BLOGGER-ARCHIVE FILM REVIEW

Alfred Hitchock: Sabotage (1936)

Sabotage (1936)

Rating: ⭐⭐1/2

***SPOILER ALERT***

Even the movies towards the bottom of the Hitchcock rankings are good films. This one is filled with trademark Hitchcock suspense and intrigue. It’s about a Scotland Yard agent who starts a relationship with a woman and her son at first in order to get closer to the girl’s father who is a terrorist who is planning to set off a bomb in London. The man develops a relationship with the girl and antics ensue. The terrorist, Verloc, owns the theatre and must ultimately choose between his family and his cause. 

With this one, I began to understand the Hitckock trope of the fast-talking male protagonist who circumnavigates any given conflict with his cunning English wit. I also noticed that this one, much like The 39 Steps (1935), has a crowd call-and-response scene. 

The most captivating scene is when the boy gets blown up on the train. It is the apex moment of a storyline of suspense in which THE BOY’S GRANDFATHER (if I recall correctly) gives him a live bomb hidden in a wrapped box, and tells him to deliver it on time to the train station. We spend a lot of time with the boy who (of course) gets distracted by a myriad of things before he gets on the train. This suspense is likely the defining moment of this film and I read that having the boy be killed on screen was a taboo/edgy choice for this time period. It did seem a harsh and gruesome death; but powerful for the story. 

Something that I gathered from this film is that one of the reasons Hitchcock wasn’t really appreciated for his directing ability was that he was considered a pop-action director. His movies were thrilling and popular, and by the end of his career, he became so mainstream that his name and likeness was essentially a brand. These judgments are correct, but what they don’t capture is that it takes talent to do this with such quality and with such consistency. Hitch is great at creating memorable moments that stick in your mind even after the film (maybe even for the rest of your life). When directors do this, but their movies lack substance in plot or intellectualism, they are critiqued for catering too much to the masses. Hitchcocks genius was that he was able to do this so consistently; he understood people’s fears, taboo yearnings and existential wishes- he even had some films of true substance (which we’ll get to). The few moments that I’ll remember from this scene might be the boy with the bomb on the bus and what happens in the parakeet shop.