Sabotage Movie Review

Remember when Hitchcock played a cameo in Blackmail as a subway passenger being bothered by a little boy? In Sabotage, he created considerable suspense by showing a young boy as he dawdled through the city streets while carrying a bomb timed to explode. By creating tension through rapid cross-cutting and then relieving it with horror, Hitchcock tried to do something that was quite a few decades ahead of its time. The audiences of his own time were horrified and outraged, and he decided never to do THAT again. Only he did, many times—he just played with the audience's sense of morality; it was perfectly all right, he found, to relieve tension with horror if the character was a mean lesbian (Judith Anderson in Rebecca), a treacherous spy (Edmund Gwenn or Herbert Marshall in Foreign Correspondent or Norman Lloyd in Saboteur), a Merry Widow killer (Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt), a hired poseur (Kim Novak in Vertigo), a thief (Janet Leigh in Psycho), or a barmaid (Anna Massey) just dumb enough to trust Barry Foster. Only make sure that Doris Day sings “Que Sera, Sera” until her kid is rescued! Sabotage has a good performance by Sylvia Sidney, who resolves to Do Something about the boy's death, plus the usual menacing turn by Oscar Homolka, and the usual masculine turn by the powerfully built John Loder. As for Desmond Tester, who played the unlucky Steve, Sabotage was the fourth of nine films he made between 1935 and 1939. His next character as a child prodigy was so obnoxious that the future cast and crew of 1937's Non-Stop New York (including John Loder) might have reacted with cynicism if he'd taken a flying leap into the stratosphere without benefit of a parachute. AKA: A Woman Alone; Hidden Power.

1936 81m/B Oscar Homolka, Sylvia Sidney, John Loder, Desmond Tester, Joyce Barbour, Matthew Boulton, S. J. Warmington, William Dewhurst, Austin Trevor, Torin Thatcher, Aubrey Mather, Peter Bull, Charles Hawtrey, Martita Hunt, Hal Walters, Frederick Piper; D: Alfred Hitchcock; W: Charles Bennett, Ian Hay, Alma Reville, E.V.H. Emmett, Helen Simpson; C: Bernard Knowles. VHS, LV, 8mm