SABOTEUR (1942), dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s first movie featuring an all-American cast, “Saboteur” walks a fine line between warning audiences that their enemies are where they least expect, and reminding them the way of the United States is to show compassion and not give in to hysteria.

As in many of the director’s films, an ordinary man finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. Barry Kane (the appealing Robert Cummings) is an aircraft factory worker who witnesses the death of his best friend when a fire breaks out at their plant. It appears a fire extinguisher was sabotaged with gasoline, and Barry is implicated when the individual whom he claims gave it to him cannot be found.

Believing other lives are in danger, he evades the law and journeys from the American southwest to New York City, where one of the director’s most famous set pieces is staged on the Statue of Liberty’s torch. Along the way, Barry also makes a daring escape or two, and finds himself involved with Pat (Priscilla Lane), a woman who initially wants to turn him in.

The movie’s tone successfully alternates between drama, sly humor (during the middle third, billboard signs are used to comment on the action), and mounting dread as a plot to set off a bomb in the Brooklyn Navy Yard is uncovered. However, it is not foreign agents or spies who are the culprits, but the crème-de-la-crème of American society, led by a man named Tobin (Otto Kruger).

The screenplay repeatedly hammers home that money, big California ranches, swimming pools and membership in high society render one impervious to suspicions of terrorism. Meanwhile, average Americans are not only content shielding their social and economic superiors, they’re quick to condemn a relative nobody like Barry, whose alleged crime raises their ire. As Pat says at one point, it’s her “patriotic duty” to turn him in.

With most of mainstream America against him, the protagonist’s only hope lies with outsiders including an old man, whose blindness symbolizes that handing Barry over to the cops would not serve the cause of justice. The argument “innocent until proven guilty” is also made by the leader of a circus sideshow which votes to give our hero a lift. Only a little person ignores the voice of democracy, and he is disparagingly referred to as a “fascist.”

Given there was a war taking place abroad and the uneasy climate at home – treason, after all, became punishable by death – one can understand characters’ decisions not to get involved in Barry’s quest to prove his innocence. But is that what makes a good American, this movie seems to ask. Is it blindly doing what we’re told, going with what newspapers and government agents say unquestioningly, or is it giving someone the benefit of the doubt and not giving in to our insecurities?

Such questions came to the forefront again during the McCarthy witch hunts a decade later, and it would be interesting to see how Hitchcock addressed these issues, if he did so at all. But he deserves credit for doing so here, and for visual touches pointed out by other reviewers, such as introducing the saboteur by having their shadow appear behind a white wall upon which the opening credits are imposed.

Overall rating: *** (out of ****)