Sabotage (1936)

(On Cable TV, September 2019) You can make a good case that Sabotage was the film in which Hitchcock’s talent as a filmmaker came into focus. While he had, at the time, more than a decade’s experience in directing, this is the film that encapsulates a lot of what his later movies would be about. Yes, The 39 Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much both precede it, but Sabotage has one of the first of Hitchcock’s classic illustrations of how to create suspense, with a boy unwittingly carrying a bomb onto a bus and the audience knowing that it’s about to explode. The overall story is a sordid tale of a deep-cover foreign agent creating deadly chaos in London, reinforced by the drama of his English wife suddenly discovering who he truly is. Several touches show Hitchcock perfecting the various aspects of his direction that would soon see him recruited by Hollywood—the oddball details, the touches of dark humour, the domestic concerns crashing into criminal ones. Hitchcock may not have been all that good at titles (Sabotage was accompanied by Saboteur a few years later), but he already knew how to put together a well-crafted movie back then. While it’s going to be of most interest to Hitchcock completists, Sabotage holds up better than many of its contemporaries.