Saboteur

This film, Hitchcock's first contribution to wartime American propaganda, is as polished and suspenseful as any the great director would make.

A melodramatic journey from coast to coast shows Hitchcock at his best. It gives movement, distance and a terrifying casualness to his painful suspense.

For his first thriller set in America, from 1942, Alfred Hitchcock runs loopily through a gamut of genres, filming in a range of settings, from California to New York, to depict a country that lives in the image of its movies. His set pieces take on the blue-collar drama, the Western, the high-society mystery, the urban police story, and the circus melodrama, while capturing the paranoia of a country newly at war.

Saboteur is a little too self-consciously Hitchcock. Its succession of incredible climaxes, its mounting tautness and suspense, its mood of terror and impending doom could have been achieved by no one else. That is a great tribute to a brilliant director. But it would be a greater tribute to a finer director if he didn't let the spectator see the wheels go round, didn't let him spot the tricks - and thus shatter the illusion, however momentarily.

Not one of Hitchcock's best, but with a few creative sequences and some sharp writing from Dorothy Parker.

A mixed-up and over-loaded American spy thriller by Alfred Hitchcok, with the unengaging Robert Cummings in the lead and an unappealing cast, featuring Priscilla Lane and Otto Kruger. Nothing holds together, but there are still enough scary sequences to make the picture entertaining.

To put it mildly, Mr. Hitchcock and his writers have really let themselves go. Melodramatic action is their forte, but they scoff at speed limits this trip.

This is another American film integrated in the effort to moralize and mobilize the public, in the context of World War II. The whole action revolves around an attempted sabotage in a military aircraft factory, with an unjustly accused worker fleeing the authorities to try to discover the truth, clear his name and avenge his best friend, who dies in the incident. The plot has obvious weaknesses. Never would the police, in their right mind, assume that the workers who try to put out a fire are the same ones who filled with gasoline the only extinguishers available to do so. Likewise, a stranger would never trust and help someone he has just met, knowing in advance that he can be a wanted and highly dangerous terrorist. This is enough to take all the logic out of the story. As a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, it is not surprising that the technical aspects of filming, editing and post production have been meticulously carried out. The actors are good and do their job on a regular basis, but there is nothing really remarkable here. Robert Cummings is the protagonist and does a good job, but largely inferior to the performance he would do in "Dial M For Murder", for example. This is a film that has aged badly and will probably end up in a certain forgetfulness, which will not be complete due to the fact that it was directed by one of the greatest filmmakers ever.