Watched: 12/28/2024
Format: 4K Disc
Viewing: First, as it turns out
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
For Christmas, K and Dug got me a set of Hitchcock movies, and I am pretty jazzed. I hadn't seen latter-era Hitchcock, but was under the impression I had seen this movie, but... as I found out two minutes in, I had never seen Saboteur (1942). So, all the better.
My Hitchcock era was, like most 90's film school kids, in the 1990's, and I haven't gone back a lot, which seems... dumb. I loved Vertigo and North By Northwest back in the day. So to have a chance to fill in some blanks and refire my interest in Hitch is a great opportunity.
Firstly - there's some amazing stuff in this film, which should be obvious, I guess, Hitchcock being Hitchcock. But the visuals of the sabotage and conflagration that follows in the film are remarkable. I suppose I should know the name Joseph A. Valentine, but it's one I'll now know as the eye behind the camera here, bringing us visuals like the wall of white with black smoke drifting in, the desperate reach for Frank Fry off the hand of the Statue of Liberty, the barren plains of the desert southwest, and the train car full of circus-folk by night.
It had a few writers on it, not least of which was Joan Harrison and also Dorothy Parker. Harrison would leave to work on Phantom Lady.
Like later Hitch films such as The Wrong Man or North By Northwest, this thriller finds an innocent man fallen in to events in which he had no prior knowledge and didn't wish to participate. In this case, the FBI takes our lead's participation in the first attempts to put out a fire as a sign that he was involved with the sabotage in an aircraft plant. He's seen handing a fire extinguisher to his friend, who runs to use it, only for the tank to explode and make things far wore/ killing the friend. However, Cummings knows the name of the saboteur and begins tracking him.
This leads to Cummings needing to stay on the move, uncovering a nationwide conspiracy, and the genteel face of those who would side with the enemy - along with the laughing disbelief of the common person that any such traitors could exist among them.
That said - I'm not sure the movie makes a solid argument for why the FBI thinks Cummings' character would have blown up his best friend or been involved in sabotage, and why Cummings doesn't just turn himself in, other than that the movie doesn't happen unless he runs to clear his name. It DOES get us that amazing leap off the bridge, so... maybe it's worth it.
What may have set Hitch apart during this era was not just his keen interest in how to up-the-ante and make a convincing thriller by way of plot, but his love of character and understanding of how very *weird* people are, person by person. The characters in this movie absolutely shine, and even those pulled from character bits are used just right, whether it's Norman Lloyd as Frank Fry or the blind piano player or the circus troupe. Robert Cummings' everyman is more or less a blank slate of desperation anyone in the audience can project themselves onto.
The villainy in the move is chilling in its banality, and, in a modern context, its familiarity. Who cares if the world ends for everyone else if the fallout is to our liking? Who cares if innocent people are trampled and killed if we have an end-goal we'd like to see achieved. Even the desire of the circus man who wishes to not get caught up in the events for his own security, and at the expense of principles like democracy is painted, rightly, as how we slip toward fascism.
Most curious is that this movie doesn't really have a conclusion that absolves our hero of sabotage in the minds of the FBI. I *think* it suggests he'll be okay, as will Priscilla Lane, but the conspirators are still out there, they've succeeded in damaging a ship in front of thousands of spectators (IRL, this is footage of the Normandie/ Lafayette, which was a victim of a fire while in dock). It's a very open ending, and one hopes that the FBI, shown to be no great shakes in this movie, will be able to do something.
My understanding is that this film was well into pre-production when Pearl Harbor occurred, launching us into World War II, and necessitating some changes from a movie nodding at the concerns of Americans eyeing Europe and Japan's hostilities, and making the possibly real problem of saboteurs on US soil seem less fantasy and more of a legitimate concern. This is not to mention those in positions of privilege and power who sympathized with the Axis and would have been happy to see Germany, Italy and Japan's fascism sweep the globe.
America's decision to go to war until we were attacked is complicated, and maybe beyond the scope of a movie discussion, but the notion that we were all waiting for an excuse to go fight Nazis is bunk. And, we know of Nazi sympathizers then and now, and it was only the war, loss of life, and echoes of the Greatest Generation that kept that in check as it became unthinkable to support fascism for a few decades.
Anyway, it's a great film, but it is complicated to watch as you consider that North By Northwest feels like Hitch wasn't quite done with the ideas in Saboteur and decided to remake it, and did make a better version with a cast more familiar to modern audiences. Well, audiences my age and older.
One weird bit was that it was in 4K, and I immediately scrambled for the remote as I noted the motion-smoothing was on my TV (which LG will just do without me asking). And, boy howdy, did motion-smoothing look odd on a 1942 film.
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