BEFORE: Let me see if I've got this straight: Hitchcock made a film based on a novel titled "Ashenden", written by Somerset Maugham, and he re-titled it "Secret Agent". For his next film, he adapted a Joseph Conrad novel titled "The Secret Agent", which he titled "Sabotage". Is that clear? (And then he later made another film called "Saboteur", which I'll watch next week.) Seems to me there should have been a better way to handle such things - unless, of course, he planned to make the Conrad adaptation first, then lost the rights, but then gained them back after committing the title to the other film.
Then, as if that weren't confusing enough, this film was also released in the U.S. as "The Woman Alone" and later as a re-issue under the title "I Married a Murderer". Jeesh!
Linking from "Secret Agent", Peter Lorre was also in the 1944 film "Passage to Marseille" with John Loder.
THE PLOT: A Scotland Yard undercover detective is on the trail of a saboteur who is part of a plot to set off a bomb in London. But when the detective's cover is blown, the plot begins to unravel.
AFTER: Long before it was a Beastie Boys song, sabotage was an act of destruction or interference designed to weaken a company or corporation. Some believe that the word derives from the name of a wooden shoe, a sabot, which could be thrown by workers into a machine at a factory in order to gum up the works, especially if the workers feared that the machines would render them obsolete. At some point the word was synonymous with what we now call terrorism.
Although it's not stated, this seems to take place in pre-WWII London, so the unnamed enemy would seem to be Nazis. But since this is not stated either, the film ends up with more of a timeless quality. A similar story could take place in NYC, or any city, today.
But what I'm most interested in is Hitchcock's growth as a storyteller. Did the pieces come together a little better with each film that he made? More or less, that seems to be the case. I don't know if he peaked at some point, like Woody Allen did with "Hannah and Her Sisters", and then took a long slow decline into barely relevant films, but that's what I aim to find out.
Yesterday's film starred Robert Young, and I made reference to the latter part of his career, appearing in decaf coffee commercials - well, tonight's film stars Oscar Homolka, who I only know as a punchline to jokes from "The Tonight Show." Johnny Carson would play a smarmy TV host, speaking to the audience during a commercial break during the (fake) broadcast of "Tea Time Movies", and he'd say something like, "And now, back to tonight's film, which stars Doris Day, Alice Faye, Turhan Bey, Michael O'Shea, Aldo Ray and Oscar Ho-MUL-ka in "Felix the Cat Gets a Tapeworm"".
A very notable scene here, where the audience knows that there is a bomb, and what time the bomb is scheduled to explode. But the character carrying the bomb, though aware of the deadline for delivery, is not aware of the resulting circumstances should he fail - in fact, he is unaware that he is even carrying a bomb at all. This is the first true "Hitchcock suspense" moment that I've encountered so far. I remember Hitchcock discussing suspense in general terms, like the audience knowing something that some or all of the characters are unaware of, and thus tension is created while we wonder if they're going to figure it out or not.
Strangely, Hitchcock appears to have apologized for the sequence in question, apparently regretting his decision to create tension in this film in this way. I'm not quite sure why he felt the need to apologize - I honestly don't see any other way this sequence could have played out. Was he apologizing for the manipulation of tension, or the fact that the tension did not get defused (pardon the pun) in the proper way? It's kind of maddening.
After the events portrayed in "Number 17", "Secret Agent" and now this one, let's have a moment of silence for all of the model trains, boats and buses that so dramatically gave up their lives in service to their country. Never forget their sacrifices...
Also starring Sylvia Sidney (last seen in "Damien: Omen II"), Oscar Homolka (last seen in "The Seven Year Itch"), Desmond Tester, William Dewhurst, Matthew Boulton.
RATING: 5 out of 10 canaries
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