Rating:
I’d never seen Sabotage before this morning and I didn’t really know anything about the flick other than that Alfred Hitchcock directed it, but what more do you need? Any Hitchcock movie’s gonna be good and stands a better-than-average chance of being a masterpiece. Sabotage isn’t a masterpiece like Rear Window or North By Northwest, but still it’s damned good.

My familiarity with much of the Hitchcock canon (Note: Anyone who creates a Circus of the Stars style show where famous directors are fired out of cannons has my full support) actually caused me to mislead myself as the movie began. Mr. Verloc (Oskar Homolka) is skulking about as he returns home on the darkened London streets. Those streets are dark because all the power has been knocked out in a somewhat ill-conceived act of (get ready!) sabotage. When Verloc’s wife (Sylvia Sidney) questions him as to his whereabouts, he claims he’s been sleeping in bed all night. Soon Ted (John Loder), an undercover detective posing as a vegetable merchant, is nosing about, convinced that Verloc is the saboteur. In spite of all this, I was sure that Verloc, whatever else he may have been hiding, was innocent in the matter of slightly inconvenient terrorist blackouts. It’s Hitchcock, you see, and if there’s one thing he loved it’s the innocent man wrongly accused and pursued. So I was sure that Verloc was just caught up in larger events over which he had no control. But then, just a few minutes in, we learn that Verloc is actually the guilty man rightly accused, truly a dirty saboteur.

Fortunately for their self esteem, Verloc and his saboteur cronies have more up their sleeves than an ineffective blackout. Sabotage is the name of the movie and it’s the name of the game! The next round involves setting off a bomb in Piccadilly Circus, and it’s this that provides the movie’s best sequence. Verloc, being not just a saboteur but a coward and pretty much a dick, has his wife’s kid brother, Stevie (Desmond Tester), deliver the bomb to its intended detonation site. We in the audience know the package Stevie carries is a bomb, and we know it’s set to go off at 1:45. Stevie knows none of this.

As Stevie makes his way toward Piccadilly Circus, a series of events—including a hostile toothbrushing by a stranger—get in his way and delay him, all while the clock keeps on ticking. Now, when I said Stevie was Mrs. Verloc’s kid brother, I meant it; he’s a little kid, complete with short pants and silly knee socks. As we watch the clock move steadily toward disaster, we get more and more nervous, but we also begin to think: “No way are they gonna let an innocent and unknowing little kid get blown to smithereens.” But then our Hitchcock knowledge rears its head again, and we can’t help but think: “But look what he did to Janet Leigh! This nut’ll do anything!” As a result, we just don’t know what to believe. We know what’s going to happen, but we don’t know when or to whom. And that, my friends, is suspense.

Concurrent with all this are scenes of detective cum greengrocer Ted getting all up in Verloc’s business and trying to seduce his wife, not to mention scenes about a terribly creepy canary peddler/terrorist bomb maker. And do you want to see a brief snippet of the Walt Disney cartoon “Who Killed Cock Robin?” Do you want to hear multiple discussions about cabbage? You can do all that and more thanks to Sabotage, a delightful, suspenseful way to spend 75 minutes.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Psycho