Sabotage

Movie Review: Sabotage

Year of Release: 1936
Country of Origin: UK
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Oskar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder

Plot outline: 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 (IMDb).

An assortment of Hitchcock's greatest early movies are featured in a three-disc collection. Based on Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, this movie (a.k.a. The Woman Alone) is imperfect narrative, but perfect dramaturgy. Impatiently brushing aside all but the semblance of motivation, Hitchcock plunges his camera into the heart of the story and brings out a brilliantly executed fragment of a plot that has more logic than he gives it. Always the master of his picture's destiny, he reduces the movie to the bare essentials of its narrative, selecting only those incidents which he could bend to his melodramatic will. His pace is deceptively deliberate, but he builds ruthlessly to his climaxes and he makes their impact hard and sudden. He directs the sequence fiendishly. It is almost an agonizing experience to have to sit silently and watch the careless youngster's (Desmond Tester) dawdling progress across London, idling at shop windows, selected by a sidewalk vendor for a hair-tonic demonstration, delayed by a parade, by traffic and by fussy bobbies. What a brilliant suspense (!) I won't tell you what happens ... that would be to cheat Hitchcock of his just reward, but it is a warning what you may expect - which, as is the way of all his melodramas, is the unexpected. Oskar Homolka as Verloc is a perfect tool for Hitchcock's deliberate tempo. Sylvia Sidney as his bewildered wife, tragically mothering her young brother, Desmond Tester as the engaging youngster, John Loder as the romantic sergeant from Scotland Yard and William Dewhurst as the bomb maker are severally perfect. Sabotage is Hitchcock's picture and a valuable one, for all its refusal to give us the whys and the wherefores of the sabotage plot. (NYT)

My judgement: *** out of 4 stars