- Revisiting contemporary and modern critical appreciation
- Alfred Hitchcock’s first American “remake” of The 39 Steps
- His Wrong Man on the run plot gets propaganda retooling
- Exciting wartime thriller with several touching interludes
- “You’d like to say—IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE!
- …but every jolting scene is TRUE!!”
- “Hounded through 3000 miles of terror!”
- “Unmasking the man behind your back!”
Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.
Saboteur: Writing on a Classic | Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Soundtrack and home video
Spanish poster
Sabotage with Suspense
When Alfred Hitchcock was fashioning such high-tension thrillers as The 39 Steps and A Woman Alone, his spies, fifth columnists, and saboteurs were lightly regarded as cinematic pipe dreams. Once again these characters are his villains, but this time the roly-poly English director’s new film, Saboteur, has the immediacy of a morning newspaper. The headlines have finally caught up with Hitchcock.
The hero of this Universal film is an indignant young aircraft worker whose one-man vendetta against a hornets’ nest of fifth columnists is somewhat complicated by the fact that he himself is wanted on a charge of sabotage and murder. The resulting story pattern is all chase and a continent wide, with stopovers at a swanky dude ranch, a desert ghost town, the Radio City Music Hall (where Saboteur will be shown in New York), the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Bedloe’s Island.
Pursuing and pursued, the beleaguered mechanic encounters such typical inhabitants of the Hitchcock scene as assorted Fascists and democrats, hoi polloi and the haut monde, the blonde who at first mistrusts our hero and, of course, the freak contingent of a traveling circus (the midget shows clear signs of incipient Fascism) .
Saboteur might have been even more effective if the past year hadn’t brought a number of similar films. Yet none of Hitchcock’s competitors dared to finish off a Fascist by sliding him to his doom down the smooth right arm of the Statue of Liberty. – Newsweek
Movie of the Week: Saboteur – Life
Sabotaged: Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane
Alfred Hitchcock’s exciting 1942 wartime thriller stars Robert Cummings as a Los Angeles aircraft factory worker who witnesses his plant’s firebombing by a Nazi agent. During the deadly explosion, Cumming’s best friend is killed and he, himself, is wrongly accused of sabotage. To clear his name, Cummings begins a relentless cross-country chase that takes him from Boulder Dam to New York’s Radio City Music Hall, and finally, to a harrowing confrontation atop the Statue of Liberty. Hitchcock’s first film with an all-American cast moves with breakneck speed towards its spine-tingling climax to create a riveting masterpiece of suspense.
“Saboteur is one hour and forty-five minutes of almost simon-pure melodrama from the hand of the master: Alfred Hitchcock,” reported the 1942 Time magazine review of the director’s film. Saboteur was also Hitchcock’s first contribution to the American war propaganda film industry. As a forerunner to the director’s more famous North by Northwest, Saboteur depicts the story of an innocent man accused of murder.
Based on an original idea by Hitchcock, the story was penned for the screen by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison and Dorothy Parker. In 1941, Hitchcock was working for Hollywood film producer David O. Selznick. After much disagreement between producer and director regarding Saboteur’s progress and profits, Selznick sold the screenplay to Universal Studios for $130,000 plus 10 percent of the gross receipts. In return, Frank Lloyd would produce the film for Universal, and Hitchcock would serve as director.
The plot of Saboteur is built around Barry Kane, played by Robert Cummings, a Los Angeles aircraft mechanic wrongly accused of sabotaging the bomber factory in which he works. To catch the real saboteur, Frank Fry, played by Norman Lloyd, Kane must follow him across the country. In his travels, Kane uncovers an entire troupe of anti-American spies headed up by millionaire Charles Tobin, portrayed by Otto Kruger. Kane also meets up with Priscilla Lane, in the role of Patricia Martin, who joins him in the hunt.
To Find a Cast
Hitchcock repeatedly tried to get Gary Cooper for the lead role of Barry Kane and had wanted to cast Barbara Stanwyck in the part of Kane’s love interest, Patricia Martin. Unfortunately, neither Cooper nor Stanwyck was interested in the role. Universal Studios, usurping Hitchcock’s final casting approval, selected the comic-faced actor Robert Cummings and the little-known Priscilla Lane for the choice roles.
[Hitchcock/Truffaut: “Robert Cummings played the hero of Saboteur; he’s a competent performer, but he belongs to the light-comedy class of actors. Aside from that, he has an amusing face, so that even when he’s in desperate straits, his features don’t convey any anguish. I ran into another problem on this picture. I was on loan by Selznick to an independent producer releasing through Universal. Without consulting me, they imposed the leading lady on me as a fait accompli. She simply wasn’t the right type for a Hitchcock picture… I was double-crossed on that.”]
Displeased with these selections, Hitchcock had hoped to persuade good-guy western actor Harry Carey into taking the role of the evil Charles Tobin to offset what he considered the weaker lead actors. According to Hitchcock, when he approached Carey’s wife, she said to him, “I am shocked that you should dare to offer my husband a part like this. After all, since Will Rogers’ death, the youth of America have looked up to my husband!” Hitchcock settled for Otto Kruger, whom the director considered a “conventional heavy.”
The Master’s Touch
With the United States as backdrop for various sequences in Saboteur, Hitchcock’s use of telephoto lenses gives the viewer an appreciation for the vastness of the American west. Often filming from as far as a mile away, the director made the on-screen figures appear tiny and insignificant in contrast to the landscape. So technically particular was Hitchcock, that Saboteur required 4,500 different camera set-ups.
For the film’s finale, Hitchcock spent more than $50,000 building a recreation of the Statue of Liberty on the studio lot. In the tension-packed scene, Kane struggles to prevent the saboteur from plummeting off the top of the monument. But as Fry’s coat sleeve tears inch by agonizing inch, the saboteur meets his grisly end. Hitchcock effected this terrifying scene by having Norman Lloyd (Fry) fall backward a short distance while seated in an elevator-type chair. By telescoping the camera rapidly backward as Fry falls away, the camera makes the apparent depth of the fall increase, and on screen, the visual effect is another spectacular image in Hitchcock’s repertoire.
Behind the Scenes
Saboteur, Alfred Hitchcock’s 29th film, was filmed primarily on Universal’s production lot. The director supervised the building and recreation of the New York mansion depicted in the film at an unheard-of cost for 1942 of $45,000.
Alfred Hitchcock ran into trouble with the Navy when he refused to cut the scene in which saboteur Fry smugly smiles at the wreck of a Navy vessel in the New York Harbor. The ship, the U.S.S. Lafayette, had suspiciously burned to ruins, and the Navy accused Hitchcock of implying that the ship had been sabotaged.
Robert Cummings, who was best known for his 1950s CBS-TV comedy series, The Bob Cummings Show, was not Hitchcock’s first choice as the leading man in Saboteur. The director was so impressed with his performance, however, that he later cast Cummings in Dial M for Murder with Grace Kelly and Ray Milland. Priscilla Lane, who came to Hollywood as a singer, had her first starring role as an actress in the 1940 film, The Roaring Twenties. Lane’s acting career lasted seven years and she starred in only three more films after completing Saboteur. – US MCA-Universal/Time Life VHS (1992)
Alfred Hitchcock came up with the original story idea for Saboteur while he was under contract to producer David O. Selznick. Selznick looked forward to producing the film, and intended to have Gene Kelly play the starring role. By November, 1941, however, the producer had decided to sell Saboteur to another studio. Hitchcock himself “shopped” Saboteur around from one studio to another. He was turned away by RKO and 20th Century-Fox before producers Frank Lloyd and Jack Skirball bought it (and the services of Hitchcock) for $20,000. Lloyd and Skirball produced the film for Universal release.
John Houseman, one of the writers who made some early contributions to the treatment, later described working with Hitchcock: “[It] really meant listening to him talk – anecdotes, situations, characters, revelations and reversals, which he would think up at night and try out on us during the day.” In one scene, Hitchcock used newsreel footage [he actually dispatched a camera crew to capture vérité footage] of the SS Normandie (a ship that had recently burned under suspicious circumstances) [sic: it was caused accidentally by a workman] was lying on its side in the waters off a New York Harbor pier.
Hitchcock then cut to Norman Lloyd, the actor who played the Saboteur, smiling smugly at the sight. Hitchcock later revealed that the Navy “raised hell” with Universal about these shots, because the implication of the scene was that the Normandie had been sabotaged. According to Hitchcock, the Navy was outraged because this was “a reflection of their lack of vigilance in guarding it.” [The scene was apparently deleted from original release prints but permanently reinstated since the 1948 re-release.]
According to Robert Boyle, art director of Saboteur (and other Hitchcock classics), “Hitchcock had most of the phobias known to man. He was afraid of heights. As a matter of fact, he would stand on the sidewalk, look up and see a man on a building being constructed, and it would terrify him.” This film needed over 1,000 scenes and 4,500 camera setups, and in some scenes, the photography of actors was purposely shot from a mile to a mile and half away. “It’s what strikes the eye that leaves the most lasting impression on moviegoers,” Hitchcock said about Saboteur’s elaborate settings. – PAL Universal DVDs (2001)
Seemingly every star on a Hitch set with a birthday has cake, even Gray Shadow the German shepherd
Saboteur: Writing on a Classic | Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Soundtrack and home video
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This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.
