So this is where I fall victim to the Secret Agent/Sabotage/Saboteur confusion, lol… I was pretty sure I’d seen this one before (I “remembered” the Statue of Liberty finale, but must have merely seen it in documentaries etc) but I definitely hadn’t. This is another of Hitchcock’s “wrong man on the run” stories that would ultimately be dwarfed by North by Northwest but are really no less fun for that.

Considering the wartime setting and the fact that war was still going on as the film came out, I was surprised to find similar humour here to that in the other chase movies – in one instance, in fact, a line is directly taken from The 39 Steps, when hero and heroine are thrown together against their will (handcuffs are even involved in the union) and they drive past an elderly couple, the wife of which upon seeing them pass exclaims, “My they must be terribly in love!” There’s also a fantastically strange scene featuring circus freaks (in which a bearded lady hilariously asks a policeman, “what is this, Halloween?” when he searches their train car).

I’m probably personally less likely to watch this again than The 39 Steps or North by Northwest, or even Foreign Correspondent, there is very much a sense that Hitchcock had done it all before this and would do it all again much better later on (in the famous Truffaut interview, the french director seems to feel the same, the only way he’s able to single out Saboteur is by way of its unique New York climax). But coming at this point in his career, it is notable for having so many of the elements of his style in place once more. It’s certainly more watchable and fun than his less “Hitchcockian” films around this time like Jamaica Inn and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Tags: chase, Hitchcock

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