Sabotage (1936) – 3/5

Sabotage!

„Sabotage“ is a British film in the English language that premiered back in 1936, so it is really close now to its 90th anniversary, which sadly also means that nobody working on this one is alive anymore. Maybe the 90th birthday has happened already depending on when you read this review of mine. Of course, this is a black-and-white live action film and I got to watch it on the occasion of a retrospective including some of the most known movies from the United Kingdom. The most likely reason why it was included there and why it is still shown here and there in movie theaters and more often probably on television is of course that the director here is Alfred Hitchcock. You are certainly correct if you say that this film got made quite a while before his most famous works, but this does not mean that he was a rookie here. Not at all. He was already closer to the age of 40 than to the age of 30 and he started shooting films in the early 1920s and as he was almost born in the year 1900, the mathematics is relatively easy with how old he was when he shot which movie. Today we are looking at this one here, one of his early sound films: There are three writers credited here, namely Conrad, Bennett and Hay, all three of them very prolific. The one with the least number of credits is still only slightly under 50 and the one with the most has twice that amount. For Conrad and Hay, you can say that this film is definitely among their most known works and for Bennett, this is probably also true, even if it is not the film for which he scored an Oscar nomination half a decade later.

If we are looking at the cast, you will find Sylvia Sidney in the lead and she had to wait for almost another 40 years until she finally managed her Oscar nomination. Oskar Homolka had to wait less than fifteen years and for John Loder and child actor Desmond Tester it wasn’t meant to be. But Tester kept acting as a grown up as well and his final credits is from the early 90s when he was over 70 already and he lived on for another decade thereafter. I am actually a bit surprised Loder did not have a bigger career. He played his role well and I thought he had tons of charisma and usually this counter more than almost anything in the 1930s, 1940s and maybe 1950s as well. But he has zero award nominations according to imdb and the same applies to this movie we have here. Without Hitchcock attached to it, well it would not be forgotten, but the amount of people having seen it would perhaps be 10% of the current amount, already because the many Hitchcock completionists. Hitchcock himself has a very brief cameo again too. I must admit I did not spot him here, but maybe you did. Well done then. Don’t be fooled by the movie poster. This is not a color film, but black-and-white as I stated earlier too anyway. It is also not a film where you became part of the story yourself in a way as you could guess who the bad guy is or wonder the protagonist here is actually the bad guy or not, but we understand right away that Homolka’s character is involved in criminal acts.

I must still say I had a hard time early on to understand he was in charge of the lights going out at the very beginning. I mean it was clear he did something there, but not right away clear what he did. Surely, it was interesting to see him return to the cinema then that he owned I think and pretend to be fast asleep. He tricked the girl, but he could not trick the Scotland Yard investigator. This was still more harmless. Towards the end, there was much more drama as the boy had to deliver a package to a certain address and this was a letter bomb or I am not sure if „letter“ is the right word as it was not inside a letter, but yeah I was just thinking the boy would get in trouble then if the package did not get there in time, but I did not see the explosion in the train coming. That was the end of the little kid as well as the dog next to him he adored so much and also the dog’s owner. Shocking stuff. There was almost a slightly dark humor already to what happens there and who is responsible for the kid’s death if we compare this to the words from the female protagonist early on that Homolka’s character takes really good care of the boy. Well, I do believe he did not have any intention to kill the kid. He was not downright evil. But the final dinner scene then was quite telling. The words there showed us that Homolka‘ character was really not likable. He was completely void of empathy there as he keeps talking about how the girl can be happy in a way that it was not him who died, but just the kid. He thought of himself very highly for sure. This was bizarre. I am sure the girl would have traded the man in immediately if she could have gotten her little brother back this way, especially after finding out that it was really the man behind the explosion and thus the killing.

Also how Homolka’s character there goes on about the food he does not appreciate if it is prepared in a way that it has a certain color, I think it was cabbage, showed us and the girl and everybody really that he did not understand her pain and suffering at all. I definitely think that they made the man look pretty bad again, so we would not feel sorry for him because honestly before this scene he did not seem like an antagonist at all. The beginning when they discover that there was a saboteur on the loose was a bit funny. The music was really loud and in your face there and I think it showed us that the film indeed took itself so seriously and it was not a comedic form of exaggeration. The music kept shooting on other occasions too to show us this was a particularly dramatic moment. But there were weaknesses to this film too. I am indeed fairly generous with my rating of three stars out of five here (or six out of ten). The ending was surely a but chaotic. How the girl and the detective turn so quickly into the most loving couple there, even if he was wooing her before that, but still. I know people back then were deciding to marry frequently before being a couple at all and those were different times, but yeah what can I say. It came a bit out of nowhere and the film would have needed better elaboration to make this twist work. It also in a way goes against all the detective’s dedication when it comes to catching the bad guy and I thought he was a real professional and I don’t think it really was to make sure the girl is free for him then. It all escalated a bit too much for my liking in the final there with the male lead being killed twice really if you wanna say so and also how it came to that and what role another male character played in this scenario.

One thing I did like, however, was the ending then when one character thinks the girl said that her husband was dead already before the explosion, but he cannot remember 100% and he is not pursuing this any further because he is not sure. This had a touch of coincidence to it in a way how the likes of Woody Allen or the Coens have really mastered this inclusion in their films, also often towards the end. But yeah, as we see here, they were not the first and the way Hitchcock handled it here or I should actually say how the three writers got it in was pretty spectacular and even one single positive aspect then attached to the ending that I otherwise was really not too big on. I guess this is it then overall. I am glad I got to watch this film for the first time on the big screen the other night, but I would say it was a close call between a positive and negative recommendation here. I shall be generous. Go see it if it happens to be on television again where you live, best chances probably in the UK or United States, but no need to see it on the big screen or rush things. It is for good reason that this has never been considered among Hitchcock’s best and probably never will be put in this group. The seven out of ten it has on imdb is also still a bit too much. Nonetheless, I give it a cautious thumbs-up, even if I must say I was a bit glad that this was as short as it gets for a full feature at approximately 75 minutes only, but maybe this was also a key problem here because said running time kept the film from elaborating properly on the romance of the two younger characters and also on the motivation(s) behind the actions of Homolka’s character. That is really all now though, but I must say I found it indeed kinda funny when at the beginning the title of the movie is scream out by one character after said sabotage is discovered and immediately after the big loud music followed. Obviously, this was not intended in a funny fashion.