Saboteur (1942)

Hitchcock’s opening image embodies the central theme of the film. A shadow of a mysterious male figure appears against a massive wall of white corrugated metal. That introduces the attack on the factory that triggers the plot. 

The image also anticipates a very dramatic scene later, when villain Fry shoots real bullets from behind the cinema screen, fulfilling the threat from the inner movie’s irate husband. Taken together these two shots embody the functional discontinuity between image and reality. 

Specifically at issue is the image of American democracy. The villains are wealthy American traitors undermining the nation’s 1942 defence against a foreign totalitarianism.  As Tobin explains, these exceptionally wealthy — and respectable! —people hunger for unmediated power. They would profit from the overthrow of democracy. Striking for a WW II thriller, there is no mention of Nazis. The threat to democracy is the US oligarchy.

They disdain of the sentimentality and idealism that hero Barry Kane (a more ideal, humane Citizen than Welles’s of 1941) represents. The elite that has prospered from democratic capitalism here abandons the outcast, the underprivileged.

The circus freaks are a broadening miniature of American society. Their instinctive responses to the troubled couple set the spectrum of humanitarianism. The mean dwarf Major bitterly argues for their betrayal. As the essential human, The Human Skeleton instinctively defends them: “The normal are abnormally hard-hearted.”  As the Siamese twins are of course divided on every issue, it falls to the bearded lady to intuit the couple’s emotional connection. She has the romantic instinct to save them. 

The film teems with instances of deceptive appearance. Twice the feuding Patricia and Barry are taken to be passionately in love, as others foresee their harmony. Patricia’s father is in the tradition of the extra sensitive, extra perceptive blind seer. Barry is struck by the difference between the real Patricia and her billboard image. Conversely, the very respectable Tobin and society matron Mrs Sutton prove to be the vile traitors, undermining America’s defence against her enemies. Setting the climax on the Statue of Liberty confirms the film’s political core. Here life and freedom literally hang by a thread. America has to defend its values against internal subverters as well as their foreign enemy.   

Especially chilling is Tobin’s cynical description of Kane: “He's noble and fine and pure... So he pays the penalty that the noble and the fine and the pure must pay in this world: he's misjudged by everyone.” 

Barry establishes an immediate connection with trucker Mac, an example of Tobin’s “moron millions” who lack his ambition for a “more profitable type of government.” For Mack having three meals a day is a sufficient dream. Like the freaks later, Mac helps Barry escape the forces of law and order that have been suborned by Tobin’s false image of citizenship and respectability. Dishearteningly, this debate over America’s soul is as current today as it was in 1942. That battle was won but the war persists.   

Still, despite that sombre theme this is a hugely enjoyable film. There are several delightful set pieces, especially Hitchcock’s venture into the Western chase scene, Barry’s scenes with the blindman and with the freaks, his extemporizing in the Sutton lair, the surreal cinema scene, his careful deployment of little Suzie and, of course, the climax on Lady Liberty.