In my ongoing quest to devour the complete works of all the important directors in the Film canon, I considered that it might be helpful to start from the beginning and develop a structured road map. Being a student of the Auteur Theory, and gravitating towards formalists, I thought it might be best to fill in the Hitchcock gaps. So I'm going to attempt to make my way through all 14 films of Alfred Hitchock's The Masterpiece Collection 14-Disc Box Set. I still plan on rewatching the 7 in there that I've already seen.
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Saboteur is famous for its ending struggle atop the torch of the Statue of Liberty, and I once watched a behind-the-scenes video detailing the construction of the life-size model of the upper portion of the statue’s left hand during a Hitchcock exhibit at Universal Studios. Everything about this scene (the final scene in the film) is wildly innovative, but I did not know how exceptionally well the rest of Saboteur would hold up. It is an astonishing precursor to Hitchcock’s much more celebrated action thriller North by Northwest, a precursor in story (an innocent man is framed for a crime committed by a small handful of wealthy conspirators and is on the run) and astonishing because the black-and-white earlier film is as thrilling and sharp as North by Northwest was in 1959. Even in 2008, the film moves briskly and displays a wide variety of influential story developments. The fugitive, Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) is apprehended by the police and sits, handcuffed, in the backseat of a cop car. As the car is stalled behind some trucks on a bridge overlooking a river, Kane asks for a cigarette. When the cop reaches in his pocket, Kane clobbers him on the head, dashes out onto the bridge, and with no other opportunities available, steps up onto the railing, and in a spectacular long-distance shot, is filmed leaping from the bridge and plummeting down, down, down into the river.
This an entire five decades before Richard Kimble’s suicidal leap of faith off a dam viaduct. Robert Cummings is of the bland & dashing variety of movie heroes. He does play harried really well, and his character often must find creative methods to elude the authorities. At one point, he even made me feel ashamed for wishing he would be more ruthless in his self-preservation: he is traveling with a young woman, Patricia (Priscilla Lane) who intends on turning him into the police, and has him in a bind – she has wrangled his handcuffed hands behind the wheel as she drives. He manages to get control of the vehicle and stops it in the middle of a lonely country road. She gets out and informs him that she’ll flag down the next car that comes by and tell them that he is a dangerous fugitive. While she stands out farther down the road, a car appears on the horizon. He craftily unlatches the hood of her car, and holds the chain of his handcuffs into the motor fan.
Hitchcock edits breathlessly between the car gaining proximity to Patricia and closer and closer shots of sparks flying off the chain as it is frictioned against the spinning motor fan. 
At the last second, the chain snaps, and he gets back behind the wheel as the car coming in the opposite direction on the left side of the road halts next to Patricia who is standing on the right side of the road, directly in his path. Compulsively, I thought, “just drive over her and speed out of there,” which of course, if he did, would render the entire point of his dilemma moot. That might make for an interesting film premise, though: a guilty man on the run for the one crime that he didn’t commit, though he’d be the only one rooting for him. Instead Cummings stops the car in front of her and grabs her to come along with him. Patricia goes from being combative to feeling dubious about his claims of innocence to finally being convinced of it. 
Priscilla Lane is a lovely and endearing actress and becomes increasingly more so as Barry and Patricia forge ahead into the knotty conspiracy. 
As for Barry Kane, Cummings makes the commonly-considered-to-be-boring good guy role look unusually alluring. The entire film, in fact, makes playing the good guy look far more compelling than being one of the elitist, treacherous villains, of whom the head, Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger), coolly proselytizes to Kane about the superiority of playing the duplicitous fair-weather friend during the country’s uncertain transitional period of fighting overseas:
“You're one of the ardent believers - a good American. Oh, there are millions like you. People who plod along, without asking questions. I hate to use the word stupid, but it seems to be the only one that applies. The great masses, the moron millions. Well, there are a few of us unwilling to just troop along... a few of us who are clever enough to see that there's much more to be done than just live small complacent lives, a few of us in America who desire a more profitable type of government. When you think about it, Mr. Kane, the competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours. They get things done.”Kane: “Yeah. They get things done. They bomb cities, sink ships, torture and murder so you and your friends can eat off of gold plate; it’s a great philosophy.”
Tobin: “I neither intend to be bombed nor sunk, Mr. Kane. That’s why I’m leaving now. And if things don’t arrive for you, if, uh…we should win, then I’ll come back.”
I would be far less tolerant of such malevolent exposition (or as Ebert labels such speeches, “The Talking Killer”) in a current film, but different criterion must be employed for a film made in 1942. The thing that made Hitchcock, like Kubrick after him, stand out from his peers, was his ingenuity and sense of humor and pacing. Many films from the 1940s would be absolutely interminable at this point, but Saboteur only has one scene (involving Kane speaking to the mother of a dead friend) that is sluggish. There is even a bizarre detour where Kane and Patricia hop a ride with a traveling Circus troupe à la Carnivàle, and in conversation with a dyspeptic midget, a kindly thin man, Bones, known as “The Human Skeleton,” a pair of warring conjoined twin sisters, and a bearded lady named Esmeralda. Reluctant to reveal that he is the fugitive that’s been talked about on the radio, Barry explains that their car broke down on a side road. “I know. A moonlight night and a parked car. That’s nice,” says the bearded lady, who is then rebuked by Bones, “Esmeralda! Everywhere you search for sex. Get your eyes out of the mud and look up at the stars!” Lodz might say she has a “singularly prurient mind.”
The film has Hitchcock’s trademark virtuoso orchestration, propelling an action story ahead of its time in artistry and thrills that culminates in a striking climax atop a famous American monument just as it did in North By Northwest (Mount Rushmore in that film). There are sumptuous, detailed images such as a hangar door slowly opening to allow entry to a multitude of shadowed workers...
...and simpler images that resonate powerfully with a primal force such as the image of a man’s seized arm struggling to reach a button to detonate an explosive with his finger or the way the absence of a score underlines and exaggerates the terrible urgency of watching a man hanging on for dear life over a dizzying fall.
There are self-aware images cleverly obscuring the line between reality and the movies as when Kane chases the real saboteur into a crowded movie theater in the middle of a screening and the man runs behind the giant screen. We see his tiny silhouette dwarfed by the massive backdrop of the theater-projected image, and the tiny silhouette fires a gun as the characters in the movie exchange gun fire. 
A man in the audience is shot and slumps over, but it takes a while for anyone to notice as the real gunshot has been covered (a similar incident occurs in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) when an assassination attempt at a symphony is planned so that the gunshot coincides with the crash of a cymbal). Saboteur has some inevitable anachronistic clunkiness here and there, but the whole enterprise still works splendidly in 2008. In 1942, Hitchcock’s work was the very definition of cutting edge.
Grade: A
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