Other Titles • Sabotage • The Hidden Power • I Married a Murderer • A Woman Alone • Woman Alone
Synopses for Sabotage (1936)
1.
Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 drama, among his darkest, is the one to which he regretfully pointed later as the exception that proved his usual rule about good suspense: you have to let an audience know the precise danger that a character doesn't know he imminently faces. Then you have to withdraw or cancel out the danger lest viewers feel betrayed. The "betrayal" in Sabotage rather famously involves a bomb, a boy, and a bus. But in the context of the story (based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, inevitably confused with Hitchcock's quite different film called Secret Agent), the twist has a devastating significance, ushering in the director's pet themes about the proximity of chaos to ordinary life and the nature and transference of guilt. Sylvia Sidney stars as the naive American wife of a German spy, the latter using a movie theater as a cover for his terrorist activities. When he asks his wife's young brother to make a delivery--a package containing a ticking bomb, unknown to the child--a bus delay causes the boy to die in the timed explosion. Sidney's character murders her spouse in revenge, but as in Hitch's great Blackmail, the deed is obscured by a sympathetic lawman who ultimately shares her secret. Wrong or right, right or wrong--the clear distinctions don't often exist in the great director's movies, and Sabotage is no exception. The print of the film used in the DVD release is serviceable and probably comparable to an average 16mm classroom or museum presentation. The DVD also includes a Hitchcock filmography, trivia questions, a director biography, and scene access. --Tom Keogh
2.
Alfred Hitchcock once said suspense is like a bomb: The audience knows it's about to go off, but there's nothing they can do about it. (He also said, "There's no terror in the bang--only in the anticipation of it.") In this film, the director puts that simile to good use. Shy and unhappy Sylvia Verloc (Sylvia Sidney) runs a small movie theater with her brooding husband, Karl (Oskar Homolka). Her young brother Stevie (Desmond Tester) lives with them and runs errands. Next door to the theater is a grocery where the charming and inquisitive clerk Ted Spencer (John Loder ) works. Ted gets to know and care for Mrs. Verloc, revealing that he is a Scotland Yard detective investigating Carl for his part in a criminal conspiracy and confirming the wife's nagging suspicions about her husband. As discovery and arrest approach, Carl assigns the unknowing young Stevie the errand of delivering a package containing a bomb. The torturously tense sequence that follows is among the most memorable in cinema history.
3.
A Hitchcock top-notch thriller of intrigue and espionage from Joseph Conrad's novel "The Secret Agent". A movie theater cashier played by Sylvia Sidney suspects her mild-mannered husband is a traitor who is terrorizing London.
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