I began the day by watching Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 movie Saboteur, not one of his very best but an exciting chase film, and one in which his predilection for “German” camera angles and lighting effects (Joseph Valentine was the cinematographer) came out more strongly than almost anywhere else — also a movie with a lot of visual and scene quotes (the gun poking out of the curtain from Hitchcock’s own The Man Who Knew Too Much, the blind hermit from The Bride of Frankenstein, the long-shot of a dance party Hitch had used before in Young and Innocent and would use again in Notorious). Though Saboteur isn’t one of Hitchcock’s suspense-of-character films — it’s a comic-book chase in the mold of The 39 Steps and North by Northwest — and Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane and Otto Kruger aren’t exactly the world’s greatest actors (Hitch’s original choices were Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard as the romantic leads, and Harry Carey as the villain — and Carey was actually available, but his wife wouldn’t let him take a part so totally against type), but it’s still a fun movie with some of Hitch’s most extraordinary scenes. The finale — in which the villain dangles from his sleeve on the crown of the Statue of Liberty — is quite incredibly staged, and Hitch mounts it beautifully, effectively having most of the scene take place in an unnatural but effective dead silence (elsewhere composer Frank Skinner overscored the film, making the absence of music at the end all the more convincing by contrast). Saboteur also benefits from some sharp, witty lines (by Dorothy Parker), especially in the train with the circus freaks, as well as suffering from some stupid, didactic lines about the war and the world situation (by Clifford Odets, uncredited). — 8/13/93
•••••
Earlier in the
day I’d watched a movie on TV — Hitchcock’s Saboteur from 1942, a marvelous film even if not
quite top-drawer Hitchcock. It was an American Movie Classics showing, and
commentator Nick “Reflected Fame” Clooney didn’t fail to mention the story of
how Hitchcock planned this film around a star cast of Gary Cooper and Barbara
Stanwyck as the leads and Harry Carey as the villain, only to lose them all
because Universal wasn’t about to pay high star salaries when they had contract
talent available, and Carey’s wife thought he was too much of an American icon
to possibly play someone as dastardly as the sabotage mastermind in the film.
(He also said Hitchcock originally wanted to call the film U.S., but Universal refused to let him use
that title because it was too generic and didn’t indicate what sort of a film
it was. Universal then suggested Sabotage, and Hitchcock had to inform them that they couldn’t use that title because he’d made a film called Sabotage in Britain six years earlier — and
that’s when they compromised on Saboteur.) As things turned out, Robert Cummings was probably better in the lead role than Cooper would have
been — Cooper was enough of an American icon by then (talk about American
icons!) that nobody in the audience would have possibly believed that anyone could have thought he was a saboteur,
whereas Cummings, though basically a comic actor, had a sinister streak to his
appearance (well exploited in Joseph Valentine’s brilliant cinematography — he
was an above-average Universal house man who obviously responded to the
challenge of working with Hitchcock) — though Priscilla Lane is hopelessly
amateurish in the female lead and significantly weakened the film. (Hitchcock
never had a kind word to say about Cummings’ performance in Saboteur, but he must have liked the actor well
enough to use him again 11 years later in Dial “M” for Murder.)
Saboteur also suffers from a musical score (by
Frank Skinner, another Universal house man) of numbing silliness — the music in
this film is so
drearily clichéd it sounds more like the horrible stock music in films from
studios like PRC and Monogram than an original score for a major production
(significantly, the final confrontation between hero Cummings and villain
Norman Lloyd on the Statue of Liberty is unscored) — and from bits of typical
Universal tackiness (the broad expanses of the American Southwest are all too
often studio backdrops and process-screen creations, though Valentine or
whoever did the second-unit stuff for this film did trot out the red filters for some
marvelously sinister background shots). Nonetheless, Saboteur is a good movie, exciting, suspenseful
and full of dry-wit dialogue contributed by Dorothy Parker (she, Peter Viertel
and Joan Harrison all receive script credit, though the clunky speeches in
which Cummings gets to articulate the real meaning of democracy while villain
Otto Kruger, all too predictable in the role for which Harry Carey would have
been absolutely marvelous
anti-type casting, were actually written by an uncredited Clifford Odets, and
sound it), particularly in the scene in the circus truck where Cummings and
Lane try to talk the freaks into not turning them over to the police. (One of the quirkier
aspects of Saboteur
is the presence of scenes that evoke memories of previous non-Hitchcock movies; the circus truck
evokes memories of Freaks,
particularly in the sensibility of a group of people whose very abnormality has
given them a common ground of surprising humanity; while the earlier scene
involving Cummings seeking shelter with Lane’s uncle, a reclusive blind man in
a forest, is straight out of The Bride of Frankenstein.) — 12/3/97
•••••
The film was Saboteur, a 1942 Universal release produced by
former director Frank Lloyd and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his third film
made in the U.S. and apparently his first with an all-American cast (the
previous two, Rebecca
and Foreign Correspondent,
both had had important roles — including the two leads in Rebecca — played by actors from Hitchcock’s
native Great Britain). It was being shown on TCM yesterday as part of a tribute
to actor/producer Norman Lloyd, who was celebrating his 100th
birthday and, unlike a lot of other people TCM has paid 100th-anniversary
tributes to, is still alive. Saboteur — not to be confused with Sabotage, a film Hitchcock had made in Britain
six years earlier based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (and, to my mind, a considerably richer
and more powerful movie than Saboteur) — is a chase film on the order of The 39 Steps and North by Northwest, featuring an innocent hero on the run
both from the bad guys whose plans he’s (inadvertently) helped screw up and the
police who want him for a murder he didn’t commit. Hitchcock had originally
wanted an all-star cast for Saboteur — Gary Cooper as Barry Kane (that’s how the credits spell
the last name, though it’s pronounced “Keene” throughout the film), who’s
unjustly suspected of causing a fire in an aircraft factory that took the life
of his best friend; and Carole Lombard as Pat Martin, who originally believes
him guilty but is ultimately won over to his side as he travels throughout the
U.S. looking for the real saboteur. Alas, however, Hitchcock’s contract was
held by David O. Selznick, and he not only required Universal to put under Hitchcock’s
director credit “By Courtesy of David O. Selznick Productions, Inc.,” he
charged Universal such a high loan-out fee for Hitchcock’s services the studio
decided they couldn’t afford the salaries of two “A”-list stars on top of what
they were paying for the director. (Hitchcock had a similar problem with a
different management at Universal 21 years later; he originally intended The
Birds for Cary Grant and
Audrey Hepburn, until someone from Universal’s budgeting department pointed out
to him that keeping two such high-paid stars on salary for the year it would
take to work out the elaborate special effects for that film would be way too expensive — and would cut into
Hitchcock’s own income because he had a share-of-profits deal. So The Birds was recast with Rod Taylor and Hitchcock
“discovery” Tippi Hedren, and Grant and Hepburn were moved to Stanley Donen’s very Hitchcockian thriller Charade.)
Instead Saboteur was made with Robert Cummings as the
innocent man on the run and Priscilla Lane as his off-again, on-again
girlfriend — and though Lane is a pretty empty nonentity in a role that just
required a pretty face and a blonde hairdo (natural or otherwise), Cummings is
arguably more believable in the role than Cooper would have been, especially in
the scene in which, trapped with two real members of the sabotage ring, he has
to pretend to be a genuine saboteur in order to win their confidence and find
out what they’re planning to sabotage next. (Hitchcock liked Cummings well
enough to use him again in Dial “M” for Murder 11 years later.) Hitchcock also had to
compromise in the casting of the principal villain, Tobin, who runs a cattle
ranch in Arizona that’s secretly a headquarters for the saboteurs and who moves
about freely at the highest levels of society, turning up at war-relief
fundraisers and other places while he’s secretly plotting sabotage behind
closed doors. The actor Hitchcock, the inveterate anti-type caster, wanted for
this role was the beloved Western character actor Harry Carey — obviously he was going after the same short of
shock he’d got in Foreign Correspondent when he had peace activist Herbert Marshall turn out to be
a Nazi agent, running a phony pacifist movement to sap the will of the
democracies to resist Hitler — but before Carey could read the script, his wife
intercepted it, read it and sent Hitchcock back a scorching letter asking how dare he ask a beloved American institution
like her husband to play a fiendish mastermind and traitor. So Hitchcock ended
up stuck with Otto Kruger, who had played slimy villains in movie after movie
and was therefore all too believable, and not at all shocking to the audience,
in the role. When I looked up Saboteur on imdb.com I saw an item telling me something about the
movie I hadn’t known before; he had originally wanted Elisha Cook, Jr. for a
role in the film — presumably as Frank Fry, the real saboteur who burned down
the plane factory (including disabling the sprinkler system and filling a fire
extinguisher with gasoline, which was how Barry’s friend died) — and he called
him in for an interview. The next day, when Cook showed up, Hitchcock said he
was no longer interested in him: “I saw you in The Maltese Falcon last night and if I used you you’d be a
dead giveaway for my plot.”
Instead Hitchcock decided to cast someone as Fry
who had never made a film before and whose face would therefore be unknown to
movie audiences (a gambit Edward Dmytryk used three years later in Cornered when he cast Luther Adler, who likewise
hadn’t been filmed before, as the mysterious villain Dick Powell was tracking
all movie, and one James Whale had used a decade earlier when he cast Claude
Rains, who’d made a few obscure movies in England but was unknown to U.S.
audiences, as the title character in The Invisible Man so audience members wouldn’t bring a
mental image of what he looked like to the scenes in which he was invisible —
which was the whole movie until the very end). He asked his friend John
Houseman, former assistant to Orson Welles in the Mercury Theatre and on Citizen
Kane, to recommend
somebody, and Houseman sent him Norman Lloyd, who suited the role absolutely
perfectly. And casting an unknown with an unfamiliar face in a key role wasn’t
the only Whale gambit Hitchcock copied in Saboteur: the film’s most moving scene is one in
which Barry, on the run from the cops, holes up in the home of blind recluse
Mr. Martin (Vaughan Glazer) in a scene somebody on the writing committee (Peter
Viertel, Joan Harrison, Clifford Odets and Dorothy Parker) obviously copied from the meeting between the
Monster and the blind hermit in The Bride of Frankenstein. When you consider that Whale used the
famous Psycho casting
gimmick 28 years before Psycho,
in The Face Before the Mirror
(he cast Gloria Stuart at the height of her fame and killed her off in the
first reel), one gets the idea that Whale’s influence on Hitchcock is one of
the great film research-paper subjects waiting to be written (ditto the
influences of Josef von Sternberg and Graham Cutts, the obscure British director
whom Hitchcock worked for as an assistant before becoming a director himself;
when I saw Cutts’ marvelous 1932 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The
Sign of the Four I wrote
in my imdb.com review, “Cutts usually gets dismissed patronizingly in biographies
of Alfred Hitchcock … as a mediocre director who drank and womanized his way
out of a major career. Judging by his work here, Hitchcock fans should probably
be looking at Cutts as an influence on the Master; this film MOVES … , it’s
clearly staged with a sense of pace, it makes good use of unusual camera angles
(including a surprising number of overhead shots), and the final fight scene …
is a genuinely exciting action highlight”).
Saboteur is one of Hitchcock’s “chase” films,
clearly reminiscent of The 39 Steps
and anticipatory of North by Northwest without being as good as either, though it’s got some great
scenes: the chase Tobin’s men lead on horseback as Barry tries to flee the
Tobin ranch (which I joked was as close as Hitchcock ever came to directing a
Western); the scenes in the circus where Barry and Pat hide out (including
Dorothy Parker’s famous line, spoken by one of a pair of Siamese twin to the
other: “You’ll have to do something about your insomnia! I’ve tossed and turned
all night!”); the scenes at the fancy-dress ball at which Tobin sends one of
his agents to cut in on Barry while he’s dancing with Pat so the gang can
kidnap her and hold her hostage; and the final chase scene that ends with Fry
falling to his death from the Statue of Liberty — a scene Hitchcock said didn’t
come off the way he wanted it to because it should have been the hero, not the
villain, in mortal peril (a defect he corrected in the ending to North by
Northwest). In general I
like what I call the “suspense-of-character” Hitchcock films better — movies
like Shadow of a Doubt
(the immediate successor to Saboteur and, like it, a box-office disappointment; Hitchcock didn’t
have a hit between Foreign Correspondent in 1941 and Spellbound in 1945), Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window and Vertigo in which he created genuinely
intriguing, multidimensional characters and used his suspense technique to
reveal them psychologically instead of just to excite the audience. Saboteur was no doubt good wartime propaganda —
though the leaden, pretentious debates on the relative merits of democracy and
fascism Odets (oddly not
credited on imdb.com even though he’s listed in the film — while Hitchcock’s
production assistant, Joan Harrison, is listed on imdb.com but is not credited) weighted down the film with
just get in the way to a modern viewer — and it’s fun, but it’s not really
top-drawer Hitchcock. At the same time, second-tier Hitchcock is still
considerably more exciting than most of the attempted “thrillers” being made today!
— 11/9/14
