Sabotage (film)
Encyclopedia
Sabotage, also released as The Woman Alone, is a 1936 British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...

. It is based on Joseph Conrad's
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...

 novel The Secret Agent
The Secret Agent
The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale is a novel by Joseph Conrad published in 1907. The story is set in London in 1886 and deals largely with the life of Mr. Verloc and his job as a spy. The Secret Agent is also notable as it is one of Conrad's later political novels, which move away from his typical...

. It should not be confused with Hitchcock's film Secret Agent released the same year, or his 1942 film Saboteur
Saboteur (film)
Saboteur is a 1942 Universal film directed by Alfred Hitchcock with a screenplay written by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker. The movie stars Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, and Norman Lloyd...

.

Plot

Karl Verloc (Oscar Homolka
Oscar Homolka
Oskar Homolka was an Austrian film and theatre actor. Homolka's strong accent, stocky appearance, bushy eyebrows and Slavic name led many to believe he was Eastern European or Russian, but he was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary.- Career :After serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War...

), the owner of a cinema, is part of a gang of terrorists from an unnamed Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an country who are planning a series of attacks in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. Their exact motives are not made clear. Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...

 suspects Verloc's involvement in the plot and assigns Detective Sergeant Ted Spencer (John Loder
John Loder (actor)
John Loder was a British-American actor. He was born William John Muir Lowe in London.-Early life:Loder's father was General W. H. M. Lowe, the British officer to whom Patrick Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Ireland, surrendered...

) to investigate Verloc, initially under cover. Spencer conducts the investigation posing as a greengrocer
Greengrocer
A greengrocer or fruiterer is a retail trader in fruit and vegetables; that is, in green groceries. Greengrocer is primarily a British and Australian term, and greengrocers' shops were once common in suburbs, towns and villages...

's helper, selling fruit and vegetables in a shop right next to the cinema.

Verloc's young and beautiful wife (Sylvia Sidney
Sylvia Sidney
Sylvia Sidney was an American actress who rose to prominence in the 1930s appearing in numerous crime dramas.-Early life:...

) believes that her husband is a good man because he has been kind to her and her little brother, Stevie (Desmond Tester
Desmond Tester
Desmond Tester was an English and Australian film actor and television actor, host and executive. He was born in London, England. Among his most notable roles was that of the ill-fated boy Stevie in the Alfred Hitchcock film Sabotage .Tester made his first stage appearance at the age of 12,...

), who lives with them. However, gradually she comes to suspect that her husband may be one of the people behind the terrorist attacks. The final straw comes when her little brother is killed, along with many other people, when a bus explodes. The boy had thought that he was simply delivering a film canister, but he was unknowingly carrying a time bomb for Verloc, to be detonated in the London Underground
London Underground
The London Underground is a rapid transit system serving a large part of Greater London and some parts of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex in England...

 station under Piccadilly Circus
Piccadilly Circus
Piccadilly Circus is a road junction and public space of London's West End in the City of Westminster, built in 1819 to connect Regent Street with the major shopping street of Piccadilly...

. The boy had become distracted along the way, which had delayed his delivery, and thus the bomb exploded en route to its final target.

Verloc confesses to his wife, but then blames Scotland Yard and Spencer for Stevie's death, saying that they were the ones who prevented Verloc from successfully carrying out the bomb delivery himself. Soon afterwards, as Verloc and his wife are preparing to eat dinner, she stabs him to death with a knife. When Spencer arrives to arrest Verloc he realizes what has happened, but insists that she shouldn't admit that she killed her husband. Nevertheless, she starts to confess her crime to a policeman. Then an explosion and fire at the cinema intervene, destroying all the evidence of her crime and effectively preventing the policeman from remembering whether it was before or after the explosion that she told him, "My husband is dead!"

At the end we see Mrs Verloc and Ted Spencer walk away together.

Adaptation

Hitchcock liberally adapted Joseph Conrad's novel, transforming the highly political Tsarist-era agents provocateurs into foreign agents without any obvious political leanings. Verloc's shop is transformed into a cinema, with the films being shown echoing the story, and the policeman investigating the case is an undercover officer posing as a greengrocer. Since the film was produced in the years immediately preceding World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, the unnamed hostile power behind the bombings has been assumed by many viewers to be Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

.
However, the film does not specify this, and indeed, Verloc's first name has been changed, presumably because his name in the novel, Adolf, had too many connotations by the time the film was made.

Stevie, Mrs Verloc's brother, is portrayed as a simpleton, with few of the visionary attributes of his literary counterpart. Stevie's death is a climactic moment in the plot, providing insight into Hitchcock's views about how the innocent suffer through random acts of violence. When a critic condemned Stevie's death as brutal and unnecessary, however, Hitchcock said that he regretted including it in the film— even though he remained faithful to the novel in doing so.

Allusions

The fact that the film was set in a cinema allowed Hitchcock to include references to contemporary films and storylines. Perhaps the most famous of these is the final film sequence, an excerpt from a Walt Disney
Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...

 animated short Who Killed Cock Robin?
Who Killed Cock Robin?
Who Killed Cock Robin? may refer to:*"Cock Robin", a nursery rhyme*"Who Killed Cock Robin?" , an episode of the British television series Randall and Hopkirk ...

(1935).

Production

Hitchcock wanted to cast Robert Donat
Robert Donat
Robert Donat was an English film and stage actor. He is best-known for his roles in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps and Goodbye, Mr...

 (with whom he had previously worked in The 39 Steps
The 39 Steps (1935 film)
The 39 Steps is a British thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the adventure novel The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan. The film stars Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll....

) but was forced to cast John Loder due to Donat's chronic asthma.

Mrs Verloc was Sylvia Sidney’s only role for Hitchcock. Reportedly, they did not warm to each other and she refused to work for him again.

Legacy

Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...

 used a clip from the film, in which the bus conductor tries to prevent Stevie from boarding with the film cans, to indicate the flammable nature of early nitrate film reels in his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds.

Cast

  • Sylvia Sidney
    Sylvia Sidney
    Sylvia Sidney was an American actress who rose to prominence in the 1930s appearing in numerous crime dramas.-Early life:...

     as Mrs Verloc
  • Oskar Homolka as Karl Anton Verloc
  • Desmond Tester
    Desmond Tester
    Desmond Tester was an English and Australian film actor and television actor, host and executive. He was born in London, England. Among his most notable roles was that of the ill-fated boy Stevie in the Alfred Hitchcock film Sabotage .Tester made his first stage appearance at the age of 12,...

     as Steve
  • John Loder
    John Loder (actor)
    John Loder was a British-American actor. He was born William John Muir Lowe in London.-Early life:Loder's father was General W. H. M. Lowe, the British officer to whom Patrick Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Ireland, surrendered...

     as Sergeant Ted Spencer
  • Joyce Barbour as Renee
  • Matthew Boulton as Superintendent Talbot
  • S.J. Warmington as Hollingshead
  • William Dewhurst as The Professor
  • Charles Hawtrey
    Charles Hawtrey (film actor)
    George Frederick Joffre Hartree , known as Charles Hawtrey, was an English comedy actor and musician.Beginning at a young age as a boy soprano, he made several records before moving on to the radio...

     as a Studious Youth
  • Peter Bull
    Peter Bull
    Peter Cecil Bull, DSC was a British character actor.- Biography :He was the fourth and youngest son of Hammersmith MP Sir William James Bull, 1st Bt..Bull was educated at Winchester College...

     as Michaelis (uncredited)

External links

  • Sabotage at Google Video
    Google Video
    Google Videos is a video search engine, and formerly a free video sharing website, from Google Inc. Before removing user-uploaded content, the service allowed selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provided the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube...

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