Saboteur

In this journey I've gone on to watch all of Hitchcock's filmography, pointing out Hitchcock's tropes has become a trope unto itself. The man loved certain concepts so much, he'd find a way to shove them into every movie, just like his cameos, and pointing them out is almost redundant. It's like watching a Spielberg movie and pointing out when he does the slow push-in shot on someone staring at something off-screen, or a Scorsese movie that glorifies and mythologizes a terrible human being. Saboteur is definitely no outlier for Hitchcock tropes. A dim view of authority? Check. Innocent man on the run for a crime he didn't commit? Check. Feisty female co-lead that the man stumbles into on his journey? Check. The relationship goes from combative to romantic with no hesitation? Check. But it's the fifth spot on the Hitchcock trope bingo card that makes Saboteur interesting, the spot that ties it all together: the innocent man being framed for a crime that is tied to a larger conspiracy. Sound familiar? Well, it should. Because Saboteur is more or less a remake of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps and would more or less be remade AGAIN as North By Northwest. Hitchcock himself said so. They're basically the same movie. Sure, specific plot details are different -- The 39 Steps was about a Canadian in England getting caught up in an espionage drama against a shadowy organization pre-WW2, and North By Northwest pivots that framework to America post-WW2, while Saboteur is in America DURING WW2 and is about domestic terrorism committed by Nazi loyalists -- but the essential beats are the same. An everyman gets caught up in a whirlwind of espionage and murder and has to go on the run while trying to clear his name. Saboteur even features a climactic showdown between the protagonist and antagonist at a famous American landmark, an idea Hitchcock would revisit in NxNW. So. how does one go about grading a movie where it is so clearly the second bite out of three of the same apple? By comparing the base elements. As far as plot goes, Saboteur's war-time setting is the more intriguing and feels like the one with the most immediate stakes. The group here plans to blow up a Navy railyard as a battleship is launching. That's so much more high stakes than the other two movies using state secrets as the dramatic lever. Unfortunately, Saboteur also has the weakest leading man of the three; Robert Cummings is fine, and certainly evokes the everyman template better than Robert Donat or Cary Grant did, but he's also rather bland. Grant was as much an everyman as I am a champion bodybuilder, but his charisma carries a ton of weight. Donat had the best balance, being charming but also believable as a regular guy. The ladies ... it's a push. The chemistry between all three couples is fine enough, but Saboteur is probably the weakest, because of Blandy McMilquetoast in the lead. They're all spunky and sassy and fun, but they're all cut from the same cloth. Saboteur definitely has the best main bad guy of the three in Tobin (played with smarmy charm by Otto Kruger), but he disappears in the final act and never gets his comeuppance, so it takes the wind out of the sails. Ultimately, what put Saboteur as the weakest of the three for me was the way the story played out. While The 39 Steps is almost too short at 86 minutes, with an ending so abrupt it feels like there's a missing reel, there's never a lull in the movie's momentum. North By Northwest is too long, but it also has Cary Grant, and an iconic final standoff. Saboteur feels like exactly what it is -- a middle ground between the two. It's too long for its own good (only a couple minutes short of two hours), stretching out the plot with some tiresome dialogue scenes, and puts two B-tier actors in the lead. The stakes feel higher than the other two, but the plot contrivances to get the leads out of trouble are so ridiculous and frequent, it borders on satire, never mind some big plot holes it whizzes by without a care in the world. I suppose the best way to describe Saboteur is to say it refines and smooths out some of The 39 Steps' formula, but in doing so also flattens it, while North By Northwest brings back the definition. It's still a good watch, but it feels like a second version of a rough draft that swung the pendulum of edits in too far in the opposite direction. If you're craving more Hitchcock suspense, and have watched the classics, this is a fine one to watch, but of the three movies like this, definitely not the first one to see.