a dark and dangerous place
by Douglas Messerli
Charles
Bennett (screenplay, based on The Secret
Agent by Joseph Conrad), Ian Hay and Helen Simpson (dialogue), Alfred
Hitchcock (director) Sabotage / 1936
Loosely based on
Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent,
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 film Sabotage is
set in a run-down movie theater run by the anarchist Verloc (Oscar Homolka) to
hide his real avocation even from his wife (Sylvia Sidney) and her young
brother who lives with the couple. That location, indeed, offers Hitchcock the
opportunity to explore the cinematic issues of dark and light as people come
and go through the small auditorium where movies are being screened.
Indeed the film begins with a
“blackout”—Verloc having tossed sand into the nearby Battersea power conduit—the
cinema-goers, with true Hitchcockian wit, demanding their money back. Mrs.
Verloc and the theater ticket-seller try to hold the angry crowd off, fearing
that if their loose the night’s take, they business will go bankrupt. Even the
next-door grocer’s assistant gets in on the action by explaining to the crowd
that the event was not the theater’s fault, the theater being protected by law.
But when Mrs. Verloc finally discovers her husband home and in bed, pretending
to sleep, he tells her to refund the money, which she is ready to do when the
lights suddenly are restored, the customers now able to continue viewing the
movie.
In this scene, not only do we discover
Verloc’s duplicity, but come to perceive the threats of mob violence. Evil
lurks everywhere in the London of Hitchcock’s story, ready to be unleashed at
the flip of a switch. Many of the films shown in this small cinema, indeed,
seem to be horror films, and even in a Disney cartoon (from Silly Symphonies) features the murder of
“Cock Robin.”
If Verloc is dangerous, those above him
are brutal, willing to blowup a busy train station. Verloc is forced to visit a
local pet store owner, who will provide him with the bomb, buried in the bottom
of a bird-cage, which is set to “chirp” at precisely 1:45. In what appears as an
act of great kindness, Verloc gives the birds to his wife’s
brother.
We soon discover that the next-door
green-grocer is a government plant, and after the agent takes her and her
brother to an expensive lunch in an attempt to get information, Verloc becomes
suspicious, perceiving that he is being watched. Unable to take the bomb to the
proper location, Verloc hands over its delivery, along with a few reels of film
to the young brother-in-law. The boy is delayed temporarily by a parade and,
after, is held back by a street peddler who uses the boy as a stand-in to sell
his toothpaste, both events creating a nearly unbearable tension as we begin to
realize the child’s fate. Suddenly the entire streetcar explodes, killing
everyone within, including the child and a cute puppy.
In retrospect, Hitchcock felt that the
boy’s death was a critical mistake, in not permitting the audience a release
from the building tension. Certainly the event, while brilliantly filmed, does
dim anything in this film that might be associated with light. Indeed, after
that event it is difficult any longer to care what might happen. And Mrs.
Verloc is suddenly forced, in her bitter grief, to take up a carving knife and
kill the man whom she previously described as being so kind.
Her act, moreover, seems to put her in
jeopardy, even though she and the agent knows what has been behind her
murdering of him. Another explosion—this one destroying the movie house,
presumably by Verloc cohorts—allows her to escape any suspicion, while, as in Blackmail, the policeman keeps silent
about the woman he will surely now marry.
Accordingly, this film leaves a somewhat
bad taste in one’s mouth, with all the villains, except Verloc, still on the
loose, while the tawdry London Hitchcock has created remains a very dark and
dangerous place.
Los Angeles,
February 18, 2016
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