Sabotage (1936)

December 2, 1936 (United Kingdom), release date

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay by Charles Bennett

Based loosely on the novel The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Music by Louis Levy

Edited by Charles Frend

Cinematography by Bernard Knowles

Sylvia Sidney as Winnie Verloc

Oskar Homolka as Carl Anton Verloc

Desmond Tester as Stevie

John Loder as Sergeant Ted Spencer

Joyce Barbour as Renee, theater employee

Matthew Boulton as Superintendent Talbot

S. J. Warmington as Hollingshead

William Dewhurst as the professor

Distributed by Gaumont-British Picture Corporation Ltd.

Many consider Alfred Hitchcock to be in a category all his own, and I am not going to dispute that, but I do think that some of his films can be listed in more than one category. Sabotage is one of those films. Its dark themes about violence—how it leads to more violence and how it presents morally ambiguous choices to people who never wanted violence to begin with—places it in the category of noir, specifically avant noir (“before noir”), which many call proto-noir. Sabotage was released in 1936, before the period when film noir was at its height, generally 1940 to the early 1960s.

A movie theater owner, Verloc, accepts one more act of sabotage, the task of setting off a bomb in London, because the money is good. At first, he is reluctant about sabotage that will involve hurting people, but his greed about the money slowly gets the better of him. Once he accepts this task, he gives little thought to the consequences of his actions, even when they have a direct effect on his family. He doesn’t realize at first that he is already under suspicion by Scotland Yard. A police sergeant, Ted Spencer, is keeping him under daily surveillance, and some of Ted’s fellow officers tail Verloc occasionally. During the course of his surveillance work posing as a grocer next door to the Verlocs’ movie theater, Ted becomes emotionally attached to Verloc’s wife, Winnie, and the narrative thus becomes even more complicated.

(This blog post about Sabotage contains spoilers.)

What Verloc doesn’t foresee is Winnie’s young brother Stevie becoming involved. Stevie agrees to deliver the package not knowing that it contains the bomb. When it explodes on a London bus, Stevie is killed. When Winnie learns of her brother’s death, she is understandably distraught. She is even more upset when she learns that her own husband had a part in Stevie’s death. She is hurt and betrayed by Verloc’s culpability and by his reaction when she confronts him: He seems to think that they should make the best of the situation and move on with their lives, maybe consider starting a family of their own. Winnie is appalled by his lack of sensitivity and his callousness, and she rejects him. They sit down to dinner almost immediately after, and Hitchcock uses carefully controlled shots and cutting to demonstrate Winnie’s frame of mind when she picks up a carving knife, Verloc’s realization that his wife is more upset than he imagined, and her accidental stabbing of Verloc. The moral ambiguity starts here for Winnie: Did her wishing Verloc dead cause her to stab him? Did she purposely set out a plan to kill her husband? The film does not offer any definitive answers.

When I saw Sabotage for the first time, the moral ambiguity of some of the characters’ decisions struck me the most. It added a level of sophistication to the narrative that I had not expected. For instance, Ted falls in love with Winnie, a married woman. For part of the film, he is portrayed as good-natured, perhaps even easily duped. But when he realizes that Winnie is responsible for her husband’s death, he tosses everything aside, including his profession and his professional ethics, and offers to leave the country with her so that she can evade questioning by the police and perhaps even imprisonment. Both Winnie and Ted know the facts of Verloc’s death (Winnie confesses everything to him), but when Ted’s fellow officers reach a different conclusion about what happened to Winnie’s husband, neither Winnie nor Ted offers to clarify. In the final shot, they walk away, their backs to the camera, through the crowd that is beginning to congregate around the crime scene. They already know what happened and don’t want to linger.

Another example of the moral ambiguity of the film is that the saboteurs do not discuss their reasons for their acts of sabotage, and viewers have to accept that the violence has only vague explanations. The release date of the film offers a clue: It is the interwar period in Great Britain, and perhaps domestic spies are at work for various international and political reasons. Ted’s boss, Superintendent Talbot, tells him that the saboteurs are interested in “[m]aking trouble at home to take our minds off what’s going on abroad. . . .”

Fate plays a large role for some of the characters. It certainly does for Stevie, who is only trying to be helpful when he agrees to act as messenger and carry the package containing the bomb. Verloc would have carried the package himself except that Ted is in the movie theater asking Winnie a lot of questions, and Verloc doesn’t want to walk past Ted while carrying the bomb hidden in a package under his arm. Instead, he takes advantage of Stevie’s good nature.

I have seen Sabotage at least twice recently, and my enjoyment of the film was even greater on repeat viewings. The complexity of the story is more apparent: Each detail is important, and it’s easy to miss important details with only one viewing. The camera work and the story are sophisticated, and it’s worthwhile to see Sabotage more than once to appreciate its many layers. Hitchcock and film noir fans won’t be disappointed.