Sunday, June 07, 2009

Unfairly Neglected: Hitchcock's Sabotage and Number 17


**The following contains spoilers**

Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock 1936)

Tick... tick... tick...

Sabotage is a great film that is unfairly neglected - chiefly because of the supposed central flaw. I do believe this criticism is totally unjustified - especially viewed through more modern and less timid eyes: What was seen as cruel or just too dark in the 1930s is relatively tame to our less sensitive palettes. Hence, with Sabotage, the bomb on the bus sequence is a tour de force of suspense that works better today than it did in 1936 - it's tragic outcome is shocking and that shock hangs in the air for the rest of the film, becoming the driving force of the story and it's mousey heroine (the incredible dinner table finale would be nothing without it). It was a bold move by Hitch and not only does it pre-date the shock/twist of Psycho by some 24 years it's actually a better film! But for most of his life he had to concede to the cretinous critics who assured him it was a mistake. It was probably the same critics who slated Stage Fright for it's 'lying' flashback (they are wrong - its a great cinematic trick!), who think Spellbound is a great film (it's not, it's a dud!) and think the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much is an improvement on the original (it's only more polished and Americanised - give me Edna Best with a rifle to Doris Day's warbling any day).
Sylvia Sydney and Oskar Homolka (a touch of James Mason but with bushy eyebrows) are both excellent as is Desmond Trenter as little Stevie. Sydney didn't like working with Hitchcock and didn't get on with him at all which is a shame because here, she is adorable (cute in the little 'sailor-boy' outfit) and very touching especially in the genuinely moving 'Cock-Robin' sequence and the quintessentially Hitchcockian dinner table finale. Unfortunately John Loder doesn't even register to me - Hitch's first choice, Robert Donat, would have been great but was too ill.
Beware dodgy DVD transfers of this great little film. For a while it wasn't widely available (especially in the UK) and so there are some very poor quality disks out there. But over the past few months we have been treated to a couple of quality box sets of Hitch's early British films and if you shop around you may get them at a bargain price.

Number 17 (Alfred Hitchcock 1932)

"Coo blimey, if it ain't my lucky day! I'm a murderer, I'm a liar and now I'm a b-bathroom fitting!"

Number Seventeen is criminally under-rated! Point out the plot-holes, shaky camera, toy town special effects and ropey acting and you are SO missing the point. 17 is meant as a comic parody of the spy story (with a large dose of The Cat and the Canary thrown in for good measure). Who cares about the plot flaws and ropey acting when everyone is having such a lark, including Hitch - like a child playing with his toy set - literally! I really enjoy this more than the generally more revered Murder and Blackmail (so the acting in those films isn't ropey??).
It's quite a surreal and odd little film - for the first half of the film people seem to keep appearing and then disappearing again at such an alarming rate it's hard to keep up with who's who - but that's part of it's charm (even in the last few minutes more identities are being revealed!).
At just over an hour it manages to cram in many of the elements we have come to recognise as Hitchcockian: staircases (lots of them!), the 'bad' girl done good, handcuffs and bondage, trains and chases on trains, bathrooms, people not being what they seem (who are the villains and the heroes?), a macguffin (the necklace), gallows humour and so on. It's no masterpiece but it's a lot of fun and never boring. It's certainly not the dud it's dismissed as.

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