Saboteur (1942) | Presenting Hitchcock Podcast

Gooooood evening. In this months episode of Presenting Hitchcock, Cory and Aaron are hanging on their liberties as they discuss “Saboteur.”

The Picture:

Picture Title: Saboteur (1942)

Written by: Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker

Starring: Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Otto Kruger, Alan Baxter, Clem Bevans, Norman Lloyd, Alma Kruger, Vaughan Glaser, Dorothy Peterson

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Trailer:

Our Favourite Trivia:

Director Cameo: Alfred Hitchcock’s original cameo was cut by order of the censors. He and his secretary played deaf pedestrians. When Hitchcock’s character made an apparently indecent proposal to her in sign language, she slapped his face. In his interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock says he and Parker filmed a cameo showing them as the elderly couple who see Cummings and Lane hitchhiking and drive away, but that he decided to change that shot to the existing cameo. tchcock makes his trademark cameo appearance about an hour into the film (1:04:37), standing at a kiosk in front of Cut Rate Drugs in New York as the saboteurs’ car pulls up.

This was the first movie in which Alfred Hitchcock’s name was billed above the title.

This movie and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) were the only two movies Alfred Hitchcock made at Universal Pictures in the 1940s. Both were box-office failures.

Universal Pictures was concerned with the fifty plus sets Alfred Hitchcock ordered, including a vast desert scene to be built on Stage 12 with a reconstruction of part of a river and waterfall, as well as the set for the Park Avenue mansion’s grand ballroom.

This movie required more than 4,500 camera set-ups, 49 sets, and about 1,200 extras.

Alfred Hitchcock wanted Gary Cooper or Joel McCrea for the lead role. Cooper wasn’t interested in doing a thriller. McCrea wanted to work with Hitchcock again, but was unavailable. So the role finally went to Robert Cummings.

The set used as the ranch house of Charles Tobin was used as the home of the Brenners for another Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Birds (1963). It originally was a leftover set from a Deanna Durbin movie shot on the Universal backlot.

The only actor that Alfred Hitchcock gave much direction to was Otto Kruger, who never pleased him as the head villain. Otherwise, he preferred to let the actors and actresses work out their roles in rehearsal and gave them direction mostly on timing in front of the camera. He believed he could solve any acting problem with camera work, such as filming Kruger’s lengthy fascist soliloquy from a disconcerting distance.

The shot of the ship on its side toward the end was an actual shot of the ocean liner S.S. Normandie, which had caught fire and capsized at its pier in New York. The fire was an accident, not sabotage. The United States War Office “redflagged” the film over concerns regarding the implication. Sabotage had been a concern but after an investigation it was deemed an accident due to carelessness, rule violations, lack of coordination between the various parties on board, lack of clear command structure during the fire, and a hasty, poorly-planned conversion effort.

Hitchcock pulled the company’s best boy from the electrical crew to play the friend killed in the factory fire because Hitchcock thought he looked perfectly like a working man. 

Alfred Hitchcock chose to use the European “Finis” at the end of the movie rather than the traditional “The End” to suggest to the audience that the sabotage ring was “finished”.

The Random Draw for Next Picture:

Next up, we’ll be discussing “Sabotage” (we swear we didn’t rig it!)

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