Sabotage

Alfred Hitchcock made a film called Saboteur, but he also made one called Sabotage (although in England it was called A Woman Alone). Again it's about spies creating havoc, this time in London.

Hitchcock was famous for his rule of suspense--you don't surprise the audience, you let them in on what's about to happen and let the suspense build. This film has a scene that fulfills that--almost (even though the film is from 1936 I won't spoil it). The owner of a cinema, Oscar Homolka, who appears to be a mild-mannered man with a wife (Sylvia Sidney) and her much younger brother, is suspected of being a spy. He is ordered to plant a bomb at Piccadilly Circus at a certain time on a certain day, and the implication is that he'd better do it or face the consequences.

He's being watched by a undercover Scotland Yard detective (John Loder), who is pretending to be a worker at the grocery next door. So Homolka gives the bomb, in a brown paper package, to Sidney's brother. A scene, almost ten minutes long, takes place as the brother makes his way to Picadilly station. He stops to watch a parade, allows a salesman to sample toothpaste on him, and then boards a bus. All the while the camera cuts from the package, to clocks, to other passengers, to stop signs. It's really a textbook illustration of what Hitchcock was all about.

The film also offers other little tricks, such as Homolka meeting his contact in an aquarium, and having the films shown in the cinema make little commentaries on the action of the film, especially a snippet of Walt Disney's Who Killed Cock Robin? We also get a pet bird salesman as a bomb maker. Ironically, the man who played that part, S. J. Warmington, died in a bombing raid during World War II.

As with Saboteur, we don't know who the spies are working for. Films of the '30s noted but did not name the increasing threat from Nazi Germany, but both Homolka (who was Austrian) and his contact have foreign accents, reflecting a certain xenophobia of the time.

The film, although not as flashy and memorable as Hitchcock's greatest Hollywood films, is well regarded, being named the 44th best British film in a recent poll, and holds a rare 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.