Mr. Verloc, a cinema owner, is part of a gang of saboteurs in London. He lives with his wife, Sylvya, and her young brother, Stevie. They know nothing about Verloc's secret. Scotland Yard assigns an undercover detective, Ted, to work in a shop near the cinema and investigate the man. The head of the gang assigns Verloc to put a bomb in the metro. The man sends Stevie there with the "bag".
AMAZON.COM REVIEWS FOR SABOTAGE (1936): This set of five titles from the British phase of Alfred Hitchcock's earlycareer serves as an outstanding reflection on the great director's evolvingpreoccupations and pet themes in the 1930s. The earliest inclusion is the1930 Murder, starring Herbert Marshall as a famous stage actor whotakes it upon himself to investigate a murder for which a young actress hasbeen wrongly convicted. Clever and witty, the film finds Hitch exploringthe blurry dualisms of reality and illusion, guilt and innocence, andwatching and doing. The 1932 Number 17 is Hitchcock in aparticularly playful vein. A bit bored by the "old dark house" Gothic toneof the story, he uses the film as an opportunity to push the limits ofcamera mobility, the emotional underpinnings of shots, and the sheer fun ofusing model trains and other vehicles to create climactic chases. In the1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the director matches asophisticated tone with a gut-wrenching tale of a child kidnapped by spies.A fascinating study in contrast with Hitch's 1956 edition of the story (theone starring James Stewart and Doris Day), this film highlights both hisinterest in the burden of secrecy as well as his youthful efforts at visualexperimentation. The 1936 Sabotage is a stunning story of a naivewoman's revenge-killing of her husband, a German spy, and the subsequentcover-up of her deed both by fate and by a police detective who chooses tokeep quiet about her guilt. Finally, the 1936 Secret Agent, starring JohnGielgud, Robert Young, Madeleine Carroll, and Peter Lorre in an espionagestory of concealed identities and assassination, is dense with ideas aboutlies and the brutality of the hidden. A few features later, AlfredHitchcock belonged to Hollywood, and the American cinema took a giant leapforward. But in this boxed set can be seen the blueprint of his genius. Theprints of the films used in this box set are serviceable and probablycomparable to average 16mm classroom or museum presentations. The DVDs alsoinclude Hitchcock filmographies, trivia questions, a director biography, andscene access. --Tom KeoghAlfred Hitchcock Collection, Vol. 1: Sabotage (dvd):
Amazon.com video review:Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 drama, among his darkest, is the one to which heregretfully pointed later as the exception that proved his usual rule aboutgood suspense: you have to let an audience know the precise danger that acharacter doesn't know he imminently faces. Then you have to withdraw orcancel out the danger lest viewers feel betrayed. The "betrayal" inSabotage rather famously involves a bomb, a boy, and a bus. But inthe context of the story (based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent,inevitably confused with Hitchcock's quite different film called SecretAgent), the twist has a devastating significance, ushering in thedirector's pet themes about the proximity of chaos to ordinary life and thenature and transference of guilt. Sylvia Sidney stars as the naive Americanwife of a German spy, the latter using a movie theater as a cover for histerrorist activities. When he asks his wife's young brother to make adelivery--a package containing a ticking bomb, unknown to the child--a busdelay causes the boy to die in the timed explosion. Sidney's charactermurders her spouse in revenge, but as in Hitch's great Blackmail,the deed is obscured by a sympathetic lawman who ultimately shares hersecret. Wrong or right, right or wrong--the clear distinctions don't oftenexist in the great director's movies, and Sabotage is no exception.The print of the film used in the DVD release is serviceable and probablycomparable to an average 16mm classroom or museum presentation. The DVD alsoincludes a Hitchcock filmography, trivia questions, a director biography, andscene access. --Tom Keogh
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