Good concept, poorly executed.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I like this story.A man is supposed to be a murder and try to escape.He meet a young ,beautiful lady on the way and they fall in love.It's so romantic ,at the time thrilling especially last scene that a real murder scream for a help on the statue of liberty.However I don't like something in the film.I think it is too rapid that two of them confirm how they feel to each other.

Producer: Frank Lloyd. A Frank Lloyd Production. (Available on an excellent Universal DVD).Copyright 29 April 1942 by Universal Pictures Co., Inc. Presented by Frank Lloyd Productions. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall: 7 May 1942. U.S. release: 23 April 1942. Australian release: 10 December 1942. 11 reels. 9,876 feet. 110 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Innocent of sabotage, an accused man hunts from west to east to pin down the real Nazi agents. In short, this movie is a variant on "The 39 Steps".COMMENT: Hard to believe that Norman Lloyd wasn't even nominated for a prestigious Hollywood acting award. Who remembers winner Van Heflin in Johnny Eager? Yet Lloyd's is one of the strongest and most unforgettable support performances of the war years."Saboteur" is a thrill-a-minute thriller with a great cast, terrific production values and an absolutely stand-out climax atop the Statue of Liberty. Hitchcock at his best! Cummings is very effective as the fall guy, Priscilla Lane makes an attractive heroine, whilst Otto Kruger is suavely deadly as the chief heavy. This great movie features crackling dialogue, and is delivered at an express-train pace. with top of the range credits and production values.In short, a typically brilliant Hitchcock chase thriller, with many of the director's favorite cliff-hanging ingredients masterfully infused into the plot. All these echoes in story and characterization add rather than detract from the over-all suspense. Hitchcock makes the familiar seem fresh and even more terrifyingly real.

Indeed, after having ventured in the atmosphere of early Hitchcock's movies and an anachronistic oddity titled "Under Capricorn", "Saboteur" provided me the same satisfaction an explorer who trotted over the globe for months would feel when crossing the threshold of his home. I missed the good old Hitchcock format to the point of homesickness and when the spinning Earth of Universal Pictures introduced that opening credits with a weird linear background and the ominous shadow of the titular "Saboteur", I knew I was swimming in familiar water, I enjoyed every moment of the 1942 thriller, and forgave every flaw.Yes, there were flaws, the plots was written by three persons and I suspect they never met to get all their ducks in a row, but the action is so fast-paced and Hitchcock's directing so insolently confident that you savor every bit of this Swiss-cheese-like plot. They say Hitchcock was a Master of Suspense, I think he was hiding a subtler talent under his sleeve: he knew how to make you not notice the flaws. The action sequences, , the uses of ellipses and smash cuts, everything were so efficient that noticing a few weaknesses in the script would make you look nit-picky (not that all his films could got away with it)."Saboteur" opens with a sabotage of spectacular effect, a hatched-face guy named Fry bumped into two aircraft workers, one of them is Barry, played by Robert Cummings (and not Dana Andrews). Barry has enough time to check the name on a postcard. A few minutes later, a fire starts and Fry gives him an extinguisher, Barry's friend wants to take part to the action, ignoring that the extinguisher is filled with gasoline. Hitchcock gratifies with the death of a man literally eaten up by flames and falling like a burnt match. Now, this is an opening. What follows is pure Hitch stuff, Barry is the suspect number one because he handed the fatal extinguisher and naturally, there's no worker named Fry.Mistaken identities is one of Hitchcock's darling and it's handled quite efficiently in "Saboteur" as Barry's identity is often the cause of misleading tricks with both the right and wrong side of the law, and can even be looked at the whole theme of the movie, which is about the fifth columnist threatening the United States' interests during the War. Indeed, "Saboteur" can't be taken outside of its context, the decisive incident happens in the temple of the war effort after all. But the mistaken identity emphasizes the interesting contrast between the good guys and the villains, obviously. Those who trust Barry are all average Joes, down-on-their-luck, from the people, while the bad guys are very unlikely figures, a gentle grandfather played by Otto Kruger and a socialite played by Alma Kruger (no relation).One would think the film has a point to make about American values, and he would be right. During his road trip, Barry meets many archetypes of American society and these are opportunities for some grandiloquent speeches about democracy. Some are pretty well-written and I must say I have drank like little milk the lines delivered by Vaughan Masser, the blind host. Some others, as well-intended as they were, were too preachy. When Barry and Pat (Prscilla Lane) ask the circus troop workers for help, the Skeleton Man proposes a vote, when the midget protests, he's called 'fascist', which was a pretty bold answer. But then again, if the man was so eager to save them, why didn't he just help them? Is it better to make a bad decision democratically than a noble one tyrannically? kind of makes you think.I understand the context forced Hitchcock to inject some inspirational moments in his film, like he did in "Loveboat", but this aspect was almost contradicted by the way the real folks behaved, the agents of FBI, the navy yard guards, all so conveniently incompetent, enough not to spot the bad guys or to arrest the wrong one… so much for democracy. One would rather accept Barry's punchy methods, after all, it's not like he trusted the justice of his country and handed himself to the Law. You're never really sure what Hitch's point is, and maybe this is the film's slight edge over "Lifeboat". The Master gives the villain many shining moments, they sing to Tchaikov' music in a car, the suave villain a speech of his own and talk about "mass morons", and even say bout totalitarian regimes that "they get things done", and ironically, this is what the hero does, getting things done with the villains' methods.Despite these contradictions, the film lets itself being enjoyed, one scene after another, Hitchcock showcases his capability to provide memorable moments, a shootout in a Radio City theater with real shotguns heard in the movies, where the suspense lies on the moment the audience will realize what's going on, a paper with a message for help flying over the sky and last but not least, the Statue of Liberty's climax. What a fitting demise for the villain who sinned by fire to die at the altar of the Liberty torch. Yet even Hitchcock acknowledged a flaw: everyone wanted the villain to die. He wouldn't commit the same mistake in "North by Northwest", but what a satisfying ending.As Fry, Norman Lloyd, without being the most memorable Hitchcok villain is the one whose face leaves the most vivid impact, and this is saying a lot in a film where they're a group of intimidating people. So we have memorable villains, a dark and handsome hero, mistaken for a killer, running afoul of the Law to prove his innocence and meeting in the process a beautiful blonde, car chases, last-minute escapes, bomb explosions, breath suspended as often as disbelief, and a climactic sequence taking place in the most unexpected and spectacular setting. I needed my fix of Hitchcock, and I got it with "Saboteur".

"Saboteur" was Alfred Hitchcock's first film made after America's entry into World War II. He had dealt with the war before in "Foreign Correspondent", but because America was still neutral at the time he was forced to do so a roundabout way. That film does indeed feature a European war, a war which has many similarities with the one actually being waged- London, for example is being bombed- but Hitchcock was not allowed to name the Nazis as the aggressors. Well, after Pearl Harbor Hollywood finally allowed Hitchcock to take the gloves off. "Saboteur" is an unashamed propaganda piece warning Americans to be on their guard against fifth columnists and enemy agents. Hitchcock uses one of his favourite plot devices, one he had already used in the likes of "The 39 Steps" and "Young and Innocent", that of a man wrongly accused of a crime. When an aircraft factory in California is destroyed by fire and a man is killed, Barry Kane, a young worker at the plant, becomes the chief suspect. Kane is forced to go on run to clear his name and expose the real culprits. In the course of a journey which takes him all the way across America to New York he meets a cross-section of Americans, including a garrulous truck driver, a rancher, a blind musician and his model niece, a circus full of freaks and a society hostess. Some of these believe in his innocence and try to help him, others try to hand him over to the police while others turn out to be working for the real saboteurs, a sinister organisation of fifth columnists. The film works well until about halfway through. There is a tense scene at Tobin's ranch, some striking photography of the Western landscapes and a good cameo from Vaughan Glaser as the kindly musician Phillip Martin. After that, however, things start to go downhill. I have always felt that the point at which it jumps the shark is when Kane and Pat meet the circus freaks, most of whom are horribly unconvincing. (The "human skeleton", for example, is not even particularly thin, and the "bearded lady's" beard is obviously false). There is little real tension in the second half of the film. The scene in Mrs Sutton's mansion is overlong and the one where Kane foils an attempt to destroy a new Navy battleship in Brooklyn Navy Yard is confusing. The sight of a ship lying on its side shortly afterwards might seem to suggest, wrongly, that the saboteurs have in fact succeeded in their efforts. (The stricken ship is in fact the SS Normandie, destroyed by fire in February 1942, but even in 1942 audiences from outside New York might have missed this point). Hitchcock loved setting cliff-hanging sequences in or on iconic buildings or structures; during his British period in the thirties the Albert Hall, Westminster Cathedral and the Forth Bridge had all been pressed into service for this purpose. He tries to create another one here using the Statue of Liberty, that iconic symbol of American democracy, but the effect of this is lessened by the fact that the person in the greatest danger is not the hero Kane but one of the villains whom the audience would love to see plunge to his death. Hitchcock originally wanted Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck for the leading roles, but Cooper was uninterested and Stanwyck unavailable. (Cooper seems later to have regretted not working with Hitch; he signed on to star in "The Wreck of the Mary Deare" in the belief that the great man would be directing it, only for Hitchcock to pull out). In the event the roles were taken by Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane; Cummings makes a decent hero, but Lane must be among the least memorable of Hitchcock's trademark blondes. The relationship between Cummings and Lane recalls that between Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in "The 39 Steps"; she initially distrusts him but is persuaded to believe in him and the couple eventually fall in love. In 1942 Hitchcock was under contract to David O. Selznick, but Selznick rejected the script for this film, one of a number of factors which led to the growth of ill-feeling between director and producer. The film was eventually made by Universal, but it is easy to understand Selznick's reservations. "Saboteur" may have succeeded as a piece of propaganda, but as a piece of film-making it is a relative failure. Hitchcock was capable of much better work than this. 5/10