© William Ahearn 2007
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Sabotage” ends with an act
of moral ambivalence (on the part of a police officer) so blatant and self-serving
that it is jarring in a way that Hitchcock would never repeat. Perhaps Hitchcock
didn’t realize that adding a love story to Joseph Conrad’s biting
novel would create situations that would have no satisfying resolution. What
boggles the mind is why he diddled with Conrad’s story to begin with.
“Sabotage” finds a warm spot in my heart for several
reasons but the overriding one is that it sent me back to re-read Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent. Conrad – who also wrote Heart of Darkness
that would become “Apocalypse Now” – is one of those rare
writers whose work defines and transcends the time in which it was written.
Written at the tail end of the 19th century and published in 1906, The
Secret Agent is a seminal work that would inspire a generation of 20th
century writers such as Graham Greene and John LeCarre, among others.
The novel deals with the intricate relationship of anarchists, spies,
embassies, the police, governments (foreign and homegrown), surveillance,
criminals, and – to a lesser degree – the media in the war of
terror being waged by anarchists in Europe in the late 1800s. Reading it in
New York City in this time of constant terrorist threat – or at least
Homeland Security’s insistence of constant terrorist threat –
the novel may actually be funnier than it was when Conrad first published
it.
Based on a botched bombing at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich
Park, London in 1894, Conrad creates a narrative that leads up to and follows
the events. (For the historic details go here.)
Not much has changed over the years. Anarchists targeted The Royal Observatory
as a symbol of resistance to technology and to this day I have yet to find
a so-called progressive movement that isn’t Luddite at heart. The
Secret Agent is a scary and humorous tale of delusion, stupidity, laziness
and loyalty that still rings true.
For accounts of the most famous anarchist event in US history, go
here.
One thing The Secret Agent isn’t and that’s a love story. And that leads me to wonder about the film versions of books – great and small – and why filmmakers think that moviegoers are different than book readers. It seems that the rule of thumb is that people read to learn and people go to the movies to escape. No other director held this belief as strongly as Hitchcock and in “Sabotage” it would present a dilemma he couldn’t solve as he introduced a romantic element to a story that had no room or use for it.
Conrad’s novel is complex in that it has numerous characters
revolving around the theme. The scriptwriter – Charles Bennett who also
scripted or wrote “Secret Agent” (from the novel Ashenden by W.
Somerset Maugham), “The 39 Steps,” “The Man Who Knew Too
Much,” and “Foreign Correspondent,” among others for Hitchcock
– tossed out the political aspects of the book, removed all the subplots
that were critical to the novel and stuck to the salient plot points mixed
with an added and unlikely romance.
“Sabotage” becomes a drama surrounding a family in a
London neighborhood far from the landmarks. In the book, their business is
a quasi-pornographic bookstore but in the film, Karl Anton Verloc, the missus
(who like the second Mrs. Winter in “Rebecca” doesn’t get
a first name) and the slow and easily distracted young brother of the missus,
Steve, run a small movie theatre. Unknown to the wife (in the film), Verloc
is an anarchist and saboteur working with an undefined group of fellow travelers.
Next door to the movie theatre is a fruit stand and working there undercover
is a police officer who suspects Verloc and who has a coveting eye on the
missus.
Verloc knows he’s under suspicion so he sends the dimwitted
Steve to deliver a package. The package is – of course – a bomb
and Steve gets distracted and behind schedule and blows himself up while riding
a bus on the way to deliver the package. The missus figures out what has happened
and while preparing dinner she stabs Verloc with the carving knife and kills
him. The undercover police officer rushes in on some pretense and discovers
that the wife has killed her husband but there’s another bomb about
to go off and they rush out and the movie theatre explodes covering the evidence
of murder.
Now – that the police officer will ignore that the missus killed
her husband – they can be together and there’s the added bonus
of her pesky and annoying little brother getting blown up on the bus.
Alfred Hitchcock used to tell a story about having a dream about
a great idea that would wake him and by morning he had forgotten what he had
dreamed. Putting a notepad and pencil on his nightstand, he went to sleep
and that night he wrote down the great idea. In the morning, the writing on
his pad read: boy meets girl.
In no other Hitchcock film is the boy-meets-girl conceit as jarring
and repulsive as it is in “Sabotage.” It certainly isn’t
the way Joseph Conrad ended the book. In The Secret Agent, Winnie
Verloc – she actually has a name – meets a far more dismal end
than marrying a police officer. The only time I can remember in cinema where
a woman murders – not kills but murders – someone as a seemingly
acceptable action is in “Thelma and Louise” and yet in that film
the resolution sticks to the no-longer-in-effect Hays Production Code. Louise
doesn’t end up marrying Investigator Hal Slocumb.
How Hitchcock handles the murder visually is as telling as
the aftermath. In the book, Verloc is lying on a day bed resting and the reader
sees the shadow of an arm holding a knife against the wall before it plunges
into his chest. After the killing, Winnie is sitting on a chair listening
to time tick away when she realizes that she has a silent clock and what she’s
hearing is Verloc’s blood dripping to the floor. In the film, the stabbing
is minimized so that the resulting romance is possible. Conrad presents it
as a premeditated act and Hitchcock – blowing off the suspense and visuals
of the book – presents it as an act of momentary anger, that the killing
is somehow understandable. One could argue that it certainly could be yet
we don’t expect the police officer to gloss over it so he can get laid.
It was with “The 39 Steps” that Hitchcock perfected the
innocent-man-on-the-run meets girl and with “Sabotage” he further
laid the groundwork for the bad-girl-gets-saved films that he first touched
upon in "Number 17."
Having once again bemoaned how great – or even good
– books can be trivialized by the film industry, I appreciated “Sabotage”
for it’s utterly and unintentional sociopathic values. Oddly, the controversy
surrounding this film when it was released wasn’t about the murderer
going free – and marrying the police – it was about blowing up
the bus.
Political bombings are contextual. While we may think of anarchists blowing
up a clock as a strike against technology as an empty and pointless act, we
certainly feel differently when it’s the French underground blowing
up Nazis.
Sinking a knife into someone’s chest is a tad less
complicated.