Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 229: Fri Aug 17

Sabotage (Hitchcock, 1936): BFI Southbank, NFT, 8.40pm
This film, which is part of the BFI Hitchcock season, is also screening on Aug 20. This was one of my five picks for the Guardian of underrated Hitchcock films not to be missed this summer. You can read my thoughts on the quintet of movies via the web here and this is what I had to say about Sabotage:

'Darker in tone and more harrowing than its reputation allows, Sabotage is arguably the most underrated of Hitchcock's still undervalued British period. A loose adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel The Secret Agentabout a shadowy network of anarchists, the film deserves to be remembered for much more than Hitchcock famously regretting his decision to let the bomb go off at the end of one of the director's most celebrated and manipulative suspense sequences. The movie's central couple run a cinema, which Hitchcock uses to masterful effect in an intriguing and rich sequence contrasting Walt Disney on the screen with the heartbreak of the wife following the tragedy at the centre of the narrative. The scene involving the "murder" (or is it "willed suicide"?) of her husband foreshadows the most brutal and shocking killing in Hitchcock's canon 30 years later, that of the East German agent Gromek in Torn Curtain (1966).'

Here is the famous bus bomb scene (Warning: spoiler)

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