Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 205: Wed Jul 26

Sabotage (Hitchcock, 1936): Regent Street Cinema, 2pm


This film was one of my five picks for the Guardian of underrated Alfred  Hitchcock films. 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 Agent about 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 (and above) is the famous bus bomb scene (Spoiler warning).

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