THE CINEMA Saboteur." At the Leicester Square.---" This Gun for
Hire." At the Plaza.
tae two major releases of the week make it clear that there is no pie distinction to be drawn between the war-film and the film escape. For Saboteur and This Gun for Hire are war-films tell are concerned less with the war than with the profound Mystery of the will to violence—with the psychology of the assassin Other than the psychology of the soldier. As a medium of escape lain insistent headlines each has the efficacy of a work of art. I Hirst admit that these two films which so much impressed me
might not unfairly be dismissed as a couple of well-made thrillers. Each is essentially a spy-hunting narrative with a speech or two on democratic liberty. This Gun for Hire does not probe nearly so deeply as Graham Greene's novel (the film is based on " Gun for Sale ") and it is superficial in its portrayal of all but the principal characters. Both it and Saboteur are as wildly improbable in incident as a good thriller should be. Yet they have the great virtue—besides which so much must be forgotten or forgiven—that they take their celluloid and they record upon it by imagination and craftsmanship, not simply an exciting story but a particular back- ground and atmosphere which could be created only by the cinema. These are, in fact, films in the tradition of " M " and The Spy and remind us of the German experiments in what might crudely be described as psychological melodrama. Their appeal lies in the contact they make with a dream-world of violence which is the secret possession of many a respectable citizen and which responds in war-time no less than in peace to the nightmare images of pursuit, capture and death.
Saboteur is directed by Alfred Hitchcock and it . is the best film he has made. Hollywood has given him a series of more spectacular settings for his chases and gun-play than he can have hoped for in his wildest dreams in Bridsh studios, and he has used them to keep the story of a three-thousand-mile pursuit always near the hysterical edge of terror. In contrast with the dramatic climaxes (built-up always with a typically violent yet logical juxtaposition of scene) are odd incidental cameos of natural human behaviour which come much nearer to life than Hitchcock's usual characterisations. As the gang (who have a taste for amateurish crooning) leave the Boulder Dam after failing to sabotage it the leader begins with all the genuine interest of a fond father to talk about child education ; at the height of the drama one woman cannot resist a just and accurate comment on another's figure ; a fifth-columnist finds time to glance at a pretty girl and to grin with pardonable satisfaction at the capsized Normandie ' as his taxi passes it on the way to the final piece of sabotage. The principal parts are excellently played by Priscilla Lane and Robert Cummings but the subtler acting and the greatest intelligence of direction has gone into the performances of
Norman Lloyd and Alan Baxter as fifth-columnists. •
In Saboteur the fugitive is innocent and himself is on the track of the real culprits: in This Gun for Hire the principal figure is a gunman who is persuaded to save the day by the one unselfish act of his ghoulish career. The setting of the original story has changed from England to the United States and the gunman's disfigurement is a malformed wrist instead of a hare-lip, but the film retains the essential story of a man driven to murder as a compensation for cruelties suffered in childhood. Alan Ladd is the cold, efficient instrument of death whose eye lights a little at the prospect of each new victim and whose poise is disturbed only by any offer of affection. He gives a brilliant performance. Veronica Lake goes from strength to strength, but Laird Cregar as the fastidious and cowardly instrument of fascist big business overplays a little. In both films it is the horr m- of heights, of empty spaces or long vistas to be crossed under the threat of detection and death that make
Previous page
