Sabotage

Verloc runs a small cinema in London and lives behind it with his wife and her young brother. She does not know what he does. Verloc carries out sabotage in the city for an organisation. One day a package arrives at the house and he gives the boy the job of delivering it; the boy does not know what it is and gets on a bus. The subject is not espionage but what the wife will do from the moment she finds out. The final section is a dinner scene in the kitchen; nobody speaks and the knife on the table is in plain view. The form depends on making the audience wait. The boy's bus journey is drawn out: the clock is shown, the traffic sticks, he dawdles with the parcel on his lap. Alfred Hitchcock later described that passage as a mistake in his own career, saying that showing an audience a bomb and then detonating it punishes them and that suspense should not be built that way. The source is Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent. The adaptation changes the place and the period; the cinema and the household were devised for the film. Sylvia Sidney plays the wife, Oskar Homolka plays Verloc and Desmond Tester the boy. Who it is for: viewers interested in Hitchcock's British period and in how suspense is constructed. Who it is not for: anyone disturbed by violence involving a child; the film applies no softening at all.