Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936): Conspirators and Bombs in Actual, Literary and Filmic London

Abstract

This chapter deals with several iterations of sabotage. The first dates back to 1894 when the Greenwich ‘bomb outrage’ occurred. For weeks, the press was full of reports about a twenty-six-year-old French anarchist named Martial Bourdin who died from shock and haemorrhage from the bomb he was ‘feloniously handling’ in Greenwich Park. This infamous incident was one of the key inspirations for Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, his only novel to be set almost entirely in London. Conrad’s novel, in turn, was loosely adapted (and updated) by Hitchcock for his 1936 film Sabotage. In his film, the threat appears to come from German fifth-columnists (rather than the Russian anarchists of the Conrad novel). Although Hitchcock always claimed in interviews to be non-political, he was unabashedly patriotic. His love for his native city is vividly apparent in his treatment of Londoners in everyday settings, in the street markets, or going to the cinema, travelling by bus, or tram or tube, and arguably these images suggest a form of social cohesion. The lingering shots of the faces of Londoners cheerfully finding their way out of the Underground by holding up matches and cigarette lighters following the power blackout in London that marks the film’s first act of sabotage represents early on in the film exactly who and what is being threatened, long before the horrific bomb outrage at the end of the film.