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Contents : Don t forget. The birds will sing at 1:45 by Richard Combs If there s anything like an Alfred Hitchcock memoir on film then his 1936 production Sabotage is the best candidate. In fact this is a memoir in two senses: one as a recollection of the London where he grew up something of an on the streets documentary mixed in with elaborate studio recreations and second at which point it becomes a future tense memoir a reminder of the film maker Hitchcock was about to become a more self conscious one not defined by the mechanisms of thrillers and his reputation as the master of suspense . At the outset of filming Sabotage s producer Michael Balcon boasted that it would show more of London than any film to date. In the event it looks like a guided tour of the hometown Hitchcock knew as John Russell Taylor s biography Hitch points out: Sabotage is the richest and most detailed picture in Hitch s work of the London he grew up in and knew like the back of his hand. Much of the detail is drawn from his own experience: the greengrocer s shop which the detective uses as cover recalls his own childhood home the little East End cinema the kind where he had his own experiences of the flicks The quirkily vivid scenes in the street markets the back street shops the cheery by play of the peddlers and the darker sense of crime behind closed doors in mean 1 streets all summon up Hitch s own childhood and his early fascination with the domestic details of the murder cases he loved to read . In being true to Hitchcock s biography the film is also atmospherically true despite its many changes to its source Joseph Conrad s novel The Secret Agent (one change the film s title was necessary because Hitchcock had already made a film earlier the same year called The Secret Agent). Conrad s story of anarchist plotting agents and double agents police spies dupes and innocent victims is set in a late 19th/early 20th century netherworld stuffed with all the rancid domestic details of Hitchcock s preferred reading matter. The shop was small and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London as Conrad opens his story introducing us to the shabby but sulphurous world of Mr Verloc and his small m nage. Verloc is the secret agent the proprietor of a seedy Soho emporium whose window displays photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines closed yellow paper envelopes . In Hitchcock s film the Soho soft porn shop has become a cinema a Bijou of his East End youth which Verloc (Oscar Homolka) runs with his young wife (Sylvia Sidney) and her younger brother Stevie (Desmond Tester). But in both cases the business is a front for Verloc s terrorist activities plotting with fellow anarchists to black out London or bomb the Lord Mayor s parade. More than 70 years later the terrorism may have resonance again though Hitchcock s very English seeming anarchists are we re obscurely told agents who are making trouble at home to take our minds off what s going on abroad . Conrad s conspirators are less veiled though motives here are even murkier because his Verloc is a double agent an agent provocateur being paid by a certain foreign embassy to expose the anarchists. Blackest of Conrad s would be revolutionaries is the Professor a proto suicide bomber who dreams of society s destruction memorably played against the grain by Robin Williams in Christopher Hampton s 1996 film of The Secret Agent. In Sabotage he s the kindly bumbling owner of a bird shop which doubles as a bomb making factory. This is located in Islington which the film places with more cin v rit footage (Islington market is still recognisable). And it s another Hitchcock marker: in 1919 the Hollywood company Famous Players Lasky opened a studio in Islington and the 20 year old Hitchcock wangled a job designing intertitle cards for silent films. The East End neighbourhood though with the Bijou and the next door greengrocer s (such as Hitchcock s father ran) from where a police detective is spying on Verloc is a studio dream of Hitchcock s past. He did however insist on one expensive piece of reality: a tramline with functioning tram running from the Lime Grove studios in Shepherd s Bush to White City. This indulgence evidently had an ulterior motive: to impress Hollywood producers. With Sabotage Hitchcock is beginning to look for other ways both to establish himself and to define himself as a film maker. He s beginning to look beyond the story for his subject for a different game to play with the audience 2 for a way to turn the devices of the thriller into what : tools of metaphysical enquiry metaphors to send c

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