Month: January 2021

The Films of Alfred Hitchcock – Part 14 – Saboteur (1942) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Saboteur is one of Hitchcock’s earlier Hollywood era productions.  It’s the story of Barry Kane, played by Robert Cummings, a wartime factory worker who is mistakenly accused of being a Nazi saboteur.  The story starts out at an airplane manufacturing plant where Barry and his friend Ken Mason are employed.  At lunch they bump into another employee named Frank Fry who acts very suspiciously.  Barry sees an envelope that Fry is sending to a man in another town and finds a large amount of money that Fry drops on the ground.  When he gives the money back to Fry, he becomes very angry.  Suddenly a large fire breaks out and Barry, Ken and Fry head toward it.  Fry gives Ken a fire extinguisher but when Ken directs it at the fire, he becomes engulfed by the inferno and dies.

During the investigation it turns out that there is no employee named Fry and Barry’s story about the whole event is doubted when it turns out the extinguisher was filled with gasoline.  He is blamed for the fire and is being hunted as a Nazi saboteur.  He runs away and hitches a ride with a truck driver heading for the town that Fry’s letter was addressed to.

When he reaches the address, the man living there, Charles Tobin, denies knowing anyone named Fry but Barry accidentally finds a telegram from Fry to Tobin.  Realizing that Tobin is one of the saboteurs and has called the police to arrest him, Barry flees but is quickly captured by the police.  Later he escapes from them by leaping off a bridge into a river.  Eventually he reaches the cabin of a blind man who suspects that he is a fugitive from the law because he can hear Barry’s handcuffs clinking against each other.  The blind man prefers to believe Barry is innocent and agrees to help him get out of his handcuffs.  But the man’s niece, Patricia “Pat” Martin, arrives and wants to turn him into the police because of the news reports branding him as a dangerous saboteur.

Now follows a confusing and slightly ridiculous chain of events that involves circus freaks and an eventual change of heart by Pat toward Barry.  Eventually Barry convinces part of the sabotage gang that he is working for Tobin and is driven to New York City where the next big action is planned.  Pat is captured and also ends up in New York.  The new target is a battleship that has been completed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  The saboteurs manage to sink it and capture both Barry and Pat.  But by a clever ruse she is able to signal the police and all the saboteurs except Fry are captured by the police.  Fry escapes to the Statue of Liberty and there is a climactic fight on the torch of the statue where Fry falls onto the torch arm and is hanging by his fingernails.  Barry manages to grab hold of Fry’s jacket sleeve and is waiting for the police to bring a rope to allow for a rescue.  But before they can arrive the sleeve rips free and Fry falls to his death.  Barry kisses Pat and the movie ends.

Well, you can’t say Hitchcock doesn’t throw everything including the kitchen sink into the plot.  Bearded women, Siamese twins, midgets, trusting blind men, a pretty girl who models for billboards, sunken battleships, the Statue of Liberty, the Hoover Dam, leaps off bridges, Rockefeller Center, Nazi spies, shoot outs in movie theaters, you name it.  And this movie is noticeably a Hollywood product.  There is all of the wartime patriotism there and the tropes that the studios had built up at this point.  The production values are high but the dialog and acting are a bit mediocre.

It’s a pretty good effort but hardly one of Hitchcock’s finest productions.  I’d called it recommended but not highly recommended.  Let’s say it is moderately entertaining but it wouldn’t be something I’d re-watch often.

Uncontrolled Overheating

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It’s hard to make exact calibrations when measuring something as subjective as hatred.  Even in the Democrat controlled media it is pretty universally admitted that Nancy Pelosi is despised by an enormous swath of the population.  A slightly smaller number hate Chuck Schumer.  This lesser hatred is attributable to Schumer’s current status as only the minority leader of the Senate.  Without a doubt as he wields his new power as majority leader, and uses it to pack the Supreme Court and deprive us of our constitutional rights, the level of hatred he inspires will grow.

Dementia Joe will very soon become the most hated man in America.  This will be by dint of his titular leadership of the people who are making it their goal to destroy the freedoms that we have enjoyed in this country for hundreds of years.  As an aside he will also be mocked mercilessly because of just how pathetic his mental condition has become.  But except as a source of comedy that is neither here nor there.  It’s not as if his intelligence will be used for anything.  He’s a pathetic figurehead who will be swept aside at the convenient point when they want to make Willie Brown’s Ho the ugly embodiment of affirmative action in action.  At that point she will become the most hated human in the country, male, female or other.

Moving away from the government, the faces of the Tech Elite, the heads of Amazon, Google, Twitter, Apple and the lesser giants are also becoming very high on the list of most hated individuals in America.  Having used their power to disconnect President Trump and many of his associates and friends from the digital realm, they followed up by shutting down the commercial platforms of anyone with an opinion that does not completely agree with their civic religion.  And this is just the first wave of cancellings.  They will use their ever-tightening algorithms to ferret out anyone who disagrees with them and force all their subordinate business partners to join with them to excise these bad thinkers from the digital world.  And after that they intend to use their allies in the banking and corporate worlds to eliminate the ability of these people to live in the physical world too.

And moving down into the local scene there are all those Governors of the Blue States and the Mayors of the larger cities who have tortured their citizens during this long year of COVID prison and the pogroms that the BLM and Antifa thugs have launched against normal people everywhere.  Guys like Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio are detested by their citizens.  And even outside of their constituencies they are recognized as awful men.

And in contrast President Trump, despite being in charge during all the misery of the election fraud and despite the outrageous bad press he gets from all quarters of the Media, continues to become more popular.

So, what’s my point?  Only this.  You can’t keep torturing people forever without all that hatred translating into something tangible.  Normally it is dissipated when people are allowed to disparage their tormentors on line or by ejecting them from office through voting.  Both of these options have now been eliminated by our tormentors.  I contend that a different and more visceral response will be forthcoming.

Interestingly, the fake version of this was play-acted at the Capitol last week.  Probably with the tacit cooperation of the authorities, some Antifa goons led some Trump supporters to the slaughter inside the seat of US government.  And now the Democrats want to use this as the basis for draconian restrictions on political dissent.  They hope to make even protesting impossible for the disgruntled citizens of this country.  How could that go wrong?

In chemical process engineering, pressure relief is a critical component in the design of a stable and safe process.  Relief valves are used to prevent overpressure if a reaction gets out of control.  What happens when you eliminate the relief valves from a pressure vessel that’s being subjected to uncontrolled overheating?  Well, the pressure keeps building until it exceeds the strength of that vessel.  At that point what you have is a shrapnel bomb.  And if the contents are flammable you have a massive explosion.  Depending on the size and strength of the vessel, the nature of the contents under pressure and the nature of the things in the neighborhood around the explosion, you have either a local disaster or an enormous cataclysm.  Over-pressuring of vessels at petrochemical plants have sometimes levelled areas equivalent to a good-sized city.

In our analogy the pressure vessel is the United States, a global super-power armed with thermonuclear weapons and with hundreds of millions of firearms in the hands of a formerly free people.  The overheating is the abuse the Left is imposing on the Right.  The overpressure is the reaction of people on the Right to being disenfranchised and silenced.  What is certain is that there is a point at which the pressure will cause the structure to give way and unleash the explosion.  The United States is a remarkably strong and stable system.  It will take an awful lot of pressure to make it fail.  But the flip side of that is once it fails at such a high pressure the energy released is enormous.

If the day comes that Americans think they are better off taking down the government than taking the abuse they currently suffer there will be a lot of very sorry former public servants running for their lives.

And yet the Left isn’t worried about the consequences of what they are doing at all.  We really must seem like hopeless losers to them.  The only thing I can think of is that we are still early on in the process of what will play out.  I guess some fairly large number of people have to feel like they have nothing to lose.  Once that number gets large enough the odds of one of them deciding to do something big become a certainty.  The only question is what the scope of that something will be.  A tiny version of that something is what that guy in Nashville did.  Dying of cancer, he decided to destroy some telecommunication infrastructure because he thought the microwave radiation harms people.  He made a big point of warning folks close by that a bomb was going to go off.  That will not be the case when someone who is really angry at the system decides to do something big.  It will be very ugly.

I’m surprised that the Left’s leaders aren’t worried.  Maybe they’re not a smart as we’ve been told they are.  It would truly worry me to be the face of something as widely hated as the Left.  The only thing I can think of is that they are depending on the decency of their enemies to obey the rule of law.  What they are forgetting is that they’ve turned this into a banana republic.  And the first rule of a banana republic is that there are no rules.  They should really reconsider what they’re doing.  It’s just common sense.

Will the Right Learn Anything from the Tech Giants’ Blockade?

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President Trump and a slew of his associates and supporters have been shut out of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram.  The payment processors like Stripe and PayPal are boycotting his election committee and his other sources of on-line funding.  Amazon, Apple and Google are conspiring to de-platform Parler.  Amazon is depriving them of server space on Amazon’s cloud.  Apple and Google are shutting Parler’s apps out of their app stores.  That effectively deprives them of access to the audience using Apple and Android operating systems on their phones.  Simultaneously, Google and Facebook are shutting down all of the commercial accounts of anyone they perceive as conservative.

Conservatives are shouting, “This is an outrage, something must be done about it!”

How about saying, “Why are you people so stupid?”  It’s like starting to rebuild your house on the side of Vesuvius while the lava is still smoking above Pompeii and Herculaneum.  How long does it take you to wake up?  Sure, it’s easier and cheaper to use the infrastructure that the Lefties built.  Sure, you took a chance and up till now you’ve enjoyed the benefits of using that premium service that they provide at rock bottom prices.  Fine.

But now that they’ve screwed you over wouldn’t it make sense to look around for another alternative?  Whining for Amazon and Apple to respect your rights just as the black hats are returning to the White House and the Supreme Court is scared to death of being packed by the Democrat Congress seems worse than useless.  It appears to be the action of a hopeless loser.

Lick your wounds, collect your wits and start over from a better position.  There are alternatives.  They aren’t anywhere near as lucrative as the fantasy land that YouTube and Facebook are.  You’ll have to pony up some dough and you’ll have to promote yourself and the profits won’t be nearly as good.

Not good enough?  Well, the alternative is to go Left.  Maybe you can convince people that you’ve seen the light and you no longer believe in the first and second amendments.  It worked for the NeverTrumpers.  Well, up until now it has.  Word on the street is that the paymasters for that operation are going to discontinue that gravy train now that they no longer are trying to win an election.  It should be interesting to see what will be going on with the Fake Right in the coming weeks.  I expect the screeching to resemble a chorus of scorched cats.

Look, this thing is just beginning.  The Justice Department is sure to be sticking its diseased snout into all things having to do with political speech on the right.  They’re sure to try and torture us with every horror they can imagine.  Maybe it’s a good time to forget about politics and collect scrap metal and rags instead.  But for pity’s sake don’t whine that the bad old meanies aren’t playing fair.  These people hate you and they’re ecstatic that Dementia Joe and Willie Brown’s Ho will be running the show.  Expecting anything but a knife in the back from them is so abysmally stupid that anyone with a shred of dignity and an IQ above room temperature should be embarrassed to do it.

Find people on our side who can provide hosting and payment processing and stop looking like an idiot.  The sooner we start using our brains the sooner we start taking a big chunk of the on-line business away from Facebook, Google and the rest of the degenerates on the Left.  Who knows, maybe someday Amazon will be coming to us begging us to use some of their unutilized cloud capacity.  And wouldn’t it be sweet to tell them to go pound sand up their cloud instead?  Sure, it would.

The Films of Alfred Hitchcock – Part 13 – North by Northwest (1959) – A Movie Review

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North by Northwest is considered by many film critics to be the epitome of Hitchcock’s suspense movies.  It has several iconic scenes and involves several high-powered Hollywood stars being choreographed through a very intricate and confusing plot about spies and murder that has a love story embedded in the middle.  But I’ve always thought it was a bit much.  It’s almost a send-up of some of his earlier stuff.

The plot revolves around a New York advertising executive, Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, being mistaken by a gang of Soviet spies for an American agent named George Kaplan who we find out later doesn’t actually exist.  Thornhill is kidnapped and brought to an estate on Long Island where he is given a choice; provide the Russian spies with information or be liquidated.  Thornhill adamantly maintains that he isn’t Kaplan and so they proceed with the murder.  They force Thornhill to drink a quart of bourbon and then put him behind the wheel of a car heading for a cliff.  But Thornhill manages to drunk-drive the car along a steep curving country road without crashing and eventually he is arrested by the local police.  After this there is a great deal of confusion as Thornhill attempts to find the men who attempted to kill him.  He next finds himself at the UN Building looking for the ringleader but instead he is somehow framed for the murder of a diplomat.

While trying to escape arrest by the NYPD, Thornhill next jumps aboard the 20th Century Limited, a luxury train that travels to Chicago where “Kaplan” has an appointment. On the train he meets Eve Kendall, played by Eva Marie Saint, and they begin a romance while she manages to hide him from the police.  But we are shown that secretly she is working with the Russian spies.  Eve pretends to get in touch with Kaplan for Thornhill and tells him to meet Kaplan at a rural Illinois bus stop that is surrounded by cornfields.  No one shows up until finally a crop-dusting biplane chases Thornhill and starts firing machine gun slugs at him.  Eventually the plane somehow crashes into a fuel tanker truck and Thornhill escapes back to Chicago in a stolen vehicle.

Now he confronts Eve with her spy friends at a fine arts auction.  He discovers that his nemesis is named Phillip Vandamm, played with his usual suave style by James Mason.  And he discovers that Vandamm is Eve’s lover.  In order to escape from Vandamm’s henchmen Thornhill comically heckles the auctioneers and is finally ejected by the police.  Thornhill tells the police that he is the wanted killer and they drive off to the local precinct.  But during the drive a radio call comes in and Thornhill is driven instead to the airport where a government agent called the “The Professor,” played by Leo G. Carroll takes custody of Thornhill and flies him to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  The Professor explains that Eve is acting as a government agent to provide information on Vandamm’s espionage ring.  But Thornhill has endangered her cover by falling in love with her and making Vandamm suspicious of her loyalty.

Thornhill confronts Vandamm and Eve at the airport.  He tells Vandamm that he really is the American agent Kaplan and he will allow Vandamm to escape in exchange for taking Eve into custody to punish her for her duplicitous behavior toward him.  When Thornhill becomes physical with Eve, she pulls out a small hand gun from her purse and shoots him several times and then flees.

Later we see the Professor driving into the wooded countryside somewhere in South Dakota and we see that Thornhill is uninjured due to the blanks in Eve’s gun.  Eve drives to meet them at this rendezvous point and explains to Thornhill that she must now leave the country with Vandamm on his private plane to complete her mission.  When Thornhill attempts to prevent her due to his romantic feelings for her, the Professor’s law enforcement associate punches Thornhill in the face and knocks him out.  Late he escapes their custody and heads to Vandamm’s home near the summit of the Mount Rushmore monument to get Eve to abandon the plan.  Hiding outside of the home he overhears Vandamm and his henchman Leonard, played with great creepiness by Martin Landau, discussing Eve’s status.  Leonard fires Eve’s gun at Vandamm and thus proves it is loaded with blanks.  After an initial burst of anger at Leonard Vandamm agrees that he will have to dispose of Eve by throwing her from the plane into a lake.

Thornhill manages to rescue Eve right before she gets on the plane but they cannot escape the property except by climbing down the face of the monument with Vandamm and his henchmen in hot pursuit.  Eventually a sharpshooter’s bullet by the Professor’s rescue party saves Thornhill and Eve from being forced off the shear rock face by Leonard who instead falls to his death.  Now that Leonard is no longer crushing Thornhill’s handhold on the cliff he manages to finally pull Eve up from where she is dangling over the abyss.  Whereupon the scene changes to Thornhill pulling Eve up to the elevated bed in their railway suite on the 20th Century Limited getting ready to celebrate their honeymoon.

Okay, so this is Hitchcock at the point in his career where he has gone a little over the top.  Humor has become a major part of the feel of the movie.  I’ll give some examples.  When Cary Grant is driving down the steep curving road drunk, the scene is decidedly comical.  And later on, when he is trying to avoid his enemies in the auction hall his demeanor is what you would expect of Cary Grant in a comic role.  It’s supposed to be funny.  And near the end of the movie where he and Eve are running for their lives away from the spies, when she asks him why his two earlier wives divorced him he deadpans that they thought his life was too boring.  This is sort of a comic movie.  And that’s not all that different from other movies from this period like Rear Window where comedy is added in.  But the improbability of some of the scenes like the crop-duster chasing him through the cornfields and the escape down the faces of the Mt. Rushmore monument makes the movie a little bit like a fantasy.

But it is entertaining.  Personally, I don’t watch this movie very often.  I have to be in the right mood.  I’d prefer to see Cary Grant in Notorious.  It’s a very similar plot but it’s played straight and has a very different feel.  But preferences differ and some people probably feel oppositely.  It’s still definitely one of Hitchcock’s better films, just not one of my favorites.  Still, highly recommended.