Two fascinating early Hitchcock films both from 1936. The Secret Agent is rather clumsily plotted but has some charm. It is startling to see John Gielgud as a handsome young romantic lead, and Peter Lorre provides an eccentric performance as a sort of generic comical “foreigner”. Sabotage provides a frisson to today’s viewer. The plot involves a terrorist planting a bomb on a London bus. Hitchcock pulls no punches: he builds up a likable child character, then brutally blows him up, halfway through the film. It would have been impossible to do this in an American film until decades later. But audiences did not like it, and Hitchcock later considered it a lapse of judgement. The terrorist in the film employs a liquid explosive of the same type as seems to have been used in the foiled multiple airplane bombing of the last few days.
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