MovieChat Forums > Sabotage (1937) Discussion > Sabotage and London bus and train bomb s...

Sabotage and London bus and train bomb scenes

posted 19 years ago by turkeycat
15 replies | jump to latest

I saw Hitchcock's Sabotage last night for the first time. I enjoyed it and thought it ranks quite highly among his other early films.

When watching it though I couldn't help but notice the similarity between some events in the film and recent news events regarding the terrorist attacks on London in July 2005. Does anyone think that the experience of viewing Sabotage has now altered significantly due to the similarity of the plot with current events?

(by the way, this is a genuine question and not some sicko joke or whatever...)

[–] morrison-dylan-fan 19 years ago

I have to say I thought of the film Sabotage when I heard the news from London.I suspect that the bombs on the buses were deliberate because they were (a)visible,and (b)emblemic of 'London'.There's a famous World War II photo of an upside-down London bus,said to have been taken to show the surreal world-turned-upside-down nature of war...
We always bring understandings,memories,etc. to films.My lack of knowledge about London's geography,but my knowledge of the recent bombings means that my 'reading' of it will be different from a contemporary viewers...but I still enjoy the film.
What a sequence the "Who Killed Cock Robin" carving knife episode is!

[–] nosnojsirhc 17 years ago

Don't Verlok's facial expressions kick some major butt there? Great cinematography and really good acting.

[–] slouchingpoet 18 years ago

I'd love to see a modern remake - set in London, Islamic terrorism, etc. Maybe less Hitchcock and more Conrad. Conrad always translates well into modern revisioning, e.g. Apocalypse Now. Of course, Hollywood or whoever would use IRA terrorists instead of Muslims, lest things get too damn real someone should start thinking.

[–] j-b-w-1 18 years ago

Yes, the use of the red London bus was taking the familiar iconic image and blowing us right out of our safety zone.

The movie was issued towards the end of 1936. The year had started with the massively expensive Things to Come in which a town is destroyed by bombs. The most featured building is an art-deco style super-cinema, probably very like the one that first-run audiences would have been inside. Hitchcock may well have been influenced by this when he set his version of Conrad in a flea-pit cinema and similarly played on the nerves of his audience by daring to detonate the bomb.

He always later regarded this as the picture in which he went too far. It still carries a punch.

[–] bbo-9 18 years ago

I recently watched Sabotage for the first time, and coincidentally also recently saw a re-broadcast of Dick Cavett's 8 June 1972 interview of Hitchcock. I didn't find the bus bombing sequence at all "over the top", or frankly, even noteworthy. It certainly wasn't gory, or even explicit (even for its day). I had never heard of the controversy regarding this movie until I saw it mentioned in the interview. In it, Hitchcock said that he would change it, but not because it was too gruesome or "over the top". He indicated that it was the craftsmanship of this sub-plot in the movie that he would do differently. What he didn't like about it was that he didn't find it suspenseful. The audience knew the bomb was going to blow up. They were shown this quite plainly and clearly. Then it blew up. I agree with him. When the procrastination scenes were shown, the audience is given the hint that the boy might be getting into trouble, but when the times were shown on the clocks indicating the time was at hand, and the boy was nowhere near his destination, the audience KNEW it was going to blow up. It blew up, and whatever small amount of suspense that was still left at that time, was gone.

Is there more to this "controversy" that I am not picking up on?

[–] 18 years ago

[deleted]

[–] 18 years ago

[deleted]

[–] mp01 17 years ago

that is the first thing I thought of when the London bombings occurred in 2005. that this film was an eerie precursor to real-life events almost 70 years earlier. glad i wasn't the only one who saw the connection.

and another occurrence I can think of this happening is Towering Inferno and the 9/11 attacks

[–] Hyman_Flomax 17 years ago

I just watched the film for the second time today, and while I had forgotten most everything about it aside from the bomb sequence, it was also much better than I had remembered and not at all a minor Hitchcock effort as the consensus would suggest. Perhaps I'm a bit daft, but while watching, the thought of the 2005 London attacks didn't even enter my mind. Even if it had, I've never been one to feel that events in the real world interfere with a cinematic experience to a very large degree. An air of personal familiarity can add to my enjoyment, or in some cases, dated aspects may stir up a bit of goofiness (the glorifying of the mujahideen in The Living Daylights springs to mind) but dismissing it because a historical event makes it "hard to watch" is a bit silly.

Cinema is an old whore who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure.

[–] sean-oconor 17 years ago

You can't but make the connection to the bus bomb of 2005, but the obvious parallel is to the IRA 1996 Aldywch bomb, which exploded prematurely on a double-decker bus.

With all the conflict in the world and the millions of humans coming in and going out of London all the time, we should be glad bombs explode relatively rarely in what is perhaps the most global place on earth.

[–] kairingler 17 years ago

well for me no, because the movie was made the year my mom was born, a long time ago. the events in London 7/05 was a definite tragedy i agree, but i would definately watch Sabotage again. i don't think that a terrorist could get ideas from early Hitchcock. Most terrorists probably don't watch movies from the 30's. at least that's my opinion.
works for me

[–] Altho73 16 years ago

A similar event happened long before 2005 or 1996 - in August 1939, only three years after Hitchcock's 'Sabotage' an IRA bomb left in the basket of an errand boy's bicycle in a crowded shopping street in Coventry exploded with horrific casualties

[–] FuturePrimitive666 16 years ago

I don't agree with this statement: 'Most terrorists probably don't watch movies from the '30's'. I have found in my journeys that many people who do not think like most in the West, prefer, for example, only watching films from a period in Western history that they deem less offensive, or less antagonistic to their idealogies. I teach in China, and they really do not like most Hollywood films of recent, but simply adore 'Gone With The Wind', 'Pride & Prejudice', and anything by Shirley Temple or Audrey Hepburn. No, the Chinese are not terrorists, but they certainly have a system that is not compatible with most Western thinking. Nevertheless, having said all of this, I think to a certain degree that a person inclined to become a terrorist is doing the exact same things and more that YOU would do, because they want to infiltrate your society, right? FuturePrimitive666.

"*bleep* it all and *bleep*ing no regrets!"

[–] PoppyTransfusion 12 years ago

Yes! In fact I just posted another thread about it. So much of the film reminded me of the events that led up to that fateful day too. Once I made the connection in my mind I kept seeing the events of 07/07/2005 prefigured throughout.

An hour isn't an hour but a little bit of eternity in our hands

[–] grape4 11 years ago

The overwhelming feeling I got watching this movie though was that it was made so long ago and yet nothing has changed...people are people and terrorism is nothing new and Hitchcock represented that really well. What made it even better though was his attempt to show the perspective of the perpetrator. Underrated early movie I say.