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Alfred Hitchcock occasionally injected episodes of terror into his suspense films - particularly memorable are Psycho and North by Northwest - but they had no relation to terrorism as acnnlly experienced in the past several decades, most notably the September eleventh attack. Only in Sabotage (1936) and The Birds (1963) does terror have a political dimension, and the difference between its manifestations in those two films can now be seen as bearing greater significance than the director could possibly have anticipated.
I
Sabotage, based on Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent, is a curious choice for a tide, since sabotage is not a factor in the film after the first five minutes. The Secret Agent would have been a more appropriate tide but could not be used since it was the tide of Hitchcock's previous release. Although sabotage plays even less of a role in the novel, Hitchcock took extraordinary pains to draw attention to the word. Filling the screen prior to the credits is a dictionary page on which it is defined, and when the credits appear, behind them is the definition enlarged to dominate the screen:
Wilful [sic] destruction of buildings or machinery with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring public uneasiness.
The second part of the definition seems to have been invented for the film, since it is not found in any dictionaries or encyclopedias consulted. It does, however, describe the intention behind the act of sabotage with which the film begins. Verloc, the central character in both the book and film,1 causes a major power blackout in London by putting sand into a generating plant's machinery - yet another invention not corresponding to anything in Conrad's novel.
An even more radical departure from The Secret Agent is the placement at the center of I the film's plot of an attempted deed of genuine terrorism, which is discussed below. Yet even while introducing terror, Hitchcock and screenwriter Charles Bennett entirely omitted Conrad's analysis of terrorists and their tactics. The film's mysterious figure who pays Verloc to "put the fear of death into people" derides the London blackout precisely because it fails to inspire terror, whereas in the novel, Verloc's contact - a Russian embassy official - firmly...