Of the 53 feature films directed by Alfred Hitchcock over his remarkable half-century career (1926-1976), just over half were adapted from novels (25) or short stories (2). Their authors ranged from paperback thriller writers like Robert Bloch (Psycho) and Vincent Canning (The Rainbird Pattern, filmed as Family Plot) – through more distinguished suspense and adventure novelists like Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train) and John Buchan (The 39 Steps) – to A-list authors like Leon Uris (Topaz) and W. Somerset Maugham (Ashenden: or the British Agent, the source for Hitch’s Secret Agent).
Of all the writers whose novels, stories and plays became grist for Hitchcock’s mill, none is more highly regarded than Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). His standing as one of the great writers in the English language is all the more remarkable given that he was Polish-born and did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties. Conrad is best known for his works set at sea and in exotic locales (inspired by his 19-year career in the merchant marines of France and Britain), such as The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. His 1907 novel The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, set entirely in and around London in 1886, received high praise on its release – The Times Literary Supplement said that it “increases Conrad’s reputation, already of the highest” – but continues to be less well known.
Hitchcock released two films in 1936. The first was the Maugham adaptation, Secret Agent. Inconveniently, the second was to be based on Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and couldn’t simply adopt the source novel’s name; hence the new title of Sabotage. (Of course, Hitchcock seems to have liked one-word titles: Champagne, Downhill, Blackmail and Murder! had already been released, and twelve more such titles were to follow Sabotage.)
Charles Bennett, who had scripted Hitchcock’s last two films (The 39 Steps and Secret Agent), officially penned the screenplay for Sabotage; but, as usual for a Hitchcock film, many chefs contributed to the recipe: Ian Hay and Helen Simpson punched up the dialogue, and Ted Emmett provided “additional dialogue”; Hitch’s wife Alma Reville did “continuity” (including script touchups) as usual; and Hitch himself typically had a hand in the final written product: of Sabotage, he told François Truffaut that he “was forced to rewrite the dialogue during the shooting” to accommodate a casting change.
In line with his usual practice, Hitchcock, Mrs. Hitchcock and Bennett worked together on how to take the words of Conrad’s novel and transform them into a motion picture experience. “What I do,” Hitchcock told Truffaut, “is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock and screenwriter Charles Bennett began transforming Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent into the motion picture Sabotage by simplifying it. The book’s three central characters – the ones essential to its core events – were carried over into the film: Mr. Verloc, the saboteur; his wife, whose given name is never heard in the movie; and her young brother, Stevie. (Stevie’s “differentness” in the novel – he is perhaps autistic – is dispensed with in the film as unimportant: he’s just an innocent, cheerful kid.) The “Professor”, who supplies bombs to anarchists, changes from the frightening, bitter character created by Conrad into a vehicle for some of Hitchcock’s trademark irony and dark humour.
Mr. Verloc’s rather complicated back story in the novel – he is the secret agent of an unspecified foreign state, infiltrating a cell of London anarchists with the goal of raising public indignation against them, but also acting as an unofficial police informer – is also simplified: he just is a member of an anarchist cell, and committing acts of sabotage at the direction of a mysterious “higher up”.
Most importantly, Conrad’s verbal structure was turned into a visual experience. There are three essential events in The Secret Agent, each leading to the next (don’t worry: no spoilers here!); but, if you will believe it, the first and third take place “offstage” in the novel, and are just read about in a newspaper by another character. Hitchcock turns the first of these into one of his classic suspense set pieces; and the third is changed altogether into a cinematic finale that provides an exciting finish and a satisfying winding-up of narrative threads (replacing the novel’s depressing and somewhat anticlimactic conclusion). As for the middle one of those three “events”, involving Mr. and Mrs. Verloc: where Conrad compellingly describes the inner thoughts of the spouses, Hitchcock shows us their thoughts in a brilliant, mostly silent suspense sequence which demonstrates his mastery of montage.
The story has been harmlessly moved forward from the 1880s to the 1930s; and Hitchcock gets some fun out of a change of setting. Where Conrad’s Verloc owns a shady shop, selling “French postcards” and the like, the Verloc of Sabotage runs a small cinema (next door to a greengrocer’s, like Hitchcock’s father’s). The movies being screened there touch on the events of the film, particularly the Disney cartoon which is playing in a key scene. (Hitchcock said that Walt Disney had the right kind of actors: if he didn’t like their performances, he could rub them out.)