Like The 39 Steps, Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent is here updated to the 1930s, enabling the film to tap likewise into contemporary anxieties, notably when a terrorist bomb explosion destroys a bus, the heroine’s teenage brother, and the cute puppy he was making friends with. Hitchcock would always, thereafter, say it was a mistake to let the bomb go off, but the plot of both novel and film depend upon it, and it gives the work a genuinely dark quality which appealed to critics who were not otherwise particular fans of Hitchcock such as Graham Greene, then film critic of The Spectator. Sabotage also contains a celebrated tour de force of Hitchcockian editing: the boldly unpunished stabbing by the heroine (Sylvia Sidney from Hollywood) of her oppressive husband.

Sabotage will be shown first in a double bill with Young and Innocent.
The two films can be seen for the price of one regular ticket.