Sabotage

Sabotage, released in the United States as The Woman Alone, is a 1936 British espionage thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock starring Sylvia Sidney, Oskar Homolka, and John Loder. It is loosely based on Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent, about a woman who discovers that her husband, a London shopkeeper, is a terrorist agent. Sabotage should not be confused with Hitchcock's film Secret Agent, which was also released in 1936, but which instead is loosely based on two stories in the 1927 collection Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham. It also should not be confused with Hitchcock's unrelated 1942 American film Saboteur. In 2017, a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics for Time Out magazine ranked the film 44th best British film ever. In 2021, The Daily Telegraph ranked the film at No. 3 on its list of "The 100 best British films of all time". Plot In London, sand is put into the bearings of an electrical generator, causing a power blackout. At a cinema owned by Karl Verloc (Oscar Homolka), people demand their money back. Verloc enters through a back entrance to the living quarters above. He washes sand from his hands, but when his wife (Sylvia Sidney) comes for him, he pretends to have been asleep. He instructs her to refund the money, saying he has "some money coming in" anyway. As the money is about to be disbursed to the customers downstairs, the lights go back on.