- A black cloud of smoke bleeds across the screen. Someone has sabotaged the airplane factory! Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) rushes to battle the blaze, only to helplessly watch a good friend perish in the flames. Kane knows that a suspicious man named Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd) handed him a sabotaged fire extinguisher, but the police suspect that Kane was the saboteur. With only a name and an address to guide him, Kane must find Fry to thwart any further acts of sabotage and, more urgently, to prevent his own arrest.
- Waiting at that remembered address is not Fry, but a rancher named Tobin (Otto Kruger). Tobin initially seems like a friendly enough family man, but his true colors are revealed once Kane spots a letter that connects him to Fry. Unlike most criminal masterminds, Tobin is happy to involve the police, cynically noting that he is a "prominent citizen, widely respected" while Kane is an "obscure workman wanted for committing an extremely unpopular crime." As a result, Kane soon ends up handcuffed in the back of a police car but, in a well-executed stunt, soon escapes by leaping from a bridge. Fortunately, this route leads him to the door of the blind eccentric, Philip Martin (Vaughan Glaser), and his niece Patricia (Priscilla Lane), who becomes Kane's reluctant companion.
- The remainder of Saboteur follows the amusing adventures of Kane and Patricia as meet a host of interesting characters while tracking saboteurs and evading the police. One of the more oddly memorable sequences involves a late-night encounter with a traveling freak show that doubles as a none-too-subtle microcosm of WWII-era Europe. Another excellent set of scenes takes place at a party hosted by the wealthy Mrs. Sutton (Alma Kruger), who, like Tobin and the meek Mr. Freeman (Alan Baxter), covers her real agenda with a veneer of politeness. After all, who would suspect high society of blowing up battleships? Of course, the best sequence in Saboteur is the climactic Statue of Liberty scene in which the nefarious Fry finally meets his end. It's a fitting conclusion to an fun, underappreciated film of truly monumental ambition.
- I spotted Hitchcock getting a newspaper in New York.
