This paper traces a number of influences on Alfred Hitchcock’s style in Sabotage and argues that the movie contains elements from German Expressionism, Soviet Expressive Realism and classical Hollywood style.
The films Alfred Hitchcock made during his British period show considerable experimentation with the language of film, drawing on a number of traditions for effect and style. Sabotage (1936) shows a number of such influences, including classical Hollywood style, German Expressionism, and Soviet Expressive Realism. Hitchcock embodied the two major stylistic threads of filmmaking, the montage of the Soviet theorists such as Pudovkin and Eisenstein and the fluid camera of F. W. Murnau, and these traditions as well are evident in this film.
The Hollywood influence is seen in the way the characters are presented and treated, and this is also apparent in the differences between the film and its source material in the novel The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. The character of the wife is essentially prettified in the film version, made a much more …