Abstract
Seventeen-year old Desmond Tester blushed every time director Alfred Hitchcock jokingly misstated his surname on the set of Sabotage (1936; US title The Woman Alone [1937]) as “testicle.”1 Such levity lightened a grim subject, as young Tester played a boy caught in the explosive hi-jinks of international intrigue. But the director’s teasing also hints at the film’s greater political issue. In portraying the 12-year-old Stevie,2 Tester embodied the figurative crown jewels of Great Britain—the values and vitality of Her Royal Majesty’s youth entering manhood—at risk from foreign terrorists. Produced in the midst of the Great Depression, Sabotage evokes the social and political unrest in Great Britain and visualizes the fears of anarchism, communism, fascism, and other subversive ideologies on film. Stevie’s death inaugurates a breakdown of order, and the picture’s ambiguous conclusion connotes a loss of national prestige and identity in an uncertain world.
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© 2014 Debbie Olson
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Lee, P.W. (2014). No Laughing Matter: Imperiling Kids and Country in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936). In: Olson, D. (eds) Children in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472816_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472816_5
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