Hitchcock was the only director I can think of that remade his own work.

A wrongly accused man on a cross-country run ends up handcuffed to a hot blonde who’s convinced he’s guilty but ends up falling in love with him in the end. On this adventure, he walks right into the enemy’s home and has to escape, and at one point, he has to improvise a speech to a roomful of people to stall for time. Sound familiar?

It should if you’ve seen The 39 Steps, which Hitch filmed in England before being imported to Hollywood by Selznick.

While Saboteur gets major cool points for having Dorothy Parker on its writing team, it isn’t an improvement on the earlier British version. For starters, it’s much more serious. It was released during WWII, so it explores wartime themes – patriotism, spies, what makes a good citizen, the rise of fascism, blah blah blah.

I have no problem with Hitchcock’s work during WWII. He was a British citizen living in America, so he obviously had a vested interest in the success of the Allies. In the two years after Saboteur, Hitch directed Lifeboat, which was basically the story of the war in microcosm, and two French propaganda shorts. Some of his other films such as Notorious and Foreign Correspondent have elements of war themes as well.

What is amazing about this film however is the final scene atop the Statue of Liberty. It makes for a very powerful conclusion to a solid film. (And calls to mind the end of North by Northwest, arguably another version of the same story.)

However, if you ask me, Hitchcock is at his best when he isn’t taking himself quite so seriously. The 39 Steps has almost everything Saboteur has, and something saboteur doesn’t – humor.