This is second-tier Hitchcock, but it’s still a fast-paced paranoia fest with remarkable things in it. It might be the closest that Hitchcock gets to political commentary.
The story is the one about the innocent man accused of a crime and now he’s on the run and out to find who set him up. You know the drill. Hitchcock’s done that one a few times, but this is the one that starts with an explosion at an airplane factory that’s cranking out fighter jets for the US war effort. When all-around regular slice of white bread Robert Cummings rushes to help fight the fire like the swell guy that he is, he winds up implicated in intentionally causing it.
Yep, we’re talkin’ sabotage. Treason. The worst crime you can commit in America after Pearl Harbor. When wanted man Cummings hooks up with Priscilla Lane, who at first aims to turn him over to the law, she flat-out says that she’d be willing to hear him out if he was accused of something silly like theft or murder. But for turning against the country, no way, Jose. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire and all that jazz. It’s the sensitive issue of the time and it requires swift justice. Nobody even wants to hear the accused’s defense.
The meat of the whole eccentric second act is a series of ruminations on the idea of “innocent until proven guilty”. On his journey to clear his name , Cummings is arrested, but he escapes, still sporting a pesky set of handcuffs that give away his fugitive status to everyone he meets. The press and the police want his head on a spike, but the individual people whom he encounters while he’s on the down-low have different ideas.
There’s the bored cross-country truck driver who quietly lends Cummings a quick helping hand simply because it’s something to do.
There’s the blind hermit in a remote country house who takes in Cummings because he likes to think that he can tell a decent person simply by listening to them. Also, he’s sympathetic to strays. (From Bride of Frankenstein to The Brute Man to On Dangerous Ground, blind people in the movies are often non-judgmental friends to the troubled and this film offers one of the more saccharine uses of the cliche .)
The highlight of this theme is when Cummings and Lane stow away with a travelling carnival and are found by a small group of sideshow freaks, fellow outsiders, who proceed to argue over what to do with them (a scene mostly written by Dorothy Parker, according to Marion Meade’s Parker biography). Each one represents a different voice in the usual public debate. The bickering Siamese twins dependably take the opposite view of the other on everything. The mouthy dwarf is a kind of quasi-fascist who wants to turn them in and doesn’t even think that there should be a conversation about it. The “human skeleton” is all for giving the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, the bearded lady is undecided and thus the one who gets the tie-breaker vote (interestingly, she casts her vote based on her misreading of the relationship between Cummings and Lane, which is still frosty at that point in the film, but our bearded lady thinks that they’re lovers).
By the third act, when Cummings and Lane’s paths lead to New York City where the saboteur cabal are about to do their next job, the film clicks into a more conventional action thriller, albeit a spectacularly well-made one.
The flaws here are a few ridiculous coincidences and the lack of any heft to Priscilla Lane’s character. She’s top-billed in the credits, but is still pretty much relegated to reacting to what’s happening and when she has a change of heart, it’s not because it makes any sense, but because that’s what the plot needs to happen before it can move on.
The juiciest role, by far, belongs to Otto Kruger as the charming villain. The scene in which Robert Cummings first meets him is primo Hitchcock discomfort. The only clue that Cummings has about the identity of the man who set him up leads him to Kruger’s opulent country home. Kruger agrees to meet with this road-weary young man and is all smiles the whole time, denying everything in pleasant fashion. He even trusts Cummings to watch over his toddler granddaughter for a moment when he has to step away to make a phone call. During that absence, Cummings does a little snooping, assisted by the kid messing with the household mail, and learns that Kruger is a liar.
When Kruger returns, he knows full-well that Cummings has him figured out, but he’s still the same charmer. He doesn’t become a froth-mouthed villain all of a sudden. He carries on almost like nothing had ever happened. He’s still all smiles.
And that toddler is still a pawn on the chess board, to be used by both sides.
It’s a richly creepy scene.