So there’s this Alfred Hitchcock movie where a normal guy gets mixed up in international intrigue due to a misunderstanding; accused of a crime he didn’t commit, he travels across the country, on the lam from the authorities and being pursued by the real spies; he meets up with a beautiful woman who travels with him, but they never really trust each other; and after a series of exciting incidents, they end up at a major American monument, where someone ends up dangling by their fingertips while the hero tries to pull them up.

Okay, wait, weird thing, there’s two of those movies. North by Northwest is obviously the more famous (and, honestly, better) one; but Saboteur is hitting the same beats 17 years earlier.

Which, if you do the math, means that this was released in 1942, and it’s extremely a WW2 home front movie — to the point where I wondered if it was actually done as an explicitly government-requested thing (but indicators point to no — in fact, the censorship board didn’t like one of the scenes, though it was kept in).

Most of this movie is taken up by a series of random incidents, with real “this, then this, then this” plotting — like, at one point, he ends up at a blind man’s cabin, and then later he’s on a train with circus performers. These don’t feel like they’re always necessary scenes from a pure plotting perspective, but they do set up the fundamental contrast in the movie: That the “little people” are kind and doing the right thing, whereas the rich and powerful are traitorous slime, hiding their venality behind a facade of sophistication and wealth.

(Toward which end, the main villain is maybe my favorite character in this movie, because he is a charming guy. Not even in a slimy way, he just seems really cool. He loves his family, he’s got a good sense of deadpan humor, he smiles a lot, he seems smart… but also he’s selling out America to the Nazis and trying to get our protagonist killed for it. So, y’know, a couple of flaws.)

There’s a reason that you’re more likely to have seen North by Northwest than this — it’s the better movie. It’s got better writing, it has more memorable scenes, it’s got more charismatic stars in it, and it establishes a tense mood more effectively. But not being as good as that stone-cold classic still leaves a lot of room for a movie to be good, and this one is.