The Lodger was the best film made in England up to the end of last year. It had power, point, and an entirely new angle, that, is to say, in' an Engl… - C. A. Lejeune

But I believe and I stick to it that there is a code in this sort of free-handed slaughter, and Hitchcock has gone outside the code in Sabotage. As a detective fan and an Inveterate reader of thrillers I suggest that this is the sort of thing that should get a fellow blackballed from the Crime Club. Discreet directors don't kill schoolboys and dogs in omnibuses. Believe me, it isn't done..

Hitchcock had an artificial story and an artificial society to deal with here, but his treatment of them is not that of a director who matches artificiality of substance with artificiality of form, but of a man who has in himself so little reaction to flesh-and-blood truth that he is almost incapable of knowing the living from the dead. Hitchcock's blindness to the things that people do in expression of their real emotions is not a mannerism but a fact. In his work he thinks, and cannot feel. No director in England, and very few in America, can tell a screen story as cleverly as he—can narrate so subtly and simply to the eye, without a word written, using all the tricks of the camera and all the loquacity of silent things to carry his audience from point to point in perfect understanding and ease. But he will have to learn to know men as well as he knows the camera or, not knowing men, to turn his talents from the intimate to the impersonal kinema before he can become one of the great directors of the screen.

I have spent the afternoon arguing with my old friend Alfred Hitchcock. Because we are old friends it was a long argument. And we did not, oddly enough, argue about his new picture, which I review, with some asperity, below. I did not like Sabotage, and Hitch," who never tries to persuade the Press against their conscience, didn't attempt to suggest that I should like it. But it is a long-standing custom between us that we should meet and eat and talk after every Hitchcock first-night.