Title: Saboteur
Year: 1941
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker (yes, theDorothy Parker)
Stars: Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane, Otto Kruger, Norman Lloyd

The Story: A nazi saboteur torches a defense plant, but the blame falls on an innocent young man, who takes off on a cross-country hunt for the real Nazi that takes him from a ghost town to Hoover Dam to the Statue of Liberty.

Why It’s Great: This film is the middle step in a three-decade long thematic trilogy, starting with The 39 Steps in 1935 and concluding with North By Northwest in 1959. All three follow an innocent man, accused of treason, who has to traipse across a series of national landmarks in order to clear his name. This isn’t an all-time classic like the other two, but it’s the only one made during an actual war, giving it a little more weight. Cummings spends the first half of the movie trying to convince everyone he’s innocent, then when he realizes what they want to do, he starts trying to convince the bad guys that he’s guilty, so that he can unravel the conspiracy from the inside. It’s a great example of raising the stakes– Reacting to circumstances is fine for getting a hero through the first half, but eventually you have to figure out a way to flip things around so that the hero takes control of the action.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…