Sabotage is a prescient thriller that puts London on bomb alert well before the real siege of WWII occurred. It's a sad little film seemingly out of Hitchcock's subconscious: it does away with the law (guilt and innocence are taken by quite another measure), the cruel father, and childhood itself. The settings include a greengrocer's whose friendly lettuce salesman is a mole for Scotland Yard (Hitch's father was a greengrocer); a movie theater where the behind-the-screen “happy family” of Sylvia Sidney and Oscar Homolka is more brutal than what is on screen; and ye olde pet shoppe that is anything but. In marvelously choreographed street scenes the constant sideshow becomes a key element in the story, as a little boy is sent to Piccadilly Circus with a film, a bomb, and his youthful curiosity. There is nothing wrong with the film's being mainly important for style. There's so much of it.