Hitchcock's Greatest Unsung Villain

Spoilers for "Saboteur" and "VERTIGO"

James Mason is probably the most famous spymaster in the Hitchcock canon. His urbane and villainous spymaster Philip Vandamm in "North by Northwest" is Cary Grant's near-match in handsome, smooth-voiced elegance,and Mason came with a certain menace that mattered.

But the villain of "Saboteur," Otto Kruger as Nazi-lovin' American magnate Charles Tobin, is one helluva great villain himself. He's a dry run for Vandamm in some ways, but significantly different in others: a homemade, All-American capitalistic fascist. Vandamm seemed to be a foreign visitor.

Hitchcock didn't want Otto Kruger for this role - indeed, Hitchcock couldn't get ANYBODY he wanted for the three leads -- he ended up with Bob Cummings instead of Henry Fonda or Gary Cooper, Priscilla Lane instead of Barbara Stanwyck.

For the villain, Hitchcock wanted actor Harry Carey, an All-American star of Weseterns and comedies (he's the sympathetic Vice President presiding over James Stewart's fillibuster in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington") but MRS. Carey wouldn't let her husband play pro-Nazi slime.

Otto Kruger, Hitchocck felt, looked "too sinister" for the part, too cliche. Perhaps -- but Kruger was sinister in a very specific, very interesting way.

Kruger SMILES a lot as Tobin, and when he smiles, his huge teeth give his skinny, sunken face the effect of a skull with skin on it. He's Mrs. Bates in the fruit cellar, 18 years early!

Tobin is also beautifully well-written. He's a very rich man, and so he comes to see Bob Cummings' Barry Kane as a total inferior -- the American working man, a lower class. Tobin always speaks to Kane with great politeness, but his contempt is always there, too.

It all comes together in that great, totally Hitchcockian scene, in which Tobin and Kane have a "verbal showdown" in the library of the New York mansion.

Hitchcock films Tobin at a heavy, formal distance,with an American eagle flag overhead and, as I recall, lamps on all sides of him. Barry Kane looks at his foe, and is closer, a warmer human presence.

Here's the trick: Tobin has all the better lines. Better written, more articulate, more "logical." Tobin hates "the moron masses" of America (that phrase, "moron masses" -- was HITCHCOCK'S phrase, privately used with friends). And as a simple business consideration, Tobin believes that the totalitarian nations run better, more profitable countries. Tobin is a rich man who looks to get richer. And he wants power -- he's rather like John Huston's Noah Cross in "Chinatown." Being rich ISN'T enough.

Barry Kane is just an "Average Joe" and he tells Tobin that Americans will fight the Nazis "til the cows come home." This prosaic dialogue MATTERED in 1942, because the audience for "Saboteur" was a lot of Average Joes, and Average Janes, and they knew that Barry Kane stood up for their values and their decency.

Charles Tobin, with his heavy-lidded reptilian eyes and skull-faced grin, is so arrogant and oily you want to reach into the screen and kill him with your bare hands...

...but Hitchcock never accounts for him at film's end. Like the more famous "Hitchcock villain who gets away" (Gavin Elster in "Vertigo"), Charles Tobin seems to just "disappear" from the movie. It is the rodentoid sub-villain, Fry (Norman Lloyd) who falls off the Statue of Liberty.

Most curious.

Tobin himself tells Barry Kane that he's prepared to run and hide with his money in the Caribbean if the Americans beat the Nazis. Ever pragmatic, he sees his backing of the Nazis, if wrong, simply as a business deal gone bad, a bet lost.

I wonder if Hitchcock considered a sequel to "Saboteur," with Kane chasing Tobin into the Carribean?

In any event, Otto Kruger's Charles Tobin is a great, well-written, well-acted villain with two typical Hitchcockian traits: he LOOKS interesting, and he's got some of the best lines in the movie.