Joseph Conrad

 "Sabotage," released in the United States as "The Woman Alone," is a 1936 British espionage thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock starring Sylvia Sidney, Oskar Homolka, and John Loder. It is loosely based on Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel "The Secret Agent," about a woman who discovers that her husband, a London shopkeeper, is a terrorist agent.

Hitchcock wanted to cast Robert Donat – with whom he had previously worked in "The 39 Steps" (1935) – as detective Ted Spencer, but was forced to cast another actor (John Loder) owing to Donat's chronic asthma. According to Hitchcock, in his interviews with the French director François Truffaut, Alexander Korda, to whom Donat was under contract, refused to release him. Hitchcock, who was not happy with Loder's casting, later commented, "The actor we got wasn't suitable, and I was forced to rewrite the dialogue during the shooting." Screenwriter Charles Bennett says Sidney was upset when Loder was cast, as she agreed to make the film to work with Donat.

Graham Greene, a well-known film critic in the 1930s as well as a novelist, was well-known for his intense dislike of the films of Hitchcock and also for his no less intense admiration of the novels of Conrad, whose influence on Greene has been often remarked. However, although this Hitchcock film is a very free adaptation of Conrad's novel "The Secret Agent," Greene was, rather surprisingly, full of praise for it and often said it was Hitchcock's best film. Later and more renowned Hitchcock films found Greene once again indifferent, and he emphatically refused to sell the film rights to any of his novels to Hitchcock.

"Sabotage" should not be confused with Hitchcock's film "Secret Agent," which was also released in 1936, but which instead is loosely based on two stories in the 1927 collection "Ashenden: Or the British Agent" by W. Somerset Maugham. It also should not be confused with Hitchcock's unrelated 1942 American film "Saboteur."

Happy Birthday, Joseph Conrad!