Hitchcock made an earlier picture about the same subject, albeit quite different in plot and very British in tone and setting, called Sabotage (1936).

Saboteur is often seen as a forerunner to Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) with its story of an innocent man on the run from the law and in pursuit of the real criminals, taking him out of his element and across vast stretches of the country. The final Mount Rushmore sequence in the latter movie is closely related to the Statue of Liberty sequence in the earlier one, and may be seen as Hitchcock's chance to correct his "mistake" in Saboteur, i.e., having the villain, not the hero, in danger of falling from a great height. The director always believed dangling the bad guy was a miscalculation that lessened the suspense because the audience didn't care if he fell.

The premise of the wrong man fleeing the law and pursuing the true villain across the country, encountering either hostility or support from various everyday Americans along the way, was also used with great success in the 1960s television series The Fugitive and its 1993 film version.

Hitchcock himself has acknowledged similarities between Saboteur and some of his earlier British work, particularly The 39 Steps (1935), in which Robert Donat goes on the run to prove his innocence and stop a spy ring, with an initially unwilling blonde (Madeleine Carroll) in tow.

The charity ball sequence, with its danger in the midst of gaiety and the audience's awareness that these upstanding society people are in fact fascists, is reminiscent of the big party sequence in the Nazi mansion in the director's later film Notorious (1946). On a broader level, the scene is also much like other Hitchcock sequences in which the hero is trapped in a very public place and unable to convince others of his situation, such as Royal Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and the auction sale in North by Northwest.

The technique used by Hitchcock to depict the fall from the Statue of Liberty (pulling the camera back from the subject, then matting in the background) was also used for similar shots in Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958).

The Radio City Music Hall sequence recalls director Sam Fuller's notion that the only way to make a realistic battle scene would be for the audience to be hit by flying bullets while watching it.

It has been suggested that the hero's name, Barry Kane, was a sly reference to Orson Welles's landmark film Citizen Kane (1941). John Houseman, who had been a close associate of Welles, was also involved in initial planning for Saboteur.

Discussing the influence of certain of his films with Peter Bogdanovich for the book Who the Devil Made It (Knopf, 1997), Hitchcock noted that looking back over movies like Saboteur, Foreign Correspondent (1940), and North by Northwest, he noticed elements from them "taken over by the Bond things" and such films as The Prize (1963), particularly in the staging of pursuit scenes, which Hitchcock often staged atypically. "But what was then the avoidance of a cliché has now become a cliché," he said, pointing to a number of spectacular chases in spy and adventure movies of the 1960s.

In the movie Sydney (aka Hard Eight, 1996), the title character (Philip Baker Hall) asks John (John C. Reilly) to take the steering wheel while he lights his cigarette, as the truck driver does to Robert Cummings in Saboteur.

In the comedy Bachelor Party (1984), there is a shootout in a movie theater timed with the action and dialogue on the screen, a direct reference to the Radio City Music Hall scene.

There is a sequence set on top of the Statue of Liberty in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985).

The splitting of Mussburger's pant leg as he dangles in midair in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) recalls the splitting of the saboteur's sleeve preceding his fall from the Statue of Liberty.

The Wrong Guy (1997) is a spoof on the Hitchcock pattern, in this and other movies, of an innocent man pursued for a crime he did not commit.

The US Navy was not pleased that Hitchcock used footage of the real-life liner Normandie lying in New York Harbor after its destruction by a disastrous fire, because in Saboteur it is implied that the ship's demise was due to sabotage. The shot was removed from the film on its initial release but restored for the 1948 re-release. The ship was actually a French liner considered one of the most beautiful and fastest afloat when it was commissioned in 1935, the year it crossed the Atlantic in a record time of just over four days. Docked in New York when the U.S. entered the war after Pearl Harbor, it was commandeered as a troop ship and caught fire during refitting. Fire engines and fireboats pumped so much water into the ship trying to put out the flames that it capsized, the image that appears in the film. Sabotage was ruled out, although a German man in 1947 claimed he set the fire. The episode became the centerpiece of a spy novel by Justin Scott, Normandie Triangle, aka The Man Who Loved the Normandie (Arbor House, 1981).

Some shots in the Radio City Music Hall shootout sequence were also cut on the film's first run because of objections that they too readily identified the theater, but they were restored for subsequent releases. Ironically, many of Hitchcock's movies premiered in Radio City.

by Rob Nixon