Not to be confused with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Sabotage or Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage is a 1936 thriller about terrorists targeting Piccadilly Circus with the unthinkable aim of causing disruption on London transport.

In true Hitchcock fashion, Sabotage wrong-foots the audience from the off, opening as a flirty comedy between an American woman who works at a cinema (Sylvia Sidney) and a cheeky English greengrocer (John Loder) as they squabble during a power cut, before plunging us into darkness with its tragic terror plot. But even in its comedic beginning, the air is thick with intrigue, a frisson familiar to anyone who has walked past the Charing Cross Road Wetherspoons at night. Or at 11am.

Watching Sabotage‘s blackouts and bombings today gives it an eerie quality, as though anticipating the Blitz and terror attacks to hit the city in the years and decades to come. Also in hindsight you notice the xenophobia of characterising the only guy who is not British or American as a terrorist (Oskar Homolka), but that paranoia makes sense in the historical context of Britain between wars, back when a non-English person in London was a cause for suspicion. Dark times indeed.

In self-referential style, Hitchcock makes film and cinema as central to the plot as the capital itself, and hints towards the psychological direction his movies would soon take, using special effects (including a sequence in the aquarium at London Zoo) to project his characters’ distress. The story clips along for a brisk 76 minutes, but the aftershock lingers like the London fog, thanks in no small part to Sidney’s emotional performance as the charming box office clerk caught up in the biggest West End disaster outside of the Spice Girls musical.

While its tonal mix can feel uneven and less satisfying than the director’s later work, Sabotage succeeds as a suspense flick, even if the Beastie Boys can’t stand it.