it "rather exciting for the most part. It's a lively, minor Alfred Hitchcock picture." Writing for The Spectator, Graham Greene gave the film a good review, pronouncing that "in Sabotage for the first time [Hitchcock] has really 'come off'". Greene identified the children's matinée scene as an "ingenious and pathetic twist stamped as Mr Hitchcock's own", and he praised the melodrama present in the screenplay writing, the dialogue, and the acting cast generally. Greene's only complaint was in relation to the acting of the "unconvincing" detective (Loder) and the "invincibl[y] distaste[ful]" prep school student (Tester). Sabotage garnered 92% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 7.4/10. Adaptation Bennett liberally adapted Joseph Conrad's novel, transforming the highly political Tsarist-era agents provocateurs into foreign agents without any obvious political leanings. Verloc's shop is transformed into a cinema, with the films being shown echoing the story, and the policeman investigating the case is an undercover officer posing as a greengrocer. Since the film was produced in the years immediately preceding World War II, the unnamed hostile power behind the bombings has been assumed by many viewers to be Nazi Germany. However, the film does not specify this, and indeed, Verloc's first name has been changed, presumably because his name in the novel, Adolf, had too many connotations by the time the film was made. Stevie, Mrs. Verloc's brother, is portrayed as an ordinary schoolboy, with few of the visionary attributes of his literary counterpart. Stevie's death is a climactic moment in the plot, providing insight into Hitchcock's views about how the innocent suffer through random acts of violence. When a critic condemned Stevie's death as brutal and unnecessary, Hitchcock said that he regretted including it in the film, not because of the brutality, however, but because it violated his method of suspense, whereby tension eventually had to be relieved. Yet, Hitchcock remained faithful to the novel in having the bomb go off, and it also allowed him to justify in the movie that the boy's sister would eventually kill her husband, who was responsible for the boy's death, and got away with it. Allusions The fact that many scenes of the film were set in a cinema allowed Hitchcock to include references to contemporary films and storylines. Perhaps the most famous of these is the final film sequence, an excerpt from a Walt Disney Silly Symphony Who Killed Cock Robin? (1935).