Desmond Tester’s natural playing gives Sabotage a younger brother worth worrying about. We rate him for helping to make Hitchcock’s threatened family feel real, a quiet contribution to a thriller whose suspense depends on our caring.
Fi1m perspective
The useful thing about Desmond Tester in Sabotage (1936) is how readily we accept Stevie as Mrs Verloc’s younger brother. Sylvia Sidney supplies much of the family’s emotional weight, but Tester’s guileless playing makes him seem at home in that relationship. We were anxious for Stevie because he felt like someone with a sister who mattered to him. The thriller gives us a reason to care about the boy before asking us to fear for him.
The British child roles were not all variations on Stevie. Carol Reed’s Midshipman Easy (1935) cast him as Gossett, while Tudor Rose (1936) gave him Edward VI. Robert Stevenson’s Non-Stop New York (1937) used him as a musical prodigy, and he returned to Reed for The Stars Look Down (1940), playing Hughie Fenwick. That is a fair amount of different work to put behind one young face. It is worth remembering those parts when Sabotage becomes the only film we associate with him.
Hitchcock gets a particular benefit from Tester’s natural playing: it makes the surrounding suspense harder to dismiss as a clever exercise. Our reservations about Sabotage lie elsewhere, in plotting that can be obscure and comedy that interrupts the fear at the wrong moment. Tester cannot make those interruptions less awkward. His work with Sidney does, however, keep the domestic scenes important; they are where the film establishes why its threats should trouble us.
In Australia, the work changed: he hosted children’s television and later produced and directed it. His manner with that audience was not condescending, a quality worth having in a field where adults can become conspicuously pleased with themselves. Later screen appearances were in smaller, supporting parts. Start with Sabotage, provided a cruel thriller is what the evening calls for.
Biography
Desmond Tester was an English and Australian actor. Born in London on 17 February 1919, he began his career on the stage as a child and appeared in British films from the mid-1930s.
His early screen roles included parts in Midshipman Easy (1935), Tudor Rose (1936), The Drum (1938) and The Stars Look Down (1940). He is credited as Stevie in Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936). After the Second World War he moved to Australia, where he worked in radio, theatre and television. He spent fifteen years at Channel Nine, including as host of children's programmes, and later joined Reg Grundy Productions.
Tester revived his stage career in 1974 and appeared in occasional film roles such as Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974) and The Wild Duck (1983). He died in Sydney on 31 December 2002.
