Lifeboat

Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) is one of the great directors "gimmick" films:  the movie's action is confined to a thirty-foot long lifeboat tossed on the seas of the North Atlantic.  The challenge posed by the picture is whether a movie can be made in these straitened circumstances that is nonetheless "cinematic" -- a problem that Hitchcock seems to solve, more or less, effortlessly. (Rear Window and Rope are similarly limited in their setting.) In his iconic films made in the Fifties, Hitchcock was famously indifferent to special effects -- in fact, his rear projection mise-en-scene is generally so awful that it imparts a dream-like surrealistic ambience to films like Vertigo.  But in the forties, Hitchcock seems to have been more concerned with achieving realistic effects and the camerawork and staging of the storm scenes in Lifeboat is craftsmanslike and fairly effective -- the actors, pronouncing their didactic and preachy speeches (courtesy of John Steinbeck) do, in fact, seem to be trapped on a small vessel in the middle of an empty and menacing sea, although the setting (and situation) always remains more or less theoretical and abstract.  A jaded socialite (played by Tallulah Bankhead -- she's like a less campy version of the middle-aged Joan Crawford) finds herself alone on a lifeboat floating in a field of debris remaining after a German U-Boat has torpedoed the transatlantic liner on which she ws traveling.  Bankhead looks annoyed as if she's waiting for a train that has been delayed.  One by one, the other characters are fished out of the drink and assembled on board -- there is a Thurston Howell the 3rd millionaire, a couple of tough merchant marine sailors, a nurse (convenient for the improvised pen-knife amputation required by gangrene afflicting one of the seamen) and an African-American porter who seems surprised when the white folks on the boat grant him a vote during their various contentious debates. (A young mother whose baby has died imparts a jarring note of tragedy to the proceedings and so Hitchcock dispenses rapidly with her -- she jumps overboard in the middle of the night.) Suspense is supplied by a German sailor, who climbs aboard, and, then, commandeers the lifeboat.  The German is a suitably sinister exemplar of the Master Race -- he sings Schubert Lieder as he tirelessly rows the boat toward his colleagues in a supply ship located somewhere just over the horizon, conversing all the while in epigrams pronounced in perfectly accented, Oxford-inflected English.  In many respects, the movie is a nasty piece of propaganda -- the film climaxes with the passengers mobbing the German and beating him to death, a bit of savagery that the audience is meant to applaud.  (Although Hitchcock is characteristically evasive about the morality of this mob-inflicted sea-lynching -- he stages the death of the German as an ugly example of mob violence.)  The point of the film seems to be that in war time, the niceties of international law don't matter and that virtuous and brave people should take the law into their own hands, a dubious point because one that could be made with equal force in Nazi propaganda of the same general tenor.  The film's function is to support the war-effort and it is single-minded in this endeavor.  There's very little of Hitchcock's perverse humor on display and the film lacks the kinky sexual undertones present in most of the filmmaker's work.  Lifeboat is a civilized sort of entertainment -- other than the beating death of the German sailor, none of its effects are as savage as the material warrants.  The man who loses his leg doesn't seem to suffer too much and Hitchcock makes death by thirst and exposure look relatively glamorous -- the special effects of sea and wave are well-designed but we never lose the sense that this is a debate on political and social issues staged for our delectation in a comfortable movie studio in Los Angeles.