LIFEBOAT (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944)

In the mid-Atlantic during the Second World War a German submarine has torpedoed an England-bound freighter; Lifeboat, from a story that the director, Alfred Hitchcock, elicited from John Steinbeck, opens, however, with the sinking of the torpedoed U-boat. The opening shot is remarkable, with the vertical action of the U-boat’s disappearance into the ocean, which is recorded by a static camera, giving way to a screen-rightward lateral movement that surveys articles from the sunk ships. The tracking comes to a halt on the face-down corpse of a German sailor, which the waters below it cause to rock. Into a single lifeboat nine survivors come, the last of whom, it turns out, had been the captain of the sunk U-boat. Willy, secretly armed with water, food tablets and energy pills, while everyone else is beset with hunger and thirst, takes over, rowing the Americans and Brits to a German supply ship. Connie Porter, an American newsperson, quips, “Well, some of my best friends are in concentration camps.”
     How good the one-set, studio-bound film is has been the subject of debate (James Agee found it “inadequate”); absolutely, though, the film has been misunderstood, with some believing that the former liner steward, the Christian Joe, and the Nazi Willy constitute moral polarities between which the others need to choose. This is a ridiculous interpretation. Joe’s failure to hold back a heretofore gentle British nurse from the mob onboard that attacks and kills Willy suggests the inadequacy of Christian righteousness to prevail against German discipline and determination and the self-righteousness of American democracy. It suggests that war is a beast that obliterates national and political differences; it creates a cauldron of vicious reactivity. American virtue is exposed as hypocritical. Early on, there’s a vote on what should be Willy’s fate; Joe’s participation is solicited. Joe, who is black, is pointedly amused. “Do I get a vote, too?” he asks before absenting: “I guess I’d rather stay out of this.”
     Steinbeck’s schematic social allegory is as bothersome as one chooses to have it; but Hitchcock is adept at making the lifeboat a symbol of hope and the perpetually active ocean waves—this is truly a film capable of making one feel nauseous—a symbol of danger and hopelessness.
     On a newspaper page we see an advertisement for weight reduction that pictures Hitchcock tubbily “before” and dreamily “after”: not just the usual joke of his cameo appearance in his films, but a thematic statement suggesting the essential nature to which each inhabitant of the lifeboat is reduced. Porter, whose background was socioeconomically disadvantaged, has risen up the celebrity ranks. In the course of the film, however, she loses all her key possessions: camera, typewriter, mink coat, diamond bracelet, etc.
     The acting in this film is variable, but Tallulah Bankhead (best actress, New York Film Critics Circle) is magnificent as Connie Porter. Haunting: her throaty burst of staccato laughter when her bracelet, being used to bait a fish, is lost to the deep. Porter transcends the miserable moment with a serene contemplation of it. This is what she may be thinking: “How humorous the gods can be!”
     Her fate in particular seems to symbolize the degree of self-sacrifice that’s necessary to defeat the Axis powers.