“Lifeboat,” the new Alfred Hitchcock movie, is a kind of ersatz film that both irritates and holds you effortlessly to its exposition for more than two hours, though it hardly ever moves outside the radius of a rather large-sized lifeboat. The film enacts the story of ten people in this boat, somewhere off Bermuda, nine of whom are survivors from an American freighter sunk by a U-boat, and the tenth is a Nazi from the submarine which the freighter sank just before going down. The film’s design is to show how this Nazi (beautifully played by Walter Slezak), by taking advantage of the others’ humanity, sense of fair play, divided aims and general physical and mental debility, gains control of their boat, their minds and bodies and stabs them all in the back. This intended parallel to the way the Nazis came into power leaves a number of points in doubt, proves itself by some rather flat-footed dénouements and is never essentially convincing. It is an intellectual preconception that never seems to come out of the natures of the people involved, but happens like a shotgun wedding. This inevitability is no doubt just what the authors wanted, but it is their inevitability, not the film’s or its people’s; one of its failures is that you get no idea of what passes in men’s minds and in their relationships during an event that is one of the most strikingly odd, awesome and important occasions of this time. You will come out of this movie knowing no more of what it is like in a lifeboat with a few people in mid-ocean than you did when you went in.
Hitchcock and the two authors (John Steinbeck wrote the original and Jo Swerling did the screen adaptation) have performed a major-league trick of entertainment and concision in keeping you comfortably and completely interested in their story, though it is solid talk in rather close quarters. They have jolted the voyage from one bewildering event to another (each event made compulsively ironical), left out all transitions or passive moments, achieved a certain realism on a theatrical level and rightly concentrated on the arresting looks of the cast. It is a strange voyage: no one is silent or discomforted, or hungry, or cold, or afraid, nor are you supposed to feel much of that. The events pile up ineffectually one on the other; they give you no intimation of the characters’ personalities; there is a great deal of old scenario baggage in the boat, yet the picture never lets go of you.
The cast is the most invigorating one to look at—person for person—that I have seen in years, and it is a capable one directed by a man who seldom leaves any bad acting on the line. Personally, I could only marvel at William Bendix’s capacity for following the director’s orders to the letter (his drunk scene is the best thing in the picture), have nothing but praise for Hull, whose jovial capitalist is beyond my analysis, like Hume Cronyn best, Bankhead least, and feel that Mary Anderson is a twin of Teresa Wright’s and a good one.
But this film contains less of the original Hitchcock quality, before it got caught in the Hollywood assembly line four years ago, than any of the American films Hitchcock has made since. He still exercises a good hand with his players, though the acting here is much broader, more theatrical and showy than anything he made use of before, and his sense of pace still operates: these two talents make the picture as much as the melodrama, the flashy dialogue or the actors themselves. There is no longer the intent or the need on his part to make his material, no matter how romantic it is, seem perfectly real and natural in appearance—the quality that made his English films light but rewarding experiences of the manners, classes of people, architecture and prejudices of our time.
He indicates this naturalism in the very opening scene of “Lifeboat”—but never again after that—when he realizes the whole emotional effect of the freighter’s sinking by concentrating solely on the movement of the smokestack as it passes into and out of sight under the water. Then he makes a characteristic, sardonic visual comment on the fact by passing some of the freighter’s wreckage in the water before your eyes: a crate of oranges, a copy of The New Yorker, some currency, a deck of cards slowly fanning out, and a Nazi’s dead body. It is the satirically edged naturalism of an intelligent, highly inquisitive creative talent from which emotion is largely lacking, which uses nothing but the means of the cinema to tell its story and has an exact eye and ear with which to do it. Everything else in this movie is theatrical or posed—when a person or group sits in the boat you feel instinctively that they were arranged there a moment before and aren’t going to do anything that isn’t in the script. The lifeboat gives less the illusion of a lifeboat, for all its pitching and tossing, than of an expansive, well protected stage, and the actors, in spite of their caked mouths and peeled, sunburned skin, seem the best fed, most rested and secure actors in the war movies. It is this lack of belief in or concern for the actual event in the picture that makes you most distrustful of what it tells you.
Hitchcock’s working vocabulary—before the death-dealing pressure in Hollywood hit him—was one of the most natural and complete that I know of in contemporary movie-making; but that vocabulary dwindles more and more as the number of his films increases. There is no indication in “Lifeboat” of his talent for getting the most startling effects with sound, nor of his use of screen silence to build the highest tension into a moment. But sometimes here, as in the playing of Hume Cronyn, he realizes that peculiar Hitchcock manner with the player, in which the actor seems to be concentrating mentally on what he is about to do but never quite does it; so that his pantomime takes on a kind of sinister spontaneity. At one point where Alice (Mary Anderson) is telling Mrs. Porter (Tallulah Bankhead) of her fear of becoming an adulteress, the crossed feet, which belong to the man sitting above her, and which stick into the top of the scene, suddenly fall apart, making one of those typical symbolic allusions that were always possible in Hitchcock’s early films. At another point, in the siesta of the young lovers, the man repeats an action that has occurred before—undoing the ribbon around the girl’s hair—and she asks, perplexed and somewhat irritated, “Stanley, why must you do that?” It is the highly surprising and spontaneous statement that was also more likely than not in the early films.
I hope that “Lifeboat” is only an aberration and not the solidifying of a destructive trend in Hitchcock’s work, and also, if it is a result of pressure, which seems likely, someone will have the sense to remove same.
January 24, 1944