LIFEBOAT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 274, 22 September 1944, Page 22

LIFEBOAT

| (20th Century-Fox)

‘THE step away from the straight thriller type of film which Alfred Hitchcock took in Shadow of a Doubt becomes a- leap in Lifeboat.

Abandoning wholly the manhunt-mys-tery motif, he gives us here a nautical morality play in which, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, a clear-cut allegory of world chaos and indecision is presented through the medium of a story about a lifeboat load of survivors from a torpedoed ship, For those of the audience who do not possess the necessary keenness of sight and hearing, Lifeboat/may seem nothing more than a realistic melodrama, rather static perhaps and long-drawn out. For those who: do, however, it may well prove the most provocative and discussable film of the war. Lifeboat was directed by Hitchcock from a story specially written for the purpose by John Steinbeck, and the controversial flutter which Steinbeck caused by his treatment of the Germans in The Moon is Down is likely to be mild compared with that caused by his treatment of a similar topic here. The argument is already in full swing in America, where Dorothy Thompson is reported to have said (very foolishly, I think) that she had given Lifeboat ten days to get out of town and was losing her patience because it hadn’t gone. % * % HE film opens with a shot of a torpedoed ship’s funnel disappearing beneath the surface. The people who clamber into the one remaining lifeboat are prototypes drawn from the world we live in; they are symbols of humanity rather than characters in the usual sense, First aboard is Connie Porter (Tallulah Bankhead ), a cynical self-centred woman journalist. She is soon joined by a husky Czech-American sailor ,(John Hodiak), with decidedly Leftist leanings; a millionaire shipowner named Rittenhouse (Henry Hull) whose leanings, naturally, are in the opposite direction; an American Red Cross nurse (Mary Anderson); a good-natured, simple seaman from Brooklyn (William Bendix), whose main interest in life is jitterbug-dancing; a Cockney radio-operator (Hume Cronyn); a Negro steward (Canada Lee); and a distraught mother (Heather Angel) with a drowned baby. These eight. souls at sea have many points of difference, but they have at least one thing in common: they are. all on the same side. It is when a ninth person is pulled dripping over the side that real controversy and "drama enter into the story for‘the newcomer (Walter Slezak) is fairly soon revealed as the captain of the U-boat which torpedoed them and which was itself sunk by a lucky shell from the ship. Thus the urgent question in the lifeboat, as in the world at large, is "What are we to do with these Germans?" The film’s characters answer it in one way at first; subsequently reverse their decision and pitch the Nazi captain overboard; but (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) at the end they are faced with the question again and are still debating it when the curtain goes down. * * e Now these are troubled waters for any film director to sail upon, but in my opinion Alfred Hitchcock very seldom gets out of his depth. The main complaints of the film’s opponents seem to be (a) That Hitchcock and Steinbeck are sympathetic in their treatment of the German; (b) that the Nazis, as symbolized by the U-boat captain, are shown to be far more efficient and far better organised than the democrats, who are literally all at sea until the German takes command, and are almost as helpless after they get rid of him; and (c) that the negro is depicted as servile and that he takes no part in killing the Nazi. There is a good deal that might be said about each of these points, but I think the main answers are clear enough. The U-boat captain is by no stretch of the imagination a "sympathetic" type: he is admittedly not the ordinary nasty Narzee of propaganda and fiction, but he is arrogant, wily, and ruthless, I agree that it may be improbable that any merchant seamen would be quite as ignorant about elementary navigation as they are here presented: at the same time it seems to me quite natural that a U-boat commander would know far more about this sort of thing than they do, and that the qualities of leadership in a crisis would be more highly developed in such a man than in the millionaire who is the self-elected leader of the boat at the start. As for the Negro, I can only say that I found him the most agreeable person in the whole boat. But, as another critic has pointed out, what is really troubling the people who object to the film is not so much the way in which the case against the Nazis is stated as that they would like to see it over-stated. They don’t want intelligent argument; they want exaggeration and super-salesmanship. * * * HETHER Lifeboat is or is not ideologically sound, it is certainly a remarkable achievement. Those who have themselves been torpedoed and have spent days in an open boat may question its authenticity in some respects, and even those who have not had that experience may wonder, for instance, whether even a Nazi superman could row a boat this size by himself. Yet all such questions of realism, all such technical details, resolve themselves satisfactorily when one regards the film, as I am sure it is meant to be regarded, as an allegory and its characters as symbolic. ; The acting all the way is excellent. Three of the castin particular-Tallulah Bankhead, Walter Slezak and William Bendix-give performances of Academyaward calibre. It is on the technical side, however, that the film’s achievement is most remarkable. Hitchcock holds the interest of his audience for nearly two hours with a story which has only one setting (the lifeboat) and only one backcloth (the sea and the horizon). That is something which few "legitimate" plays have ever successfully attempted. Lifeboat manages it because Hitchcock, while never obscuring the main theme, gives full value to all the side-issues of humour, heroism, bickering, romance and passion that occur within the narrow limits of the set; because the backcloth is a constantly changing panorama of cloud, mist, storm and calm; and because the usual

Hollywood tendency to produce incredible changes of heart in characters in these circumstances is heroically resisted. Lifeboat, then, is a thoroughly grownup picture. And although, as it must, it leaves its particular problem still unanswered, its general implication is clear: that, whether Americans, British, Germans or Czechs, we are all in the same boat when the unknown seas of the world’s future have to be faced.