How Lifeboat Set the Stage for Some of Hitchcock’s Best Thrillers

By Matthew Jackson  |  January 30, 2024 | 10:01am
Movies Features Alfred Hitchcock
How Lifeboat Set the Stage for Some of Hitchcock’s Best Thrillers
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We know Alfred Hitchcock as the ultimate cinematic master of suspense, a man capable of winding up tension up on anything from birds to showers to rotary phones. So maybe it’s no surprise that he could make fishing into something just as suspenseful, but in the context of Lifeboat, it’s both surprising and deeply meaningful, a moment that primed Hitchcock for some of the greatest thrillers of his later career. 

Though it’s still not as beloved as many of his other films, Lifeboat is a master stroke of Hitchcockian attention to detail, and an important forebear to the master’s single-location classics like Rope, Dial M for Murder and, of course, Rear Window. Released 80 years ago this month as the director’s sole film for Twentieth Century Fox, Lifeboat is not a thriller in the classic Hitchcock sense, or even in the way that we might understand survival thrillers in a modern cinematic context. Produced amid the full-bore onslaught of World War II, Hitchcock saw the film as both a striking character drama and as a cautionary tale for the Allied Powers as they worked to defeat Hitler. As he later explained to Francois Truffaut in the latter filmmaker’s classic book of Hitchcock interviews:

“We wanted to show that at that moment there were two world forces confronting each other, the democracies and the Nazis, and while the democracies were completely disorganized, all of the Germans were clearly headed in the same direction,” Hitchcock said. “So here was a statement telling the democracies to put their differences aside temporarily and to gather their forces to concentrate on the common enemy, whose strength was precisely derived from a spirit of unity and of determination.”

To that end, Hitchcock and his Lifeboat writers Jo Swerling and John Steinbeck (who’s credited with the story) devised a classic survival scenario, bringing together a band of disparate people who’ve been shipwrecked in the middle of the Atlantic by a German U-boat attack, then examining how they fare when a wild card, a German U-boat captain (Walter Slezak, masterfully playing the part) is thrown into their midst. With this scenario in mind, there are two very obvious sources of tension: The survival (or not) of the characters and the survival (or not) of the Nazi among them. It seems simple, but as with so many Hitchcock classics, the simplicity is only a feeling achieved by a tremendously intricate cinematic mind.

Hitchcock uses his innate understanding of dramatic ingredients to quickly establish the differences in background and viewpoint of his lead characters, from an upscale columnist (Tallulah Bankhead) who thinks this will all make a great story, to an injured seaman (William Bendix) just trying to catch a break, to a wealthy industrialist (Henry Hull) who thinks he can run the whole show because, well, he seems to run any room he enters. These characters spend the film maneuvering around each other, trading barbs, forming alliances like a game of Survivor, shifting the leadership structure of the survivors as they see fit, all the while unaware that the German in their midst has a plan of his own, and the military experience required to carry it out. It’s a very well-framed story.

But of course, Hitchcock films are never just about the basic plot. Hitchcock told Truffaut that he wanted to make the film, in part, to focus on a particular “theory” he was developing about contemporary thrillers of the age, something he could apply in a very technical way.

“Analyzing the psychological pictures that were being turned out, it seemed to me that, visually, eighty percent of the footage was shot in close-ups or semiclose shots,” Hitchcock said. “Most likely it wasn’t a conscious thing with most of the directors, but rather an instinctive need to come closer to the action. In a sense this treatment was an anticipation of what was to become the television technique.”

And indeed, things in Lifeboat do get very close. Hitchcock is true to his mission of never letting the camera leave the confines of the oblong shape that serves as the film’s sole setting, but then he goes a step further. There’s virtually no music in the film, no big sweeping crane shots that allow him to swoop over top of the boat, no sharp camera movements to confirm that the action is really unfolding on a soundstage. The ensemble of actors is always kept close, framed in intricate tableaus that mirror the balance of power in the boat at any given time. Watch closely, and you can see Hitchcock building the skills that would allow him to master the one-take wonder of Rope (1948) and the townhouse tension of Dial M for Murder (1954) just a few years later.

But the movie also goes beyond these formal limitations, with Hitchcock  already perfecting the kind of attention to minute detail that would shape later films ranging from Strangers on a Train to Psycho. Which brings us back to the fishing scene, and the film’s highest moment of tension.

Lifeboat opens with a shot of inanimate objects passing by the camera, floating along in the water to show just how desolate the shipwreck is. We see newspapers, children’s toys, wooden spoons from the galley, and more all lost to the ocean, reminding us what was at stake when the ship went down. Once onboard the boat itself, we see characters cling to items that give them comfort, utility, a sense of self, then watch as Hitchcock throws them overboard one by one. One of the first objects to go is a home movie camera, letting us know that the usual cinematic tricks don’t apply here. Then we lose a typewriter, a suitcase, the makeshift sail put up by the survivors. Then, finally, it comes down to a bracelet Bankhead’s character has been wearing for years, a symbol of her hard-won success and status as a voice of reason and power. When it finally leaves the boat, it does so as bait for fish, in a last-ditch effort to feed the remaining survivors and last a little longer, and it does so as a symbol that the passengers have let everything go except the hope of living another day.

So we watch as that bracelet enters the water, and Hitchcock teases a fish growing closer and closer. By this point in the film, the bracelet is the last real piece of materialistic identity the survivors are holding onto, the last shred of who they were before they all entered this boat. They’re starving, and desperate, and willing to shed everything they used to be for that one bite of life-saving food. The tension is as palpable and invigorating as anything in any other Hitchcock thriller, not because the master is playing by all the thriller rules, but because he’s spent 90 minutes earning this one moment through a careful assemblage of circumstances and technical prowess. It’s a master stroke from one of our great masters.

And it’s a moment that reveals that Lifeboat is, while not necessarily one of Hitchcock’s absolute best films, an essential piece of viewing for students of Hitch’s legendary filmmaking. The way he plays with limited ingredients, the dramatic flourishes he deploys, and of course the way he earns tension through precise, careful placement of story elements and props, makes it a crucial precursor to the films he’d make a decade later, and a vital stepping stone in one of cinema’s great careers.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.

 
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