Lifeboat (20th Century-Fox, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Thursday, July 25 my husband Charles and I went to the Campbell Playhouse in Martinez for what we thought would be a live theatre program of seven one-act plays. I’d misread the poster advertising it, but the event they were actually presenting was almost as interesting. It was a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film Lifeboat, put on by a local organization called Backdoor Films. Their slogan is, “Keeping your guilty pleasures on the big screen!,” and they define themselves as “a movie club for FANS of cult, Queer, Black and alternative cinema.” The film was hosted by the group’s organizer, Omar, who showed up in a sailor’s costume with a blue cardboard model of a ship around his waist to emphasize the movie’s nautical theme. Lifeboat seems to have made it onto the Backdoor Films schedule not so much because of its director as its star, Tallulah Bankhead, the sexually omnivorous (with both men and women) theatrical legend who made only a handful of films, notably Devil and the Deep (1932) – a World War I submarine melodrama in which she seduced her co-star, Gary Cooper, and later said he’d given her gonorrhea – Faithless (1932) and this one. Hitchcock’s idea was to do a film set entirely on a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and the reason he cast Bankhead in the lead was he thought she’d be the person you’d be least likely to meet in that circumstance. I’d seen Lifeboat only once before, and that was in the early 1970’s on a commercial TV screening. I took a strong dislike to it then and had avoided seeing it again until last Thursday, when I figured that as long as we were there anyway (and Omar and his fellow attendees seemed like fun people to hang out with), I’d try to make my peace with it. I liked it better than I did last time but it’s still not one of Hitchcock’s best.

Lifeboat was supposedly based on a story by John Steinbeck, though apparently the idea was actually Hitchcock’s and the actual screenplay was by Jo Swerling (a man, by the way), who was best known as a comedy writer and seemed a little out of place in a World War II melodrama that was supposed to reproduce some of the conflicts of the war in microcosm. One of the film’s gimmicks is that the reason the characters are stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean (they’re trying to chart a course to Bermuda) is because the ship they were on before that was sunk by a German U-boat, which was in turn almost immediately sunk by an Allied plane. The U-boat captain, Willi (Walter Slezak), tries to pass himself off as just another German sailor, but heroine Constance “Connie” Porter (Tallulah Bankhead) “outs” him when she addresses him as “Capitaine” (she’s established as fluent in at least three languages, English, German and French) and he responds. The other people on the lifeboat are former marathon dance champion Gus Smith (William Bendix, billed second), who much to Willi’s displeasure changed his last name years before from “Schmidt”; anti-social sailor John Kovac (John Hodiak), whom Connie naturally and almost immediately takes a sexual interest in; British nurse Alice McKenzie (Mary Anderson), who laments having fallen for a married man; fellow outcast Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn), who takes an interest in her; and railroad tycoon Charles J. Rittenhouse (Henry Hull). Anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson and New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther both hated the film, and in a 1969 interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse Hitchcock explained why. “The main complaint was that I’d shown the Nazi in ascendancy over the rest of the people,” Hitchcock said. “But that was ridiculous because, after all, he was a submarine commander; he’d be the man who was most proficient at handling a boat than anyone else. It also showed that they were all at sixes and sevens with each other, and to get rid of this man, they had to combine. Irrespective of whether Henry Hull was a Fascist or John Hodiak a Communist, they had to get together.”

Not surprisingly, Willi turns out to be a double-crosser – he’s said throughout the voyage that he doesn’t have a compass, but he’s hiding one, and he’s steering the lifeboat not to Bermuda, but to a German supply ship on which they’ll be taken into custody and sent to concentration camps or worse. This time around I was genuinely moved when Mary Anderson tells her story, and even more moved when Gus goes through a D.I.Y. amputation (with brandy from a flask as the anesthetic) because his leg has become infected and his main concern is that if he survives his dance-partner girlfriend won’t want anything to do with him anymore. Eventually Willi pitches Gus overboard on the Nazi principle that he’s become useless to the world anyway and the others would be better off without him. I also liked the meticulous way Connie is stripped of her possessions, one by one: first her movie camera with which she’d filmed the attack on the ship; then her fur coat; then her typewriter and finally the jeweled bracelet – a gift from her first husband (her emphasis, not mine!), she tells us – after she had the idea of using it as bait to catch a fish. (Charles pointed out that the fish on screen was actually a fresh-water koi – imdb.com says it’s a carp – which wouldn’t be found in a salt-water sea.) And one of the best remembered aspects of the film is the way Hitchcock worked in his cameo appearance; he’d just been on one of his periodic attempts to diet, so he decided to take before-and-after photos of himself and use them as part of an ad for a fictitious diet product called “Reduco” which is seen in a newspaper John Hodiak picks up and reads from the lifeboat’s floor. Needless to say, 20th Century-Fox got plenty of letters from people asking what “Reduco” was and where they could get it. Nonetheless, Lifeboat was a terrific box-office flop, so much so that though 20th Century-Fox had bought Hitchcock’s services from David O. Selznick for two films, they canceled the second film. Fortunately for Hitchcock, his next film, Spellbound – a brilliant thriller set in an insane asylum, personally produced by Selznick and starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck – was a huge hit and revitalized his career.