BAILING OUT MY “LIFEBOAT” REVIEW

My first review for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat” is included at the end of this post. Meanwhile, if you click on the following link, you’ll go to the sister blog, where you’ll find my second review. These are different reviews of the 1944 suspense thriller, which starred Tallulah Bankhead and Walter Slezak. They are different reviews right down to the core, a fact that I find fascinating considering that I wrote both of them.

How to explain the difference of opinion? Well, maybe the opinions aren’t necessarily refuting each other. I still agree with everything I wrote in my first review of “Lifeboat,” but I’ve had longer to consider the movie, and I realized that those minor quibbles don’t matter. So what if the ending is preachy? So what if there are – I didn’t list them below, but I hold the argument to be true – a few far-fetched contrivances in the plot? Frankly, I thought the same thing about “Vertigo,” but it was still entertaining. As is this movie.

And the bottom line is that these are movies, meant to thrill and stimulate the masses. Hitchcock, one of cinema’s foremost masters of mise-en-scene, editing, and sound, creates an atmosphere that positively draws you in, and almost makes you forgive some lapses in logic. Also, it’s sometimes the flaws that make a masterpiece special. “Lifeboat” features some sinister goings-on that seem impossible, but without them, the filmmakers may not have been able to wrap up various themes in a satisfactory way. That might have badly blunted the movie's overall impact.

So, is “Lifeboat” a masterpiece? Personally, I still feel that it’s a very, very good movie, great until midway through the second act. It’s no “North By Northwest,” but has fine acting and technical credits, and at only 97 minutes, still represents a decent way to kill time.

LIFEBOAT (1944), dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Not a great movie, but entertaining nonetheless. While the action is restricted to a small space, Hitchcock manages to wring genuine suspense from this tale of ordinary men and women trying to survive the ocean, and one another.

A wealthy socialite, several merchant marines, a doctor, a servant, and a millionaire industrialist are among the survivors of a Nazi attack. They climb aboard a boat that has little food and a non-functioning compass. Tensions between individuals of different social classes cause feathers to get ruffled. Then, as if things were not complicated enough, into the mix comes the captain of the same Nazi submarine that sank them.

Are the survivors willing to trust the officer, who has experience on the high seas, but is also their enemy? “Lifeboat” starts off following the same well-tread formula that has since become a cliché: Characters from various walks of life band together to reach a common goal. But the movie ends up being preachy instead, basically warning viewers to never, ever trust a Nazi. Personally, I have no problem with a movie that exists solely to teach me that moral. However, the way Jo Swirling’s screenplay arrives at the conclusion feels forced, as if changes had been made to meet a studio’s satisfaction.

Hitchcock made a few terrific suspense thrillers in his day. With this one, he continues his pattern of melding the terrible with the innocuous, the horrific with the mundane. To his credit, he turns a tranquil ocean into something isolating and dangerous. Meanwhile, the director scores a casting coup with Walter Slezak as Willy, the Nazi officer whose cherubic face hides a cunning guile.