One Place Only: Lifeboat (Dir Alfred Hitchcock, 1h35m, 1944)

From the grandest scale, to the smallest now.  The Chamber Piece has long been a place in which the line between cinema and live theatre are often blurred, where a director essentially restricts themselves to a single location, and usually a small cast of actors. From here, the film can explore the often claustrophobic nature of a car boot, a telephone booth, or a lift, the liminal, in road side diners, hotels and exam halls or the mundane, from house-parties to our own apartment, to the pub, for the purposes of horror, action, drama, or comedy. Films set in a single location are both made from financial necessity and by directors showing their skill, and over the next four weeks we will consider a quartet of the finest, from a Sidney Lumet courtroom drama to high tension aboard a Japanese Bullet Train to perhaps the greatest dramatic doublehander of American cinema. We begin at sea with Hitchcock's 1944 film, Lifeboat.

By 1944, Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most famous directors in the world. Beginning in the British film industry as a title-card designer, he worked his way up to director, debuting with The Pleasure Garden (1925), and successful by his third feature, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), hugely influential on the entire thriller genre, whilst Blackmail (1929) would be the first "talkie" in Europe. By the 1940s, he would not only be hugely successful in his native England, but had been lured by Hollywood; his filmography by this point would include The 39 Steps (1935), Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941). Lifeboat would be Hitchcock's only film for 20th Century Fox, as part of then typical inter-studio talent trading, whilst the director's prominence by the mid 1940s is exemplified by the gallery of authors approached to write the story, including Ernest Hemingway and James Hilton, alongside its eventual author, John Steinbeck, though he would later disown the work 

Following the battle between an American Merchant Navy ship and a U-boat, and the subsequent sinking of both, so eight passengers find refuge in the titular lifeboat, from sailors Kovac (John Hodiak), Garrett (Hume Cronyn) and the African-American Joe (Canada Lee), to wealthy industrialist Rittenhouse (Henry Hull) and Tallulah Bankhead, making her first appearance in over a decade in film, as journalist Connie Porter. Over its first third, Steinbeck's story, and the script by Jo Swerling, who would script It's a Wonderful Life two years later, sketches in the details of these characters, and how they adapt to their immediate plight, particularly in the case of the grieving English mother Mrs. Higley (Heather Angel), and the wounded German-American, Gus Smith (William Bendix).

What is equally impressive is the degree of detail given to each character; it could be easy for one or two to stand out from the group, the rest little more than two dimensional stereotypes. This is not so: each and every one of them come across as having a dimensionality, flaws and traits that butt up against and support each other. Kovac is our obvious hero, a tough macho figure who immediately takes command of the situation, Rittenhouse is the voice of calm among the waves, perhaps the closest the film has to an unflappable moral centre, yet is a millionaire concerned about returning to his fortune, useless out here, whilst Mary Anderson's nurse, Alice, acts as both the romantic interest for radio operator Garrett, and, later in the film, the voice of the mob as one of the passengers aboard is not who they seem. Against all of this is Bankhead's scene-stealing heroine, her journalistic drive matched with her dry wit; she is the first character we meet and she remains riveting throughout, a fiery reminder of what the actress was capable of at her best.

Against our disparate crew of characters, Lifeboat places three threats. The first of these is the sea around them; whilst Hitchcock and cinematographer Glen MacWilliams meticulously planned out many of the film's shots with models, and the water tank at Twentieth Century Fox, but the wildness and danger of the ocean is ever-present, threatening to becalm the small lifeboat and its passengers; this gruelling shoot took its toll on the cast, with MacWilliams replacing the film's first cinematographer, Arthur Miller, after just two weeks of tank shooting, whilst Bankhead would battle pneumonia and Anderson would break ribs. The sea's power is at once terrifying in the storm scenes-the camera never leaving the confines of the boat, all of this adding to a claustrophobic sensibility as our passengers are left physically exhausted, whilst the stillness of the sea, the isolation, and the purgatorial entrapment upon the boat, exert a mental threat to which two of the passengers eventually succumb.

Ever-present, meanwhile, is the threat of the Germans. This is most obvious in the form of Willi (Walter Slezak), a survivor from the U Boat that sank our protagonists' boat: he is also the figure in the film that is the most complex, and who goes through the most development: as a German, our heroes can barely trust him, and it is only through Connie that he is given a voice, against which Hitchcock poses the question of mercy. However, Willi is no simple sailor, and he become a far more cunning, and identifiable figure. Nothing seems to phase him, he is happy to do the work that the rest of the castaways cannot do, such as amputate the wounded leg of Gus, with whom he seems to share an enmity, given the latter's renouncement of his German heritage.

More than this, he is charismatic. Like Norman Bates, decades later, Hitch is playing a trick on us, placing this Ubermensch fascist as the unlikely hero of the piece, cutting through the squabbling mob, and enacting his plan, even as Willi's command of the vessel metes out things as barbarous as anything his comrades in the U Boats could plan. It's a trick that several contemporary critics fell for; hardly unsurpising given the film was released at a point where the Allies were preparing invade France. Willi is the villain of the piece and his fate is deserved, but it is where the film begins to blur the lines between "us" and "them".

The lifeboat, ultimately, is a collection of British and American figures whose only connection is their entrapment aboard the vessel; it's easy to read this as an overtly political statement. There are moments where Hitch peers into these cracks between those on the boat; early in the film Joe asks, whilst the group discuss what to do with Willi, whether he gets a vote, whilst the working class Kovac and the multimillionaire, Rittenhouse snip at each other throughout the film, only for a surprise twist to show the honesty of both. By this point, all of the crew, save for the devout Joe, have done something unspeakable to survive, and it is this quandary, this moment of collective violence, that Hitchcock seems to worm his way into, as he does in his best films, asking, simply "what would you do to survive?"

Hitchcock is not merely considering  his fine ensemble cast, headed by Tallulah Bankhead, but the audiences watching in cinemas in Britain and America as the Second World War reached towards its end; Lifeboat is an undeniable wartime rallying cry for the Allies to stick together, even at the cost of their gentility, in a taut, and often claustrophobic thriller set entirely at sea. 

Rating: Highly Recommended

Lifeboat is available via AppleTV and on DVD from 20th Century Fox

Next week, to another single-location masterclass of cinema, with Sidney Lumet's courtroom drama, Twelve Angry Men