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...
