Bergsonian Critique

“You’re only thinking of yourselves,” cries the devious, hulking Nazi to the others passengers of the lifeboat during a vertiginous typhoon sequence, “you’re not thinking of the boat.”

That line best highlights Lifeboat‘s maxim, Alfred Hitchcock’s World War II film, which points to the cause for all of the dangers to follow. That the “enemy” utters that line made it particularly indignant in 1944 (when critics lashed out at Hitchcock for his unpatriotic portrayal of Brits and Americans), and perhaps it still resonates today: we (as in anyone who’s not a Nazi) may have rallied together, expressed our contempt after the many hours of history lessons, and deservingly ridiculed the Nazi regime to great measures but, since then, we’ve certainly become more petulant, materialistic, and egotistical than ever.

The funny question in all of this is who would’ve pegged Hitchcock for a moral humanist? Certainly not me. I would like to believe that my universal humanism is more intricate to be correlated with a man whose métier was the psychological horrors that distort the glam of the American/British bourgeoisie. But I digress, though I’d like to acquiesce with the the selective consensus that, despite the film’s lack of technical excellence, this is probably the most characters-driven film within the director’s voluminous canon.

From the get-go, the film opens with a brilliant prologue that ingeniously tells us what has happened. We hear and see what appears to be an explosion, and then see the flue of an Allied merchant marine freighter going under the waves. It has just been torpedoed and sunk by a Nazi U-Boat. Then we focus on a lone lifeboat shrouded in fog, as various objects float by: a copy of the New Yorker, playing cards, a chessboard, and a corpse, face down in the water. There is a beautiful, well-dressed, fortysomething woman alone in it, and seemingly without a care in the world. This says much about her, as she is the film’s central character, Constance Powers (Tallulah Bankhead) -a sassy and witty world-wise magazine reporter who has filmed the whole naval gun battle and ship sinking, and believes it is her ticket to journalistic immortality. The first of the other survivors to make it to the lifeboat is one of the sunken ship’s engine crewmembers, John Kovac (John Hodiak), a rough blue-collar guy from Chicago with Communist leanings. He and Connie don’t get along, especially after he accidentally knocks her camera into the sea, losing her shots she felt were worth a million dollars. It is the first of many things Connie will lose over the course of the film’s 96 minutes, as she eventually humanizes from a shrill social butterfly to a real human being. Then, several others make it aboard: there is Gus Smith (William Bendix), a co-worker of Kovac’s, whose leg is severely injured, the beautiful, young brunet nurse Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson), who looks like a saintly Judy Garland; a British seaman named Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn), who is destined to fall in love with Alice, and Charles D. Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), a wealthy industrialist and war profiteer who goes by the nickname Ritt. The final pair to come aboard are the token black character, George ‘Joe’ Spencer (Canada Lee)- a ship steward who is swimming with a British woman, Mrs. Higley (Heather Angel), whose baby has died- even as she still clutches it.

It doesn’t take too long for us to figure out that the entire film strictly takes place in the lifeboat; thus, creating a claustrophobic situation that gradually distills and exposes far more troubling psychological disturbances that seem to inhibit the colorful survivors. It just happens to be one of the lifeboat’s occupants is the very man who causes their predicament: the German captain of the U-boat whose own submarine torpedoed their vessel. Captain Willy (Walter Slezak) appears, at first, to be the black sheep of this war-era film but Hitchcock has other ideas for him. Instead of being portrayed as the obvious villain of all humanity, Willy essentially proves to be the savior among the bunch, a rather blasphemous portrayal in such a perilous time when the Nazis were anything but that.

Still, while this might give anyone the liberty to hastily accuse Lifeboat as a propaganda fluff, the tapestry of the film’s narrative and motifs conjure enough wind, allowing it to sail against such indictment. For Willy, he hardly fits the descriptions of stereotypical goon; he is a capable seaman (where the others are completely incompetent), a skilled surgeon (he performs the amputation on Gus’s leg), a multi-linguist (he surprises everyone with his fluency of the English language), and the only one who keeps his head when a storm threatens to destroy their lifeboat. The very fact that his character seems to be the strongest and smartest of the lifeboat refugees was a fact that caused government censors and critics around the country to criticize the film as not patriotic enough, resulting in a limited run for the film and a lesser box office gross than expected.

Nevertheless, the film still doesn’t deviate completely against the feelings of its time; Willy has his dark side too. Certainly, he feigns not speaking English, hides his compass from the others, pilfers their water and food, keeps food pills for himself and, most devilishly, tampers with Gus’s fragile emotions to effortlessly and convincingly push him overboard. Such rendering surely devolves Willy enough flair for him to become more convincible and dynamic than what we might have initially expected: he oozes malevolence that is both stereotypical of Nazis but very realistically as an individual, such as when he yawns at the pain Mrs. Higley and her dead baby is going through. In this regard, he has much in common with other Hitchcock killers, particularly with Bruno Anthony of Strangers on a Train; he is conceited, self-assured, and underestimates his foes, which ultimately causes his undoing. In spite of that, he is probably the most likable of those sorts of characters that Hitchcock had created.

Though perhaps the most contentious scene is when the other survivors learn about Willy’s villainous exploits, as they precipitate to beat him and toss him overboard (except for Joe), and most surprisingly the first attacker happens to Alice, the self-proclaimed pacifist who earlier in the film said she did not understand why people wanted to kill other people. This potentially elicits some mixed reaction because, according to the survivors, the killing of Willy is not murder of a POW (which is against the morality of war), but the execution of a murderer by a society that will not tolerate murder. The polemics of Hitchcock’s feature exposes how poorly politics can influence ethical censure while it convincingly sketches human reactions and nature in extremis, even as it relies on some of the grossest human caricatures, stereotypes, and is a blatant bit of communist propaganda.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that Lifeboat refuses to tie its neat package with bows and ribbons because not only it luridly asks us a question but also begins its parabolic lesson as soon it finishes. At the finale of the film, when after another German ship is torpedoed by the Allied forces, a second Nazi sailor crawls aboard. He is younger than Willy but carries a gun. He is quickly disarmed, and then frighteningly asks if the survivors will kill him. This gives something for the characters (and for us) to mull over as they wait for their rescuers to sail nearby, and Connie delivers her response, which is more cogitative than the question itself.