Rent Lifeboat (1944)

Dated - Lifeboat review by JD

A war film about the survivors of a torpedoed British boat in the Atlantic. The occupants become increasingly stressed with dramatic consequences. Not greatly gripping or inspiring, just OK. B&W.

Agreed with previous reviewer. - Lifeboat review by Cato

Except that it was directed by one of the greatest English directors ever. It was obviously a very good film, but not a great one. I can only surmise that it was obviously made for British film watchers of the time.

WWII Propaganda. - Lifeboat review by Steve

This is one of Alfred Hitchcock's impediment films, in this case made entirely in the water tank at Twentieth Century Fox, within a lifeboat holding a broad cross section of the American public, and the captain of the u-boat that sunk them. The director and a fine ensemble cast make a virtue of this limited environment..

By 1944, WWII films were starting to look beyond the conflict towards the kind of future that the men and women of the services would return to. But this is actually more like the propaganda films of '39 to '41 intended to get the US into the war; alerting them to the virtue of the cause, the degeneracy of the enemy and the dangers of neutrality.

The scene that stays in the memory is pure interventionist propaganda; the wretched death of William Bendix's lame hepcat, borne away on the waves with the taunts of Walter Slezak's German skipper in his ears, while the others sleep. Among the survivors, Tallulah Bankhead stands out as the sort of woman who attends a shipwreck in a fur coat.

It is a powerful, and very unusual experience, even if not the sort we normally go to Hitchcock for. It lost money at the box office, maybe because it was making a case for something that already happened and people were pretty tired of war. But now, this is a fascinating Hitchcock curiosity.