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 Hitch's impediment films, in this case made in the Fox water tank, within a lifeboat holding a broad cross section of the American public, and the captain of the u-boat that sunk them. 

By 1944, many WWII films were starting to look beyond the conflict at the kind of future that the men and women of the services would return to. But Lifeboat is more like the propaganda films that were made 1939-41 trying 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 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.    

Hitchcock's fluent camera and cutting makes his closed environment work, with a fine ensemble cast trapped within the grip of the sea, just as the world was engulfed by war. Tallulah Bankhead stands out as the sort of woman who attends a shipwreck in a fur coat. It is a powerful, unusual film, even if not necessarily the sort of experience we go to Hitchcock for and it lost money at the box office.