Lifeboat

The verticality of a sinking ship's smokestack yields to a lateral view of the detritus leading to a floating corpse, thus Bergman's endgame long before Shame. After the dying whistle there's the irritated sigh of a survivor contemplating the run on her stocking, a posh journalist (Tallulah Bankhead) immaculately cool as the lifeboat she's in drifts past the remains of a torpedoed freighter. The engine-room prole (John Hodiak) isn't keen on her sardonicism: "You think this whole war's a show put on for you to cover, like a Broadway play. And if enough people die before the last act, maybe you might give it four stars." Seaman (William Bendix), tycoon (Henry Hull), nurse (Mary Anderson), radio operator (Hume Cronyn), and steward (Canada Lee) also climb aboard, the shell-shocked mother (Heather Angel) clings to her drowned baby. Their unity is tested by the unwanted guest, a German U-boat captain (Walter Slezak). "The more we quarrel and criticize and misunderstand each other, the bigger the ocean gets, and the smaller the boat." John Steinbeck's schematic microcosm, richly complicated by Alfred Hitchcock's understanding of frail order and seductive demons. The herrenvolk is a matter of concealed energy pills, yet there's the fatuous industrialist eagerly playing the flute to the Nazi's lullabies. The New Jersey mug medicates himself with cognac ahead of a makeshift amputation, his sloshed mugging stops dead cold at the sight of figures huddled around a cigarette lighter struggling to sterilize the blade. The discarded shoe, the would-be Madonna's empty hands, a technique of particular interest to Welles (The Stranger) and Polanski (Knife in the Water). Not Godard's Hermès bag (Weekend) but a Cartier bracelet, it becomes fish bait and ends at the bottom of the sea to the cracked cackle of the bourgeoisie. "Little by little, I'm being stripped of all my earthly possessions!" It ends on the overlapping bloodlust of democracy and fascism, a dark Hitchcock formulation pursued in Rope. In black and white.