Friday, 11 April 2014

All at sea

Lifeboat (1944)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock this film stars Tallulah Banhead, William Bendix, Walter Selzak and Mary Anderson. Following the sinking of a ship in the Atlantic several Allied survivors are joined in a life boat by a German from the U-boat that sank them.

Unlike many films of the period this is not a pure propaganda piece and Hitchcock does a decent job of balancing the moral dilemmas faced by the characters. At the time the plot was somewhat controversial and while you can see that on racial grounds the script is fairly weak the portrayal of the German character is nicely nuanced. Setting the whole film essentially in a lifeboat provides an interesting challenge for the direction but obviously with a master at hand this works really well.


4/5

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