Product Description

Nominated for three Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock's "absorbing brilliantly executed" (Hollywood Reporter) World War II drama, is a remarkable story of human survival.

After their ship is sunk in the Atlantic by Germans, eight people are stranded in a lifeboat, among them a glamorous journalist (Tallulah Bankhead), a tough seaman (John Hodiak), a nurse (Mary Anderson) and an injured sailor (William Bendix). Their problems are further compounded when they pick up a ninth passenger - the Nazi captain from the U-boat that torpedoed them. With its powerful interplay of suspense and emotion, this legendary classic is a microcosm of humanity, revealing the subtleties of man's strengths and frailties under extraordinary duress.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1820 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-10-18
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Special Edition, NTSC
• Original language: English, German
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 96 minutes

Amazon.com
Part mystery, part wartime polemic, Lifeboat finds director Alfred Hitchcock tackling a cinematic challenge that foreshadows the self-imposed handicaps of Rope and Rear Window. As with those subsequent features, Hitchcock confines his action and characters to a single set, in this instance the lone surviving lifeboat from an Allied freighter sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic. A less confident, ingenious filmmaker might have opened up John Steinbeck's dialogue-driven character study beyond the battered boat and its cargo of survivors, but Hitchcock instead revels in his predicament to exploit the enforced intimacy between his characters.

Indeed, we never actually see the doomed freighter--the smoking ship's funnel beneath the credits simply sinks beneath the waves, and we're plunged into the escalating tensions between those who gradually find their way to the boat, a band of eight English and American passengers and crew, plus a German sailor (Walter Slezak) rescued from the U-boat, itself destroyed by the freighter's deck gun. Heading the cast and inevitably commanding their and our attention is the cello-voiced Tallulah Bankhead as Connie Porter, a cynical, sophisticated writer whose priorities seem to be hanging onto her mink and keeping her lipstick fresh. Gradually, the others find Porter and her lifeboat, forming a temporary community that inevitably suggests a careful cross section of archetypes, from wealthy industrialist (Henry Hull) to ship's boiler men (John Hodiak and William Bendix).

Hitchcock juggles the interpersonal skirmishes between the boat's occupants with the mystery of their German prisoner, which itself becomes a meditation on the fine line between nationalism and morality, a line that Slezak walks delicately until his identity is resolved. Visually, Hitchcock transforms his back-lot set and its rear-projected cloudbanks into a desolate stretch of ocean, while capturing the horror of an amputation through an economical set of images culminating in an empty boot. --Sam Sutherland

Customer Reviews

Good, but not Great
Being a compulsive Hitchcock fan, I have a difficult time not giving every one of his films 5 stars, but I have some reservations with this film.

Obviously this is a propaganda film for the Allies in WWII. With this in mind, I realized there would be melodramatic, patriotic and democratic dialogue--and there was almost instantly. But my difficulty and problems lie mostly with my confusion about what I was supposed to feel. The message is not clear. I find this troubling since Hitchcock, being the master, was always able to control his audience without them ever knowing (remember during Psycho, when suddenly the car NOT going into the lake scared you, and you may have noticed later that your allegiance shifted, without a conscious decision, from Marion to Norman?).

Regardless of that, Tallulah Bankhead was marvelous, as was Canada Lee (even in his confined role of George "Joe" Spencer).

Great for WWII propaganda, but a little lacking in the Hitchcock--still a great movie. Recommended.

Poor quality DVD not as advertised
The DVD would not work in any of my machines. When the DVD was returned I was credited a small amount of what I had paid for it.

lifeboat
This is a time less classic. What a great movie! They don't make them like this any more