Wednesday, October 14, 2026
By Peter Hummers on November 20, 2025
I’ve been reading Hidden History of the Outer Banks by Sarah Downing and was reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Lifeboat by Downing’s account of German raids during WWII on Allied shipping off our shores in “Submarine Alley,” where the Unterseeboote were in turn hunted by our armed forces.
“Are you Number Two Boat?”
Lifeboat, based on a story by John Steinbeck, takes place entirely on a lifeboat. Now that that’s out of the way, I must say that I, who fidget uncomfortably during movies in tight spaces, found nothing objectionable about it. The movie is mostly people speaking—but the writing contains universes: Who are we? Individually? Together? To whom shall we listen? Where are we going?
Hitchcock described it as a story “of a goldfish bowl.” It was all filmed in a studio on a movable lifeboat replica in front of a projected image, with a giant water tank employed for wide shots. Hitch used four different lifeboats during production: one for rehearsals, one for close-ups, one for wide shots, and a large-scale tank boat for water sequences. Everything looks great and doesn’t detract from the action, which quickly engages us.
Critics of the day didn’t like the close quarters and panned the film. One set? Where even were the sturdy Hitchcock tropes like spies, blackmail … trains? Scenery? Can Hitch make a cameo at sea? (He does, and it’s very funny.)
Lifeboat opens on “the sea.” The credits roll over a closeup of what looks like a smokestack on top of a submerged steam freighter burning, then leaning back and sinking, extremely realistically. White smoke comes from the stack, then an explosion followed by nasty black smoke. As it sinks the black smoke becomes steam, before everything disappears. The camera pulls back to survey the floating flotsam of the Merchant Marine ship—a crate marked “Red Cross for Britain,” a chess board, a copy of The New Yorker, some corpses … but one has on a German life-jacket marked “Deutsches Reich U78.” The camera pans again and we see that a U-Boat also sank. (Merchant Marine ships were armed during the war.)
Then we pan up and back to “the set”: a dame (Tallulah Bankhead) is sitting in a lifeboat taking pictures of the wreckage all around her. That’s “dame” as in “a swell dame,” as her hair is done up and she’s in a mink coat and working on a cigarette. The camera is far back enough to take in the whole lifeboat: a long shot. Occasionally we get a shot of the bare horizon (which is almost never horizontal). The Dame is known to a seaman who climbs aboard as a famous columnist, Connie Porter. She’s not a “people person.”
There is high drama almost immediately. More people climb onto the lifeboat—civilians, a woman with a baby, sailors, including one who looks around and finally says, “Danke schoen.”
When they settle in on the lifeboat, they are: Connie Porter; Gus Smith (William Bendix), an injured man; Willi (a very nuanced Walter Slezak), the German sailor; Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson), nurse; John Kovac (John Hodiak), a crewman; Stanley “Sparks” Garrett (Hume Cronyn, who worked with Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt), radioman; Joe Spencer (Canada Lee), steward; and Mrs. Higley (Heather Angel), a shell-shocked British mother with her infant Joe.
Charles J. “Ritt” Rittenhouse Jr. (the indispensable Henry Hull, The Return of Frank James), a wealthy industrialist, indeed, the owner of the shipping line, is aboard, too, full of crusty irony. He’s a scrappy and confident self-made man.
Running the numbers finds plenty of room for drama, and it comes, hot and heavy.
Lifeboat received three Academy Award nominations, for Best Director, Best Original Story, and Best Cinematography—Black and White; and Tallulah Bankhead won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. (She was a pip!) Critics didn’t like Lifeboat at first, but audiences loved it.
I’ll award the movie five out of five MacGuffins. Maybe I’m ready for My Dinner with Andre.
[Hitchcock] [black & white] [WWII] [drama] [MacGuffin]
Sources include A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks with the Master of Suspense; NavWeaps
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Click here for more Stream On: What to watch on TV columns by Pete Hummers. Columns are archived and updated when necessary on Substack.
