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| Twentieth Century Fox | Release Date: January 28, 1944 |
Starring:
Canada Lee, Heather Angel, Henry Hull, Hume Cronyn, John Hodiak, Mary Anderson, Tallulah Bankhead, Walter Slezak, William Bendix, William Yetter Jr.
Summary:
Several survivors of a torpedoed ship find themselves in the same boat with one of the men who sunk it.
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Lifeboat is actually much more complicated than it first appears. Its emphasis on moral debates in dialogue can seem a little dry, but Hitchcock’s shifting sympathies guarantee our guilty involvement with the characters until he builds to a climax of intellectual and spiritual excitation.
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The suspense is pulse tearing, but Hitchcock, in a movie made explicitly for the war effort, gives it an extra edge. Also, in his favorite and most ingenious cameo role, Hitch solves the problem of appearing in a film with no extras -- the cast consists only of the other shipwreck survivors -- by having himself photographed before and after losing 100 pounds on a special crash diet. [15 Nov 2005, p.C3]
The entire cast is superb, but the standouts are Bankhead, as the spoiled, wealthy dilettante writer whose expensive furs and jewelry are worth more to her than the lives of her fellow survivors, and Bendix, as the compassionate but not-too-bright stoker whose gangrenous leg poses a threat to his dreams of returning home to dance with his sweetheart.
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Where its successors might interpret or imitate its achievement of making a movie set in a confined space, Hitchcock evokes more important questions - many of them without answers - from his cross-section of characters, and creates an impressive and remarkably prescient perspective on our relationship with the world around us.
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Ham-handed, wartime Hitchcock.
Jul 21, 2019
Lifeboat is a wonderful movie, one of the best movie about war. Divine direction by Hitch!
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