The first sequence, silent, as often in Hitchcock, is one of his most remarkable. An American ship has been sunk by a German submarine. Amid the waves float, as on Lautréamont’s dissecting table, the incongruous remnants of the wreck: a first aid kit, a bunch of onions, a copy of “The New Yorker”, a chessboard. One by one, they lead us to a lifeboat, where the worldly reporter Tallulah Bankhead – wrapped in a magnificent mink, camera in hand, glancing at a run in her stocking – smokes, casually snaps, and waits. Fundamentally (and from the opening credits), the film belongs to her. Hitchcock, however, defended the political indictment: “There were two opposing forces in the world, democracies and Nazism. Now, the democratic forces were in a state of complete disorganization, while the Germans knew exactly what they wanted. The idea was to tell the democracies they had to unite, put aside their differences, and concentrate on a single enemy.” Words so noble and (always!) resounding that, cinematically speaking, they could betoken the worst. Quite the opposite, Lifeboat possesses a constrained, compelling vitality. The eight survivors forced to share the lifeboat’s few square feet form a small world of dialectic and sentiment, a full parliament, an “our town” rocking to a treacherous sea – with echoes of Thornton Wilder by way of Steinbeck (who wrote an early treatment) and a Capraesque touch from Jo Swerling, who signed the screenplay. The German they saved from the sea looks like a kindly Bavarian brewer, but he isn’t, and in the end the forces of good do what the moment calls for. Tallulah’s phenomenal performance – her progressive stripping away of identity (she loses mink, camera, typewriter, and a diamond bracelet used as bait), her “raucous comic sexiness” (Pauline Kael) – leaves us suspecting that if this American stage legend didn’t find more space in cinema, it’s because the screen of the 1940s wasn’t big enough to hold both Bette Davis and her. Ending in the form of an enigma: the war isn’t over, the war is never over, and “what is to be done?” is the question that will forever haunt every human being, every society.

Paola Cristalli