Thoughtful and Exciting Drama From Hitchcock.

Rating: 8/10 (13 June 2008)

This doesn't get much attention and I'm not sure why, because it certainly deserves more. The story of a diverse handful of survivors adrift in the Atlantic after their ship is torpedoed, it represents one of the technical and narrative challenges that Hitchcock at the time was beginning to impose on himself. There's only one set -- the lifeboat -- and how do you give the ten or so people aboard enough to do and say to keep the audience watching? You can't have them almost mowed down by an airplane in the middle of a corn field.
Hitchcock and his writers handled the problem deftly. There isn't a dull moment in the film. They fight storms, cut off legs, play cards, get drunk, fall in love, and kill each other.
John Steinbeck wrote the treatment and the screenplay was polished off by Jo Swerling. It immediately ran into trouble with the Office of War Information and the Breen Office. The handful of British and American survivors pick up the captain of the U-boat, now sunk, that torpedoed their ship -- good old Willie. Willie proves to be more focused and more able than anyone else in the boat. He's not only a master seaman and navigator but a surgeon as well. He turns out to be cheerful, practical, cherubic, avuncular, perceptive, melodious, charismatic, and murderous. He rows the boat in the general direction of the U-boat's mother ship while he sings German folk songs and the others tootle along, accompanying him on a flute. "How'm I doing, Willie?", asks the millionaire Henry Hull. The hypermasculine, possibly communist, John Hodiak mocks Hull in a queer voice, "How'm I doin', Willie?", and then cackles. And why not? After all, everybody in the boat is accompanying Willie.
The problem, as the censors saw it, was that Willie was superior to anyone else in the boat and Willie was a Nazi. The fact that Willie was cheating by swigging from a concealed bottle of water, taking vitamin pills, and peeking at a hidden compass was trumped by the obvious fact that he was the only person who knew exactly what he was doing. The Germans could have shown the film throughout Europe as pro-Nazi propaganda.
Steinbeck caught most of the heat for this, as he had for an earlier screenplay, "The Moon is Down," that humanized a German soldier. Was Steinbeck a crypto-fascist? It's ironic that the question should have been raised because before the war, Steinbeck, the author of such modestly leftist works as "To a God Unknown" and "The Grapes of Wrath", was accused of being a Commie.
There are a couple of shots that no other director would have employed because no other director would have thought of them, and they're not necessarily dramatic or suspenseful. It's a languorous afternoon on the becalmed sea. Hodiak, his torso mottled with tattoos is reading an old newspaper. We see the newspaper from his point of view. Then a mischievous finger pokes slowly through the page and pulls the paper away, to be replaced by Tallulah Bankhead's seductively smiling face dropping gently backwards onto Hodiak's lap. While they swap back stories, she produces her lipstick and adds another fake tattoo to his chest -- the initials C.P. They're Bankhead's initials, of course, "Connie Porter", but they also hint at "Communist Party." With only a few minor exceptions, the acting is superb. I never found myself under Talullah Bankhead's Magic Spell but if I had to choose an actress to play a spoiled, snobbish, rich bitch it might be her. She seems to belong in that mink coat and she practically owns that smoke-cured voice. In many ways, this is her story. She's progressively stripped of every material possession she uses to define herself, and it's her character that shows the most development. Canada Lee, as the black guy, is a fine actor and has the right face for the part but he's saddled with a stereotypical role. There isn't space to get into all the characters but it's clear that Hitchcock opted for genuine faces instead of glamor pusses in this story. John Hodiak looks like an ordinary stoker, not like Cary Grant. And I mean -- take a look at Hume Cronyn. A face made for radio.
You really shouldn't miss this one. It's a lesson in movie-making.