A brilliant and harsh ride

Rating: 9/10 (24 January 2001)

Before today, all I really knew of Hitchcock was his murder mysteries (I consider myself a huge fan of those). Now I see why he is more often described as a master of SUSPENSE. You would think: how much suspense can there be within the confines of a 12 or 15 foot long lifeboat?

There is plenty- from a shellshocked woman tied to a chair after her baby is buried at sea, to an amputation performed by a Nazi during a rising storm, to the experience of being in a leaky boat caught between two ships that are shelling each other- this movie was a much harsher ride than I expected, and makes me respect the genius of Hitchcock even more than I already did. I watched it alone on VHS in broad daylight, and I STILL felt rattled by the experience... I can only imagine what it must have felt like to see this on the silver screen in a darkened theater back in the day.
The brilliance of this movie is how it portrays good and evil in little glimpses instead of broad strokes. Every character is morally ambiguous to some point, acting nobly one moment, brutally the next. Despite the presence of a black man, an affluent woman, a (probably Nazi) German, a blue-collar sailor, and so on, there are no stereotypes aboard this lifeboat by the end. Each has surprised you, possibly disappointed you, and definitely made sure that you will REMEMBER them as a person, not as a "type," long after the movie is over.