Weird propaganda

Rating: Null/10 (15 September 2013)

Saw The Lifeboat (1944) early this morning, when I was tucked up in bed with flu. Very enjoyable.
It's a really intense exchange of dialogue between very different characters. I could see the inspiration for kitchen-sink drama + (maybe) who-will-survive horror films. Did it influence The Old Man and the Sea? It's Hitchcock with Steinbeck as writer (someone else as screenwriter), so the atmosphere is good. The confined space works really well, with cheesy backdrops of the seascape.
But it's really a propaganda film, so a lot of the charactertisation is unnatural, and the dialogue is sometimes irritating. I actually sympathised with the German, because I would have reacted in that realistic way. And the other characters lost some plausibility, in that they seemed to cheer for themselves selfishly. Maybe that's my contrarian horror-loving prejudice coming through.
Anyway - thank God they were all rescued by the state after committing murder, which turned into a propaganda point. A later Hitch would have taken retribution on those characters, but in the end we get a false justification of the unjustifiable.
In fact this film would have measured up to Hitch's psychological greats if it had been made clear that the German's command was actually in the best interest of the other characters. What do you do then? But that's not going to happen if your release date is circa D-Day!