Dead In The Water

Rating: 6/10 (7 December 2007)

One of the most interesting things about this effort is the presence of a Black man amongst the survivors because the Tallulah Bankhead character is playing a variation of Gene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, as she gradually loses all vestiges of the civilised life she represents. Bankhead, in fact, is the main reason for watching this typically self-indulgent Hitchcock film, as he strives to illustrate yet again how clever he is. With a story by John Steinbeck, one of the school of thirties 'political' writers, only the most naive would expect a lack of axis (that's NOT a typo) to grind and we're not disappointed - and before you start writing your letters to the editor let me say that I'm a Steinbeck buff. The one thing we can't do, of course, is to view this movie with 1944 eyes but could we do so our reaction may well be colored by our own experience of war; how many loved ones had we lost, did we have a relative in a Concentration camp, etc. Probably the last thing we would have done would be to take it on face value, just another example of the Hollywood 'bomber-crew' syndrome, a disparate group of people thrown together in a confined space waiting for atavism to rear its inevitable head. For the record Bankhead is outstanding and the support is mostly out of the right bottle.