03 Sep Lifeboat
Lifeboat, WWII Movie starring Tallulah Bankhead and William Bendix
(1944) This entire Alfred Hitchcock movie is played out in a lifeboat! After a battle with a U-boat in which both ships are sunk, several American and British survivors find themselves together on a lifeboat. The story was originally written by John Steinbeck, and a condensation of it appeared in Collier’s Maga
As the movie opens, the glamorous Tallulah Bankhead is sitting alone in the lifeboat, dressed in her fur coat, smoking a cigarette, and snapping pictures. As other survivors crawl in one by one it’s not long before the camera and fur coat are gone. Miss Bankhead continues to be the core character.
My other favorites were William Bendix (later of TV’s “Life of Riley” fame) and Hume Cronyn (already married to the lovely Jessica Tandy.)
One of the survivors is a German sailor from the U-Boat, and he seems to be the only one who knows how to find where they want to go, Bermuda. After the film was released in January of 1944 there was a lot of controversy because this German character was put in a somewhat positive light.
My interest in “Lifeboat” is that it is one of the movies that my parents saw when they were in Stockholm in 1944. In neutral Stockholm, there would have been plenty of Germans in the audience also who would have cheered heartily for their German comrade.
Lifeboat (Special Edition) at amazon.com
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