Lifeboat

Lifeboat is a 1944 American survival film directed by Alfred Hitchcock from a story by John Steinbeck. It stars Tallulah Bankhead and William Bendix, alongside Walter Slezak, Mary Anderson, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Heather Angel, Hume Cronyn and Canada Lee. The film is set entirely on a lifeboat launched from a passenger vessel torpedoed and sunk by a Nazi U-boat. The first in Hitchcock's "limited-setting" films, the others being Rope (1948), Dial M for Murder and Rear Window (both 1954), it is the only film Hitchcock made for 20th Century Fox. The film received three Oscar nominations for Best Director, Best Original Story and Best CinematographyBlack and White. Bankhead won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. Though highly controversial in its time for what many interpreted as its sympathetic depiction of a German U-boat captain, Lifeboat is now viewed more favorably and has been listed by several modern critics as one of Hitchcock's more underrated films. Plot Eight British and American civilians, service members and United States Merchant Mariners are adrift in a lifeboat after their ship and a German U-boat sink each other in combat. Willi, a German survivor of the U-boat is pulled aboard. During an animated debate, engine room crewman Kovac demands the German be thrown out to drown. However, the others object, with radioman Stanley, wealthy industrialist Rittenhouse and columnist Connie Porter succeeding in arguing that he be allowed to stay. Porter is thrilled at having photographed the battle, but her photo camera is the first of her many possessions to be lost overboard in a succession of incidents.