Part mystery, part wartime polemic, Lifeboat finds director Alfred Hitchcock tackling a cinematic challenge that foreshadows the self-imposed handicaps of Rope and Rear Window. As with those subsequent features, Hitchcock confines his action and characters to a single set, in this instance the lone surviving lifeboat from an Allied freighter sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic. A less confident, ingenious filmmaker might have opened up John Steinbeck's dialogue-driven character study beyond the battered boat and its cargo of survivors, but Hitchcock instead revels in his predicament to exploit the enforced intimacy between his characters.
Indeed, we never actually see the doomed freighter--the smoking ship's funnel beneath the credits simply sinks beneath... Learn More
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Part mystery, part wartime polemic, Lifeboat finds director Alfred Hitchcock tackling a cinematic challenge that foreshadows the self-imposed handicaps of Rope and Rear Window. As with those subsequent features, Hitchcock confines his action and characters to a single set, in this instance the lone surviving lifeboat from an Allied freighter sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic. A less confident, ingenious filmmaker might have opened up John Steinbeck's dialogue-driven character study beyond the battered boat and its cargo of survivors, but Hitchcock instead revels in his predicament to exploit the enforced intimacy between his characters.
"Somewhere in the Night" is an exemplary title for a film noir, and the shellshocked pilgrimage of an amnesiac WWII veteran through an L.A. shadow-zone of hotels, bars, steam baths, sanitariums, and creepy private dwellings casts an uncanny spell. The plot is so byzantine, and the interlayering of the banal with the bizarre so pervasive, we may occasionally feel we've wandered into a Raul Ruiz mindgame in the guise of a '40s mystery-melodrama. The situation is primal: a man searching for his own identity, dreading what that identity will prove to be, yet so monastically dedicated to his mission that he won't reveal his dilemma to anyone even when it might ease his quest.
The script is shot through with contradictions and improbabilities, though these loom more glaring in retrospect... More Info About This DVD Actor(s): John Hodiak - Nancy Guild Director(s): Joseph L. Mankiewicz DVD Release Date: Released the 06 September 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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For fans of the genre, without question the worst part of any combat war movie is the first third. Granted, a lot of movies take a while before shifting into gear and getting serious about things. Combat war movies are uniquely hobbled, though. They usually have a large, ensemble cast and their raison d'être is to display men at war. Their large cast has to be introduced and the audience has to identify and bond with them. I suppose. Why we have to waste time warming up to the cast is a little mystifying, though. They could hang cardboard signs over the characters - the Grizzled Vet (James Whitmore), the Short-Timer (George `Pops' Murphy), the Nominal Hero (the one who possesses the skills and guile to survive, Van Johnson), the Greenhorn (the rookie through whose eyes we... More Info About This DVD Actor(s): Van Johnson - John Hodiak Director(s): William A. Wellman DVD Release Date: Released the 04 May 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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