New Picture

Lifeboat (20th Century-Fox] is one of the most ambitious films in years. It begins with a close-up of a foundering ship's funnel that might stand for the end of an era. Then the camera closely meditates a dissolving frieze of floating debris, and lifts its eye to frame, in the light of predawn, its compact symbol of our time: a damaged boat, its compass smashed, its sole occupant a trullish photojournalist who has lived through so much that she calls herself "practically immortal." Further survivors clamber aboard, masked and anonymous with floating oil. As the little boat gets moving, the film suggests Poet E. E. Cummings':

King Christ this world is all aleak;

and life preservers there are none . . .

The idea for Lifeboat first occurred to Director Alfred Hitchcock. John Steinbeck wrote the idea into a story (still unpublished). With Hitchcock's help, Scripter Jo Swerling wrote the story into a screen play. The cinematic problems involved in keeping nine characters and their story dancing for two hours upon the pin point of one lifeboat were staggering. Result: a remarkably intelligent picture, almost totally devoid of emotion. Its characters are not so much real people, derelict upon a real sea, as they are a set of propositions in a theorem. Their story is an adroit allegory of world shipwreck.

"Doesn't Anyone Know?" One survivor is a shipbuilder and owner named Rittenhouse (Henry Hull). He symbolizes the virtues and vices of capitalism. He assumes command as his natural right.

"We're under way," he cries gaily, rubbing his hands as the sail bloats to the breeze. "Where to?" someone asks. "Uh?" he says, searching their faces; "Doesn't anyone know?" But there is no compass.

Another passenger is a German (Walter Slezak), captain of the destroyed U-boat which sank the lifeboat's ship. His life is saved when Shipbuilder Rittenhouse insists on democratic procedure and the observance of international law. When a dance-hall addict (William Bendix) develops gangrene, it is the German captain, an ex-surgeon, who amputates the gangrened leg. As the passengers grow weaker, the German takes charge and rows, hour after hour, comforting the derelicts by singing Lieder.

But he conceals his compass, steers not for Bermuda but for a German supply ship. And while everyone sleeps, he pushes overboard the man who catches him drinking from a concealed bottle of water. His apparently superhuman strength comes from this water and from energy tablets. In a burst of horror and rage his boatmates force him overboard, beat him under water. Rittenhouse delivers the coup de grace--with the shoe from the amputated foot of the man the German saved.

"We Still Got a Motor." The survivors have no water, no food, no energy, no destination, no prospect but death. "When we killed the German," they say, "we killed our motor." Says religious Negro Joe (Canada Lee): "We still got a motor." He means God.

Melodramatically salvation heaves in sight. A German supply ship and an Allied ship stage a shelling duel. The German ship is sunk.

A boy of 16, symbol of postwar Germany, clutches the lifeboat, is hauled aboard. Cinemactresses Mary Anderson and Tallulah Bankhead rush to help him. "Kill him!" cry the men -- among whom only the gentle radio operator (Hume Cronyn) has any doubt. As the trembling boy holds them at bay with his water-soaked pistol, the Negro disarms him. They debate whether or not to kill him. Tallulah Bankhead recalls the man the German captain drowned and a young mother (Heather Angel) who was pulled aboard the lifeboat, later jumped over board after her dead baby. When Lifeboat ends, they are still debating, like the world, what to do with the German.

Ascetic Sadist. Globular Alfred ("Hitch") Hitchcock has lately become an oblate spheroid by jettisoning some 90 Ib. of flesh. (His starting weight was 295 Ib., his favorite food, beefsteak.) But asceticism has not reduced Hitchcock's abilities as a humorist, raconteur, deadpan artist and the greatest director of cinema thrillers. At a large stag dinner party, when his turn came to enrich the traditional ambience of brandy & cigars with an off-color story, he murmured diffidently: "I have a story, but I'd best not tell it because it's rather long." The clamor for it was insistent. Then for three-quarters of an hour Hitch held a dozen grown men breathless, waiting for the double-entendre, while he told the story of Cinderella --straight.

This accomplished sadist was born of solid middle-class parents (his father was a poulterer) in London, 43 years ago. For a while he was a layout man for an advertising firm. In idle moments he jotted down elaborate titles for hypothetical films. He took them to British International Pictures, was immediately hired as title artist. At 26, Hitch was a director.

Training on Trains. In his younger days in London, Hitch was an insatiable first-nighter, a sort of rolling encyclopedia of stage lore. Another consuming interest was transportation. He could tell any Thamesside character who would listen the tonnage, type and country of every craft on the Thames. He loves to ride on trains, and two of his best pictures (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes} have thrill ing train sequences.

His memory for detail is photographic. After half an hour in one Swiss village, he reproduced it in a set down to the last lintel and Lederhosen. When he came to the U.S., he flabbergasted David 0. Selznick's representatives by telling them precisely where everything in Manhattan was and how best to get there. And he could scarcely wait to see the police lineup, a treat to which he had been looking forward for years.

After he made The 3Q Steps (1935), Hollywood had its eye on Hitchcock. He was not only England's leading director; he was, with Rene Clair, possibly the most brilliant of all directors of fiction films. In 1938 he signed with David O. Selznick, because he thought Selznick produced Hollywood's best pictures. But he takes no back talk from Selznick. As a result, he fares better than any other Selznick property. Selznick lend-leased Hitchcock to-20th Century-Fox to make Lifeboat for $200,000. Hitch pocketed $120,000 of it.

No Love, No Laughs. Hitchcock is no improviser. By the time shooting starts he knows the script by heart, knows to the last foot every effect he proposes to get out of the picture. He is a good actor, a superb teacher, a meticulous director. He will spend ten minutes not only demonstrating but explaining why a certain effect will be achieved if the actor gets less animation into his hands. Then he will do the scene himself. He never enacts a love scene; he will not risk a laugh.

Director Hitchcock always appears for a moment in each of his films. It is his way of "signing" his pictures. But there was no room or excuse for him in the lifeboat. So in the middle of a news page--which has precious little business in Lifeboat either--Hitchcock planted himself, in bulbous profile, as the before-&-after model in a reducing ad.

CURRENT & CHOICE

A Guy Named Joe (Spencer Tracy, Irene Dunne, Van Johnson; TIME, Jan. 10).

Madame Curie (Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon; TIME, Dec. 20).

Happy Land (Don Ameche, Henry Morgan, Harry Carey; TIME, Dec. 13).

Battle of Russia (TIME, Nov. 29).

Guadalcanal Diary (William Bendix, Richard Jaeckel; TIME, Nov. 15).

The North Star (Walter Huston, Ann Harding, Erich von Stroheim; TIME, Nov. 8).

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