Lifeboat (1944)

Directed by

Alfred Hitchcock

Genre

drama film, war film, survival film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 36m

Rated

NR

Rating

7.4 of 10 from 485 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A group of survivors from a torpedoed freighter cram into a lifeboat with the German captain from the U-boat that sank them. They must decide whether to trust him as they struggle to survive on the open sea.

tenseclaustrophobicsuspensefulmoral ambiguitygrittypsychologicalbleakslow-burn

What happens

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 freighter 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 Cinematography – Black and White. Bankhead won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. Though disparaged at the time of its release by a couple of influential film critics for its supposedly 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 most underrated films. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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