There are a few variations of this anecdote, but they all start the same way: producers at Fox 2000 were courting directors to make a Larry Cohen script called Phone Booth, a real-time thriller that unfolded entirely from the point-of-view of a man trapped in a Times Square phone booth. The movie was eventually made by Joel Schumacher with Colin Farrell, but at one point Michael Bay, hot off Armageddon, found himself on the shortlist to direct. He took a meeting with the producers and apparently the first thing he asked was, "Okay, but how do we get this thing out of the fucking phone booth?"
It's a great forest for the trees bit, but there's a valid question in there: how's a director supposed to keep things interesting in a studio movie when their two principal tools - movement and montage - are impaired? After all, there's only so many places characters can go, only so many times camera movement could be repeated, and nothing to cut away to if the story's told in sequence.
For Hitchcock, the election to follow up Saboteur (which crosses the entire United States) and Shadow of a Doubt (less ambitious, but still a location shoot) with a WWII movie set entirely aboard a lifeboat was born of a desire to experiment with space and time in a new way. Hitchcock explains this when answering a softball prompt from Truffaut:
Truffaut: Wasn't it pretty daring to undertake [shooting] a whole film in a lifeboat?
Hitchcock: That’s right, it was a challenge, but it was also because I wanted to prove a theory I had then. Analyzing the psychological pictures that were being turned out, it seemed to me that, visually, eighty per cent of the footage was shot in close-ups or semiclose shots. Most likely it wasn’t a conscious thing with most of the directors, but rather an instinctive need to come closer to the action. In a sense this treatment was an anticipation of what was to become the television technique.
There are a lot of reasons why early television dramas consisted primarily of close-ups (and still do today), including screen size, practical limits to the variety of dramatizable action, and needing to making story beats obvious for the widest possible audience. But one thing these shows had in common with the psychological pictures Hitchcock was probably referring to was that they mostly entailed scenes of people talking - something Hitchcock knew had little to do with cinema. So Hitchcock had his work cut out for him cinematographically, though he knew those talking parts had to be pretty sharp too.
Based on an original conceit by Hitchcock, with a treatment by literary giant John Steinbeck and a rewrite by screenwriter Jo Swerling, Lifeboat is the story of a small group of survivors of an Allied merchant ship sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic. Among them: bourgeois reporter Constance Porter (Tallulah Bankhead), millionaire capitalist Charles Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), hunky engineer and proletarian John Kovac (John Hodiak), badly-wounded seaman Gus Smith (William Bendix), reformed pickpocket and ship steward George “Joe” Spencer (Canada Lee), nurse and girl-next-door Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson), and her admirer and radio operator Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn).
They're in bad shape from the start, with little in the way of supplies or chance of imminent rescue. Complicating things further, they find another survivor in the water: a German called Willi (Walter Slezak) who's revealed to be the captain of the U-boat that sank their ship. The group debates about what to do with Willi, whether to throw him back overboard or let him stay on and partake of what rations they have left, all while he subtly maneuvers himself into a position of influence on the direction of the lifeboat and wellbeing of its crew.
An unsubtle allegory for the West's inability to unite decisively against Nazi Germany, Lifeboat is a more urgent telling of the same message in The Lady Vanishes; Hitchcock and his writers implore the audience to set aside their differences and unite against their common enemy before they will be outsmarted, outmuscled, and be led in a direction from which they cannot return.
It sounds unsubtle now, though apparently it wasn't obvious to everyone at the time of its release in 1944, as a handful of critics seized upon the film's depiction of Willi as superior to the other survivors in strength and intelligence as glorifying the Nazi while denigrating its British and American characters (Dorothy Thompson of the New York Times gave the film "ten days to get out of town"). Hitchcock was reportedly stung by the critical reception and the studio’s retreat from promoting the film or expanding its exhibition. He defended the movie in the press, though his subsequent work on three propaganda films that year - The Fighting Generation, Bon Voyage, and Aventure Malgache - availed him of any further accusations of Axis sympathies.
Other criticism leveled at the movie concerned the character “Joe” Spencer, the only Black character. As ship’s steward, Joe is elected to become the lifeboat’s overseer of rations and serve as the stereotypical “helper.” When those supplies are exhausted, he’s left to play the flute at the pleasure of his White shipmates or sing prayers for the deceased. And when given an opportunity to vote for who becomes field captain, he abstains. Stage actor Canada Lee, who was the first of the ensemble to be cast, campaigned to revise his dialogue and rework Joe’s scenes to be less racially stereotypical from how they were originally scripted, serving to make the character less egregious than other contemporary screen portrayals of African-American characters (the few opportunities that existed for Black actors in Hollywood were largely tokenistic). Little is known about how Lee’s changes were received by Hitchcock or Swerling, as it wasn’t a subject raised in their interviews, though Lee was largely praised by the NAACP and some Black critics for his performance in spite of the role’s shortcomings (and, indeed, he’s quite good).
While not a critical success, Lifeboat had a decent run in New York where it opened, which Hitchcock attributed to its technical accomplishments. Save for background photography, the film was shot entirely at Fox's studios in (what's now) Century City using four lifeboats; one for rehearsals, one for close-ups, one for long shots, and one in a water tank. This meant Hitchcock's largely exaggerated proclivity for storyboarding every scene almost certainly happened for this project, since no blocking or staging could be left to chance in an enclosed space where practical effects or process photography figured into nearly every shot.
The three-and-a-half month shoot was arduous, with cast and crew repeatedly falling ill, getting hurt, or nearly drowning. But the results speak for themselves; the storm that nearly capsizes the lifeboat looks authentic and the cast look appropriately rattled. And Hitchcock is successful in keeping a single-setting story compelling and cinematic by seldom repeating shot compositions or letting dialogue be the primary way information is revealed.
Hitchcock would go on to make two more "bottle" movies: Rope and Rear Window. (Sidebar: Larry Cohen had actually brainstormed Phone Booth with Hitchcock in the 1960s, but hadn't cracked the script in Hitch's lifetime.) Though both Rope and Rear Window would innovate cinematic form in more influential ways, Lifeboat is certainly a more interesting political work than either and a fitting close to the "ripped from the headlines" era of his career.
Lifeboat’s available to rent through most major digital platforms and on a handsome Blu-Ray release from Kino Lorber.
Further Viewing
Ron Silver (Timecop) directed a TV-movie remake of Lifeboat called Lifepod set in space. It’s written by Jay Roach (director of all three Austin Powers movies), stars Silver, Robert Loggia (Independence Day and those Minute Maid orange juice commercials), and CCH Pounder (Robocop 3, Avatar) - and isn’t very good, if you can believe it. So if you’re looking for a pulpy modern-day “bottle” movie, you can do worse than Phone Booth.
Up Next
Spellbound, which is out of print on home video and unavailable on streaming, but can be found here (at least for the moment).
Cameo
Approximately 25 minutes in, Hitchcock appears by photograph in a newspaper advertisement for a fictional weight-loss product called “Reduco.”
References
Screen captures sourced from DVD Beaver
The Alfred Hitchcock Wiki: The Hitchcock Cameos
Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat: The Theater of War. Featurette directed by Peter Ventrella. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. United States, Simon & Schuster, 1985.