Released: January 1944
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Studio: Twentieth Century-Fox, headed by Darryl Zanuck
Produced by Kenneth McGowan.
Based on a story by John Steinbeck; screenplay by Jo Swerling.
Starring Tallulah Bankhead (as Constance Porter), John Hodiak (as Kovac),
Henry Hull (as Rittenhouse), William Bendix (as Gus), Canada Lee (as Joe),
Hume Cronyn (as Stanley), Mary Anderson (as a nurse), and Walter Slezak
(as Willy).
Background note: President Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI) in June 1942, with the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) as one branch of the OWI bureaucracy. Initially, the BMP sought to work cooperatively with Hollywood to encourage the production of movies that would help the war effort. By the end of its first year under the OWI, however, the BMP "advised" Hollywood studios that they should submit synopses of proposed films as well as final scripts for government review. The BMP reviewed Lifeboat in 1943 and approved the final version in September of that year.
Lifeboat was a controversial film. It raised hackles at the BMP, and was sent back to the studio for significant changes before it could be released to the public. Panned by some reviewers after its opening, including one who wrote that the film had "ten days to get out of town," Lifeboat seemed to lend itself, some thought, to German rather than American propaganda.* Other objections surfaced as well. John Steinbeck wanted his name removed from the credits because he believed that Hitchcock had so thoroughly gutted his intentions. (Twentieth Century-Fox declined to honor the author's wishes, and trailers for the film proudly announced Steinbeck's contribution to the film.) Although Alfred Hitchcock won the Academy Award for Best Director for the picture, Lifeboat turned out to be a box office success only in New York City.
The film opens with the funnel of a ship plunging into confused seas. It is an American ship on the Atlantic and it has taken a German torpedo. After it goes under, the camera pans floating debris and an occasional body, coming eventually to the lifeboat that will be the set for the rest of the film. Its sole occupant, at the start, is a white woman (remarkably well turned out, considering the circumstances) played by Tallulah Bankhead. Before long there are ten people on board, and for the rest of the film's 96 minutes, we see most of them wrestle with questions of leadership, democracy, fascism, class, ethnicity, and violence. Race and gender are also key elements of the story that unfolds in the course of the movie, though the film's dialogue is less self-conscious and explicit about these crucial matters.
*Dorothy Thompson was the reviewer. See Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 309.
How do I read a film as a primary source for historical investigation and analysis? To read a film or "movie" for its rich and diverse historical meanings, that is, for its value has an historical document, I employ a two-pronged approach. I examine a given film both as an artifact, a product of its own particular history, and as a cultural text, with a potentially rich set of meanings in play.
For every film, we can trace (more or less successfully depending on the range of available documentary evidence besides the film itself) a specific historical process by which the film was created (and, once created, interpreted by its publics, its audiences). That process rests on a material, technological foundation, but also on a set of cultural, social, political, and economic relations. When I refer to a film as an artifact, then, I am emphasizing the specific historical process by which that film was produced in a particular way, at a particular time, in a particular place.
What institutional structures made the film possible? What institutions enabled and/or constrained the creative process of writers, directors, actors, etc.? How did the necessarily collective creative process of filmmaking bring together, bring forth, or suppress the articulations and interpretations of the various artists and administrators involved in the process?
For this film, specifically, we will be interested in the social and political context of World War II. The article by George H. Roeder, Jr., should contribute to our understanding of that context. The documents I have provided may also provide clues to the complex artistic and political process that produced Lifeboat.
The second prong of my approach examines the configurations of meanings at play within a given version of the film. How does the version in question represent class differences, for example? How does it figure wealth and poverty, success and hardship, entitlement and deference, capitalism and its alternatives? What signs and symbols invoke gender identity in relation to the various characters in the film, and how do these change, if at all, as the film progresses? In what ways does the film use skin color, ethnic identities, racial stereotypes, and racial ideologies to build its narrative? Perhaps most importantly, how does the film seem to position viewers in relation to various characters, signs, and symbols? Where are our sympathies directed? Are we offered the opportunity to identify with all the characters? some more than others? Does this seem to change over the course of the film?
The configuration of meaning at play within a given version of the film should not be equated with the intention of the film's director, writer, or producer. This is important for at least two reasons. First, as noted above, it is very unusual for a film--in contrast to a novel or a painting--to have a single "author." Even if the meanings at play in a work of art were reducible to the intentions of the artist, films necessarily embody the intentions of myriad artists and contributors. Second, and less obviously, films, like novels and paintings, express meanings that operate on unconscious as well as conscious levels. Thus, what a filmmaker is able to articulate about his or her intentions for a film will never encompass the full range of meanings suggested by that film, even if he or she is the sole creative force behind it.
As an historian I am often interested in the intentions of a given artist (writer, filmmaker, sculptor, etc.), but I am also interested (and sometimes more interested) in cultural evidence that exceeds an artist's conscious intention or articulation. Reading a film as a cultural text, in this broader sense, can provide information about what the cultural theorist Raymond Williams called "structures of feeling," sets of meanings that are only just emerging, not fully coherent, but that help us to understand what was imaginable in a given historical context.
I am particularly interested in the range of meanings associated with the social divisions associated with gender, class, and race in Lifeboat. The questions I ask you to consider in relation to the film as a cultural text, then, have to do with how the film represented complexities of gender identity, motherhood, class differences, and racial politics.
Such questions can in turn to be applied to the different stages in the production and reception of the film. Steinbeck, Hitchcock, and BMP reviewers all had different versions Lifeboat in mind, and at least to some extent, we can ask how each of these versions figured gender, class, and race. In this sense, the questions I ask about a film as a cultural text may intersect with the questions I ask about a film as an artifact of the past. But to carry out a rigorous exploration of the film as an historical document--or more properly, as a set of historical documents--these questions should be considered separately and in turn.
I. Respond to the following questions after viewing the film and before coming to class.
A. Scene-based questions (choose one):
1. Early on in the film, there is a debate over whether one of the lifeboat's passengers will be thrown overboard. Discuss this scene using some or all of the following questions as a guide. How do the various characters represent themselves in the course of this debate? What do we learn about the ethnic and national identities of the various characters? How do they define the social and political community of the lifeboat in this scene? How does the camera treat each character?
2. After the big storm, the next scene opens with a low-angle shot of Willy rowing and singing, accompanied by Rittenhouse. Considering both the visuals and the soundtrack, how does the film position its viewers with that scene? What do you think Hitchcock is trying to get across here? How does this scene present questions of race and masculinity?
B. Theme-based questions (choose one):
1. What is the role of Joe, the African American steward, in the film? In what ways did Lifeboat reproduce stereotypes of African Americans? In what ways might the filmmakers have been seeking to break new ground with this character? Do you think they succeeded?
2. How does Lifeboat represent womanhood, motherhood, and marriage? In what ways did it appeal to its audience to think about women's roles, opportunities, and dangers in wartime?
II. Presentations and Class Discussion:
Another question, which may be taken up in a student presentation concerns the film's representation of class differences. I mentioned this question in my discussion of my approach to films as primary sources: How does the film figure wealth and poverty, success and hardship, entitlement and deference, capitalism and its alternatives? Note that this question intersects with those above. I hope that the connections among these questions will enable everyone to contribute to our discussion of meanings at play in Lifeboat.
A student presentation could also address what we can learn about the creative process behind Lifeboat by reading it side by side with the other documentary sources I have provided: Steinbeck's scenario, Zanuck's memos, and Crowther's review.
Lifeboat: Required Reading:
1. Article (read for class prior to screening):
George H. Roeder, "Censoring Disorder: American Visual Imagery of World
War II," in Lewis Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds., The War in American
Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 46-70.
2. Documents (read before or after screening, but before our main class
discussion):
John Steinbeck, "Lifeboat," Collier's, November 13, 1943.
Darryl Zanuck to Alfred Hitchcock, memoranda dated August 19, 1943 and
September 4, 1943, in Dan Auiler, Hitchcock's Notebooks: An Authorized and
Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock (New
York: Avon Books, 1999), 129 & 132.
Bosley Crowther, "Adrift in Lifeboat," The New York Times, January 23,
1944.
Lifeboat: Recommended Additional Reading:
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How
Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New
York: The Free Press, 1987).
Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co.,
1976).
Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda
during World War II (Amherst: University Of Massachusetts Press, 1984).
George H. Roeder, The Censored War: American Visual Experience during
World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). See especially
Chapter 3, "War as a Way of Seeing."
Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Lewis Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds., The War in American
Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1989).