Lifeboat

Even the best acting from the 1940s is intolerable, its defects all the more conspicuous in a claustrophobic character-study confined to a boat, in the ocean, where there's nothing to do but speak your lines and pretend to feel all sorts of emotions. From the careful, stupid script to the overly efficient scenework, to the preposterous double-whammy ending, Lifeboat uniformly sucks as anything other than a movie. As a movie, it works well enough. Partly that's the problem. Everything is such a safe bet: the moral ambiguities, the heroes who aren't, the pathos, the bathos, the fabricated ironies. Lifeboat looks and sounds like one of those overproduced, overprocessed radio singles from the corporate universe. Makes me want to listen to Foreigner.

So what good can I say about it? The fat guy dies. The baby dies. The mournful mother dies. That's all okay. The Negro says a prayer. That's pretty racist. Germans are evil after all. That's propaganda for the war effort. And people don't fall in love on lifeboats. Starving, dehydrated, frantic, they have better things to do, like suspect the Captain of hiding a compass. You know, with all the dramatic potential of strangers pitted against themselves and Nature, this could have been a good movie. Instead, it's just an interesting one. C-