© 2007 William Ahearn
There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Tallulah Bankhead.
Talent was one of her many faults and few wore it so well. One of the most
quotable personages of the time, she often sat with the Algonquin round table
and was famous for being infamous. Most of the parts she originated on stage
went to Bette Davis when the plays became films and the list of good Tallulah
movies is a short one.
In “Lifeboat” she plays tough-as-nails reporter Connie
Porter stuck in a lifeboat with the other survivors of a torpedoed ship. The
cast has William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Mary Anderson, John Hodiak, Henry
Hull and numerous others. This is the first of three films that Hitchcock
would do with a single set, with “Rope” and “Rear Window”
being the others, and in some cases seems more real than some that he shot
on dry land.
Why “Lifeboat” gets overlooked along with “I
Confess” is beyond me. This is an interesting piece of work for Hitchcock
and it’s only misstep as a film is in service to wartime propaganda
but under the circumstances (there was a real war going on), that’s
to be expected.
While it’s not the classic some have suggested – it does
get a bit creaky and chatty – it is a work of ambition and vision and
that alone is enough to recommend it.
How John Steinbeck, the balladeer of the common man, and Alfred Hitchcock,
a Brit with ingrained notions of social class, didn’t get along makes
an interesting tale. For details, go here.
During the war Hitchcock made two short films with the Free French.
While watching “Aventure Malgache” all I could think of was Bernard
Fall’s book on the battle of Dien Bien Phu titled Hell In a
Very Small Place. And Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece “The
Battle of Algiers.” Some geopolitical realities should have been so
obvious to the French – and the British as well – in the endgame
years of World War II and yet, it seems, only the Americans and the Soviets
got the fact that the colonial era was going to be another casualty of the
changing landscape.
This, of course, is not the fault of Alfred Hitchcock. This film
– along with “Bon Voyage” – was made to boost French
morale during the war and is more about them than about Hitchcock, although
I doubt he would have disagreed.
“Aventure Malgache” is about three actors preparing to
go onstage and reminiscing about their days with the French resistance in
Madagascar against the Vichy government. What struck me as odd was that three
insurgents from an occupied country were planning the re-occupation of a colony
after the war when the Vichy government and the Nazis were defeated.
This, apparently, didn’t seem the least bit odd to them.
Which is why I thought of Hell In a Very Small Place
and “Battle of Algiers” and the end of the colonial period in
Africa and an area once known as French Indochina and now known as Vietnam.
Maybe the quiet Americans didn’t get it either.
“Bon Voyage,” is the probably the best idea for a spy
film that Hitchcock was given or acquired. The film is the debriefing of a
downed pilot who escaped back to England with the assistance of the French
Underground. Or was he? The script is based on what is known to intelligence
agencies as “false flagging.” If country A is at war with country
B and country A’s counterintelligence agency discovers a network from
country B operating in A’s land it can do one of two things. The obvious
reaction is to round up all the foreign agents and shoot them. The second
is to exploit the foreign agents as a conduit for disinformation or –
in the case of “Bon Voyage” – to use the exfiltration –
as the cloak and dagger crowd call it – of agents or downed fliers as
a way to safely send messages into enemy territory for their own agents.
For more information about Hitchcock's wartime films, go here.
It’s a damn shame Hitchcock didn’t develop this into
a full-length film. Spy stories are difficult and complicated – which
is why there are few good ones – and this one would have made a nice
one.