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Need a rescue from the stock market? Take a ride with Tallulah!
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The gyrations of the stock market are really hard to handle—up, down, up, down down up –so maybe you need a bit of a rescue. In a previous column I suggested some screwball comedies, but if drama’s more your thing, hitch a ride on Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, starring the immortal Tallulah Bankhead.
Many stage stars enter the pantheon of immortals but lose their credentials along the way. Carol Channing, Lunt and Fontanne, Gertrude Lawrence, and Cherry Jones are examples of great stage performers whose films don’t do justice to their talents. However, Hitchcock ensured Bankhead's immortality when he cast her in Lifeboat as Constance Porter, a glamorous war reporter. Bankhead owns the movie: she’s a true star, confident, knowing, a little campy, and a delight to watch. She also makes the movie work. Without her star quality, the group of hammy actors surrounding her would sink this cinematic tub faster than the Nazi U-boat that starts all the trouble.
Lifeboat is one of Hitchcock's most daring technical forays. The action takes place entirely in a twelve-foot long lifeboat crowded with refugees from a freighter sunk by a German torpedo. It’s got all the expected characters—the noble black man (Canada Lee), the ill-tempered hottie (John Hodiak), the helpful nurse (Mary Anderson), and the wry millionaire (Henry Hull)—not all that different from the cast of Gilligan’s Island. But then there’s Bankhead, who rules through star wattage and a sly theatrical talent.
A defining moment for Bankhead's performance arrives during a makeshift funeral for another passenger’s baby. Bankhead faces away from the camera for most of the scene, which is shot in a very John Ford manner, all iconic silhouettes against a starry night sky. While Canada Lee intones the 23rd Psalm on behalf of the dead child, Bankhead turns to face the camera, slowly revealing her beautiful, voluptuously shaped head. It’s a glorious moment of self-worship and totally in sync with the self-involved character she plays. Once this moment of self-adoration is over, all we see is Bankhead's shadowed face and the whites of her eyes glowing in the dark. Suddenly the moment turns almost unbearably sorrowful. This kind of transcendence is of a kind possible only within the grandiose intimacy of film. If you need to know why Bankhead was so well-regarded as an actress, study this scene. It will erase your bad (or maybe fond) memories of her campy turns on 60s talk shows and in such kitsch as Batman and Die! Die! My Darling.
Lifeboat is also notable for its expert portrayal of moral ambiguity, one of Hitchcock’s favorite themes. In spite of the sometimes mawkish script and the rest of the cast’s overacting—William Bendix is the most egregious of hams—Hitchcock manages to involve his audience in the characters’ various dilemmas, the most important being the presence onboard of a German officer (Walter Slezak) whose intentions are suspect. The rotating alliances among the characters, at first united in survival and then driven apart by suspiciousness and starvation, are very involving. The climax when the passengers realize the depth of the German officer’s duplicity is deeply shocking. Nowadays this scene would be shot with a maximum of gore; Hitchcock shows us so little (almost all the characters' back are to the camera) and frightens us all the more for his restraint.
Bankhead was famous off-screen for her outrageous behavior and sharp wit, so if you need a laugh after the drama of Lifeboat, go to http://home.hiwaay.net/~oliver/tbquotes.htm to read some of Tallulah's more hilarious quips.
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