Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Revamping the characters, Hitchcock improved on their personalities and relationships, tying them closer to the drama. Steinbeck’s “ordinary seaman” Bud, who had narrated the novelette in a “dese, dem, and dose” vernacular,
now became Kovac, and the script abandoned his point of view, making him a secondary character. Hitchcock returned the film’s focus to the characters who intrigued him the most: the well-to-do Connie Porter, and Willie the German.
Though Kovac became less of a proletarian, he also became, arguably, less cardboard. “Practically a Communist,” in Hitchcock’s words, Kovac in the film becomes a more nuanced symbol of lumpen
politique
whose conflict with Rittenhouse is depicted as a miniparable of management versus labor. And Steinbeck had presented Rittenhouse, blandly, as the owner of an airplane factory; the film made him a gleeful capitalist with leadership qualities—“more or less a Fascist,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut. It is Rittenhouse who presciently anticipates a boom after the war and forecasts China as an expanding market, and Rittenhouse who is friendliest with Willie.
Steinbeck had woven “very little love interest” into his novelette, as the author himself conceded to lawyers, and no hint of any budding romance between Kovac and Connie Porter. Yet in the film their animal desire for each other is a key component of the tension. (“Dying together’s even more personal than living together,” Kovac declares, grabbing Connie Porter and kissing her when it looks as though the lifeboat is about to sink.)
Porter had been described by Steinbeck as a onetime stage actress (“kind of pretty when she’s fixed up”) who got elected to Congress on an antilabor Republican platform. This was too on the nose for Hitchcock, who had his leading lady in mind before Steinbeck’s name was ever mentioned. So now he, Alma, and Jo Swerling remade Connie Porter into a flamboyant newspaper correspondent, a Dorothy Thompson type, worldly and cynical.
The German in the lifeboat had been Hitchcock’s conception from the first. He wanted Willie to be an über-German, fluent in English, and—the most inspired twist—the smartest, strongest person in the boat. Hitchcock’s Willie conceals a flask of water and a compass (all details that were added by Hitchcock, Steinbeck told lawyers). He’s also a doctor, and saves the seaman Gus’s life by crudely amputating his leg, a Hitchcockian scene that juggled comedy and tragedy. Then the German takes over, rowing the boat toward the enemy as the other passengers lose their strength and wits under the blazing sun. When a dazed Gus spies Willie sipping water, Willie throws overboard the man whose life he has saved, drowning him. This, the most Hitchcockian scene in the film, was absent from the novelette.
There was no such Willie in Steinbeck’s narrative, nor was there any Gus. There was a character who metamorphosed
into
Gus, but “nobody like him, really,” Steinbeck admitted to lawyers. These were all Hitchcock’s characters, fleshed out by Swerling. Steinbeck told lawyers he
detested
Hitchcock’s version of Willie.
Later, during his own deposition for the plagiarism lawsuit, Hitchcock
was obliged to answer a series of questions to establish the origins of the film’s characters, scenes, main incidents, and ideas. His answers establish how precisely he kept track of the tangled authorship of one of his typically tangled scripts—and how, privately, he viewed his own contribution.
Who, the attorneys asked, thought of the character of the Nazi captain?
“I did.”
“The character of the colored man.”
“John Steinbeck.”
“The incident of the colored man conducting the burial at sea.”
“As far as my recollection goes, it was MacKinlay Kantor.”
“The character of Gus Smith, the sailor.”
“I think Jo Swerling.”
“The incident of the amputation of Gus Smith’s leg and his thirst for drinking salt water.”
“Jo Swerling.”
“The characters of the crazy woman and her baby.”
“I would say Steinbeck.”
“The activities of the crazy woman with her baby in the lifeboat.”
“I would say Steinbeck.”
“The idea of the Nazi captain having a compass concealed on his person.”
“Myself, in conjunction with Swerling.”
“The idea of the Nazi captain being pushed off the lifeboat.”
“To my recollection, Steinbeck and Swerling.”
“The idea of the Nazi captain being beaten to death with the shoe from the foot of the amputated leg.”
“Myself.”
“The character of Connie Porter.”
“Steinbeck and Swerling.”
“The incident of fishing with a diamond bracelet as bait.”
“I do not remember.”
*
“The incident of the colored man playing the flute.”
“Steinbeck.”
“The incident of Kovac taking charge of the boat, directing its course and the rejection of the Nazi captain for this job.”
“I do not recall. That was in conference with many people.”
“The idea of constructing a tattered sail for the lifeboat.”
“I do not recall.”
“The character of Rittenhouse, the wealthy man, and his activities in the lifeboat.”
“Steinbeck and Swerling and myself.”
Even in private, fighting a charge that he’d misappropriated another’s work, Hitchcock took few pains to claim authorship; like Swerling, he also made no claims to originality.
“There were [many] survivor stories, and survivor books published in the newspapers and magazines,” Hitchcock told the lawyers matter-of-factly. “In other words, it [the film] wasn’t the most unique idea.”
Fishing with a shiny bracelet for bait? “Read any kind of lifeboat story,” Hitchcock advised the lawyers. “They all try to fish. … no originality in that at all.”
*
That business in the film about Gus trying to drink salt water? “That’s in the Bible,” his attorney interjected. “I would say in roughly 3,782 lifeboat narrations,” Hitchcock remarked.
Some writers have contended, absurdly, that Hitchcock fretted about Steinbeck’s “political baggage” (the author sided with progressive causes). If they had any political quarrels, they were over speechifying, which bored the director in private and on-screen. Jo Swerling was as liberal as Steinbeck, if not more so. Under Hitchcock, the film became less pedantic; the labor versus capital motifs were strengthened (Connie Porter sarcastically dubs Kovac “Tovarich,” and reminds him of his responsibility to the Comintern); the references to fascism and the political prisoners were introduced (“Some of my best friends are in concentration camps”); and in the end the film leaned further left politically than Steinbeck’s novelette.
Swerling finished by late July. Then Hitchcock reviewed the shooting script one last time with MacGowan, pushing back the start date as cuts and improvements were made.
From his very first meeting with Kenneth MacGowan, Hitchcock knew whom he wanted for his leading lady. To play the flamboyant reporter, who somehow materializes in the lifeboat looking like she has stepped out of a fashion layout—mink coat, jewel case, portable typewriter, and Brownie 16 mm camera intact—he wanted a living legend. He was only passingly acquainted with Tallulah Bankhead, who had taken London by storm in 1923 when she appeared in
The Dancers
, a play by Gerald du Maurier and Viola Tree; of course, he had admired her in the stage production of
Blackmail
, too. (He had even slipped a compliment to her into
Murder!
, when a character praises another actress as “pure Tallulah.”)
Bankhead was a legend, only on the stage; she was notorious for her
lack of success in film. Moreover, by 1943 she was forty years old, hardly a young, glamorous Hollywood leading actress. That was undoubtedly part of her appeal for Hitchcock, who liked contrary casting, and the like-minded MacGowan approved the idea.
The director sent one of the earliest treatments to the actress, who signed on at once, allowing Hitchcock to ensure that her colorful personality could be written into the role. According to Bankhead, “He kept making my part like me and I kept saying: ‘Don’t make me say “dahling,” they’ll think I’m playing myself,’ but I did what he told me.” Later, after she came to Hollywood for the filming, Hitchcock told the actress that Connie Porter was the least likely sort of person he could think of plunking into the lifeboat, and Bankhead was “the most oblique, incongruous bit of casting I could think of.”
Burly William Bendix, who specialized in playing good-natured American joes, was cast as Gus, the sailor with a gangrenous leg. Henry Hull, a veteran of films since 1917, was cast as Rittenhouse, while Hitchcock gave English actress Heather Angel the small but memorable part of the mother who drowns herself. (Angel also had portrayed the maid in
Suspicion.
) A young actress under studio contract, Mary Anderson—who had played a small part in
Gone With the Wind
—was cast as the Red Cross nurse Alice.
The role of the Negro seaman, Joe, was assigned to Canada Lee, who had played Bigger Thomas in Orson Welles’s vaunted stage production of
Native Son.
Hitchcock spotted Lee, who had appeared in only one minor film, in a screen test sent over by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His casting was a subtle indication of how Hitchcock saw the character. Lee, who had only a brief screen career—ending with his blacklisting and premature death in 1952—could be counted on to bring strength and dignity to any performance.
If the part of Connie Porter grew in the script drafts, Kovac—the narrator of Steinbeck’s novelette—lost ground. Yet he remained important as the only man who poses any physical risk to the German, and the post-Steinbeck rewrites would accent his sexual attraction to Connie Porter—although their chemistry is fractious, as much instinctual hate as eventual love. The actor feeding lines to Lee in the MGM test was John Hodiak, a square-jawed ex-radio actor with minor screen experience. By now Hitchcock knew what trouble he’d have coaxing Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda into his lifeboat, and so Hodiak, a relative unknown with a correspondingly affordable salary, was cast as Kovac.
The single character added to the film after Steinbeck’s novelette was the ship’s radio operator, who pursues a tender sideline romance with the nurse. (In the frustrated-hairdresser fashion of other characters in Hitchcock films, he is always fiddling with the ribbon in the nurse’s hair.) It was a part especially created for Hume Cronyn, who had a growing friendship with the director.
Spies and traitors—Germans or Nazis, often enough—were among Hitchcock’s stock-in-trade, and the part of Willie called for a supervillain as engaging and irresistible as he was loathsome. Perfect for the part was Walter Slezak, once a dashing figure on the German stage and in films, who had gained poundage and become, literally and figuratively, an imposing heavy. Having admired him in two recent anti-Nazi films, Leo McCarey’s
Once Upon a Honeymoon
and Jean Renoir’s
This Land Is Mine
, Hitchcock gave Slezak the role.
Lifeboat
was slated to be shot almost in its entirety in a water-filled tank on the back lot at Twentieth Century–Fox. The tank had four corner chutes that propelled water toward the lifeboat, which would be held relatively stable by a maze of underwater wires. For scenes that required ocean backgrounds, a second boat was suspended on a mechanical rocker against a process screen, on which were projected the shifting moods of the sky and sea.
The cameraman would have to come from the studio roster, but the director knew his choice: Glen MacWilliams, with whom he had crossed paths on
Waltzes from Vienna.
A journeyman whose work dated back to the silent film era in Hollywood, MacWilliams would turn in his most impressive photography under Hitchcock on
Lifeboat
—and earn the only Academy Award nomination of his career.
Before filming started in August, there was a last-minute crisis when Darryl Zanuck, immersed during the first half of 1943 in Signal Corps activity in Washington, D.C., returned to his post as head of production just in time to critique the finished
Lifeboat
script.
Lifeboat
would have been an unusual, ambitious film at any studio, but at Twentieth Century–Fox it could have been developed only in Zanuck’s absence. The studio boss was aghast that ten months had been spent on the film—and that the result was a script that posed serious budget and censorship issues.
Zanuck pointed to an Office of War Information letter complaining that
Lifeboat
presented “more serious problems than any script of yours which has been reviewed by this office for years.” Accurately predicting the antipathy that would descend on the Hitchcock film upon its release, the OWI letter said “the group of Americans in the lifeboat present a picture which the Nazi propagandists themselves would like to promote.”
The OWI saw Connie Porter as a “selfish, predatory, amoral, international adventuress,” while Rittenhouse was assessed as an unfairly unsympathetic businessman. Kovac seemed “fairly decent,” although he had Communist leanings, and the script implied he cheated at poker. Joe, the Negro, shouldn’t be a “former pickpocket,” and, by not participating in
balloting on the fate of the German, he “implies that he is not accustomed to the franchise and prefers not to exercise it.” (“Do I get to vote too?” Joe asks sarcastically.)
Worst of all, the OWI report concluded, “The only hero is the Nazi”—and the spectacle of Willie murdering Gus by shoving him overboard was positively disgusting. (That certainly wasn’t in the novelette, Steinbeck hastened to tell lawyers—it was Hitchcock’s coup de grace.) Disgusting, too, that Willie should then be beaten and drowned in a burst of mob outrage. (Willie drowned in Steinbeck’s version, too, but getting beaten with Gus’s shoe, taken off his amputated leg—that was pure Hitchcock.) “They’re like a pack of dogs,” Hitchcock said in describing the scene to François Truffaut. To the OWI, the scene was “an orgasm of murder.”
To Zanuck’s credit, he issued no harsh commands, no formal response to the OWI complaints. Having arrived late in the game, he found himself in an awkward position: he still hoped Hitchcock might direct a second picture for Twentieth Century–Fox, and he was as tough an opponent of censorship as any studio head. In the end, he simply informed Hitchcock that while he did not agree with all the criticisms, he felt they should be taken into account.