Seeking a creative challenge after several years' worth of fairly elaborate melodramas, director Alfred Hitchcock stages all of the action in Lifeboat in one tiny boat, adrift in the North Atlantic. The boat holds eight survivors of a Nazi torpedo attack: sophisticated magazine writer/photographer Tallulah Bankhead, communistic-seaman John Hodiak, nurse Mary Anderson, mild-mannered radio-operator Hume Cronyn, seriously wounded Brooklynese stoker William Bendix, insufferable-capitalist Henry Hull, black-steward Canada Lee and half-mad passenger Heather Angel, who carries the body of her dead baby. This adroitly calculated cross-section of humanity is reduced by one when Ms. Angel kills herself. After a day or so of floating aimlessly about, the castaways pick up another passenger, Walter Slezak, who is a survivor from the German U-boat. At first everyone assumes that Slezak cannot speak English, but when the necessity arises he reveals himself to be conversant in several languages and highly intelligent; in fact, he was the U-boat's captain. As the only one on board with any sense of seamanship, Slezak steers a course to his mother ship, while the others resign themselves to being prisoners of war. After it becomes necessary to amputate Bendix' s leg, Slezak decides that the burly stoker is excess weight; while the others sleep, he tosses Bendix overboard, watching dispassionately as the poor man drowns. When the rest of the passengers discover what he's done, all of them (with the significant exception of Lee) violently gang up on Slezak, and once more, the lifeboat drifts about sans navigation. If you're wondering how Hitchcock was able to make his characteristic cameo appearance in Lifeboat keep an eye on that newspaper in the closing scenes. — Hal Erickson