Director Alfred Hitchcock was always up for a challenge. He made England's first talking film, Blackmail (1929), using the experience to experiment with the use of sound to capture psychological states, created the illusion that Rope (1948) had been shot in a single continuous take and played with 3-D in Dial M for Murder (1954). For the 1944 suspense film Lifeboat, he wanted to see if he could solve the problems of shooting in a small, confined space. He had considered a film set in a telephone booth, but when 20th Century-Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck mentioned that the Maritime Commission had asked him to make a film about the danger of German U-boats in the North Atlantic, he came up with the idea for Lifeboat.

Working with several writers, including novelist John Steinbeck, he came up with a story about the survivors of a ship sunk by the Nazis during World War II. When they take in a survivor of the U-boat, which has also sunk, it sets the stage for a tense confrontation mirroring tensions among the Allies fighting the war. His biggest casting coup was stage star Tallulah Bankhead, who returned to the screen after 11 years to play fashion reporter Connie Porter. But he also hired such strong talents as Canada Lee, John Hodiak, Hume Cronyn, William Bendix and Walter Slezak, the latter as the German who, in the guise of helping them, tries to steer the ship towards a German port.

Hitchcock used a number of tricks to keep the action moving. He had four lifeboats created, two of which remained intact while the other two were cut in half, one from fore to aft and the other from port to starboard. He filmed these in the studio tank, with underwater wires to hold the boat in place, but also in a regular soundstage. There, the boat was held in place by overhead wires as it rested on rollers that duplicated the movements of ocean waves. The results were so spectacular and fast-moving, few audiences noticed the film was set in a single location. Hitchcock was nominated for a Best Director Oscar®, and used some of the techniques he developed for shooting in tight places for later films like Rear Window (1954), Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). In the latter he even got to shoot a sequence in a phone booth.

By Frank Miller