Compared with Hitchcock's other films, "Lifeboat" has a distinctly different temperament, both in subject matter and shooting techniques. The film is considered Hitchcock's major experiment in the art of "minimalism": no flashbacks, cutscenes, no soundtrack, all shot on studio soundstages... It must be said that this is another innovation of this eccentric and talented fat man. The film is also considered one of Hitchcock's "limited-setting" films (his "Rear Window", "Phone Murder" can also be classified in this category), and appeared in his films A rare "group portrait play" in the works. This makes people naturally think of some later movies, such as "Twelve Angry Men", and then calculate how much the two are similar, and how much the latter may be inspired by the former.
"Lifeboat" was filmed during the height of World War II, which made it seem politically explicit and undercut many of Hitchcock's signature suspenseful elements. Although it is not difficult to see from the character setting that the film considers issues such as race, class and gender, the theme of politics still dominates the entire film. Therefore, the above-mentioned "group portrait" essentially only shows the spiritual contest between the two sides in World War II. This is probably why the original author of the story, John Steinbeck, decided to cross his name from the list of creators. There are too many differences between his naturalistic tendencies and Hitchcock's stylized presentation.
This political intention was not only reflected in the film, but also appeared in the comments of various parties at the time. On January 13, 1944, the day after "Lifeboat" was released in the United States, The New York Times wrote an article expressing its dissatisfaction with the film, believing that it glorified the Nazis and was suspected of smearing the democratic system. No matter which side it is, opposition to the Nazis is the default premise.
These controversies now seem stale, irrelevant, or at least less intense than they were then. While watching the film, another age-old controversy came to my mind: Is raping a prostitute worse than raping a nun? In Lifeboat, the question can be completely translated into: Does a Nazi soldier have to be more damned than a normal person?
I was amazed at why I had doubts about the answers to these two questions, since at one point I thought I already knew the answer to this question. Needless to say, from a humanitarian standpoint, the answer to both questions is no. But gradually, I found myself really confused by human prejudice.
So I prefer to see Lifeboat as a film that deconstructs prejudice. Many times, the so-called political correctness just provides us with a shortcut, this concept is ready-made and does not need to be thought through. I don't deny these political correctness, but I think that the brain circuits it forms in people's brains are too simple and limit the development of people's cognition. Like many movies that deconstruct crime, Lifeboat gave me the answer that the problem of prejudice is unsolved.
Interestingly, in a recent video program "Thirteen Invitations" produced by One-way Space, Xu Zhiyuan expressed his original intention of producing this program, "I will set out with my prejudices and wait for these prejudices to be broken or re-opened. Confirmation". I suddenly agree with the statement that without prejudice, there is no way of seeing the world.
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