Lifeboat

Lifeboat (1944) is a WWII drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Alfred Hitchcock — one of his most audacious formal experiments. The entire film plays out in a single setting: a small lifeboat adrift in the Atlantic after a torpedo strike sinks both an Allied freighter and the German U-boat that attacked it.

Eight survivors climb aboard — journalist Connie Porter, a merchant officer, a working-class machinist, a nurse, a black stoker, a war profiteer, and a young woman clutching a dead infant. Then they pull the German U-boat captain out of the water. He's the only one with navigation skills. He's also the enemy. Hitchcock locks these people together and watches what fear, desperation, and prejudice do to an improvised coalition. The lifeboat becomes a compressed argument about how democratic societies deal with an adversary in their midst.

Tallulah Bankhead leads the cast alongside William Bendix, Walter Slezak, and Hume Cronyn. The script came from a John Steinbeck story. Stream Lifeboat (1944) online on iFILM.