Final Rating: 2.5/5
Provocative titles can help sell a movie for viewers. It alerts you and forces you to pay attention. Especially in the era of boring one-word titles or franchises that tack on as many qualifiers as they can. When researching films playing at SIFF seeing one called Hitchcock’s Pro-Nazi Film it more than piques your attention. As someone who puts Alfred Hitchcock on the Mount Rushmore of filmmakers, owns about thirty of his films and is trying to watch his entire filmography (along with producing several podcasts about his work including 66: Contra Zoom Presents… Hitchcock), this title more than raised my eyebrows.
Daphné Baiwir’s latest film Hitchcock’s Pro-Nazi Film looks at whether or not the esteemed director’s 1944 film Lifeboat was helping the war effort or potentially aiding the enemy. If you haven’t seen the movie, a merchant ship gets torpedoed and sinks with a handful of survivors making it onto a tiny lifeboat. The group looks for anyone that is still alive in the water and pulls a man aboard who ends up being the captain of the U-boat that sank them, aka a Nazi.
It’s been about seven years since I watched Lifeboat, but at the time I gave it four stars and wrote in my Letterboxd review “The politics and group dynamic are all skillfully acted and the twists are surprising. Hitchcock, having seen his home country bombed out by the Nazi’s sure took his sights on fascism and Third Reich front and center in this brutal take down of them.”
When WWII was ramping up, Alfred Hitchock had already departed his homeland of England for America. While the United States hadn’t joined the war effort yet, London was experiencing mass bombings by Germany. Prominent British filmmakers were making propaganda films to encourage people to enlist or find other ways to support the country.
Hitchcock was being blasted in the press of his homeland and being called a deserter for not doing more to support his countrymen. At the time in the United States, they had enacted the Neutrality Act, so Hitchcock was actually defying laws when he made 1940’s Foreign Correspondent, a film that encouraged America to join in the fight and help England a full year before they eventually did.
At the same time writer John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, was asked by Hitchcock if he would write a script based on an idea he had about a downed ship and its survivors. Steinbeck wrote a screenplay and while Hitchcock liked what he did, he still brought in several additional writers to help make the story more to his style, with Jo Swerling being the final and most important contributor.
The final product changed Steinbeck’s focus from the black sailor and the nurse characters to the female journalist and industrialist instead. Stenibeck wrote the story, per Hitchcock’s instruction, that the boat was representative of America as a whole, with his interpretation being that minorities and marginalized people are the real heart of the country. The U-boat captain was given more intrigue to better reflect a Hitchcock thriller too.
When the film came out critics were quick to point out the racism directed towards Joe (Canada Lee) the only person of colour in the film, which included referring to him as “George”, which at the time was a derogatory name towards black men and keeping him separated from the rest of the group. Most importantly it was argued that Willi (Walter Slezak) the U-boat captain was being treated as an equal and trusted to guide their rowboat, Hitchcock was being far too accommodating towards Germany as a whole.
Baiwir covers this entire production cycle showing Hitchcock in his attempts to secure a contract with an American studio all the way through the release and blowback of Lifeboat. The film uses Hitchcock scholars to help tell the story of his background and narration to fill in the gap for specific details.
The film certainly includes lots of interesting information about Hitchcock’s career including his time during WWII when he made a couple of French short films (something I had no idea about) that eventually got pulled from theaters due to the war ending and the Allies not wanting to portray Germans as the enemy anymore.
Unfortunately as stated at the beginning of this review when you have a film with as provocative of a title like Hitchcock’s Pro-Nazi Film, you expect some fireworks. The movie runs 90 minutes and it takes until almost the hour mark before it even begins to approach its thesis. It is more concerned with giving biographical details leading up to the release and reception of Lifeboat, than it is with giving a reason for such a provocative title.
If you are a fan of Hitchcock’s work it was more than intriguing enough to hear discussions of his films like The Ring and Torn Curtain in regards to his views on race and learn about his war effort shorts Aventure malgache and Bon Voyage made in French. But if you have seen Lifeboat, it doesn’t add a ton of context about why this might have been considered a “pro-Nazi film”, and if you haven’t I feel like you likely will be disappointed viewing it for the first time in 2024 based on such a scintillating documentary title.
Hitchcock’s Pro-Nazi Film was seen during the 2024 Seattle International Film Festival. Thank you to the festival for the screener.
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