The 1944 movie “Lifeboat” received three Academy Award nominations: Best Director (Alfred Hitchcock), Best Story (John Steinbeck) and Best Cinematography (Glen MacWilliams).
See the interesting digression below.
Seventy-five years later, another film with the same title has been nominated. “Lifeboat” is up for the Academy Award in the “Documentary Short” category. This half-hour “Lifeboat” follows a volunteer crew of a ship sponsored by the German nonprofit Sea-Watch attempting to rescue refugees fleeing North Africa in dangerously overcrowded and unseaworthy boats and inflatable rafts.
Watching the Academy Awards ceremony is frustrating because one likely has not seen and doesn’t know where to see the nominees in the “short” categories. Short films are rarely shown with feature films. The best hope is to watch for screenings at a so-called art[house movie theater. In this case, The New Yorker magazine has arranged to make this particular nominee available on its web site.
“’Lifeboat’ captures, up close, the experience of motoring out, encountering vessels packed with migrants, distributing life jackets, helping migrants aboard, and providing them with medical care, water, and space to rest before transferring them to boats bound for Europe.”
You will be in awe of the volunteers’ efforts and persistence in what is a nearly hopeless mission and in despair with the part of humankind that makes such efforts necessary.
Read The New Yorker’s report here.
Interesting digression – Alfred Hitchcock was known for his very brief cameo appearances in his movies. He showed up only for a second or two as a face in the crowd, a pedestrian on the sidewalk or passenger on a bus or train. Part of the fun of viewing a Hitchcock film was to keep an eye out to spot him on the screen. The entire movie “Lifeboat” takes place in a lifeboat surrounded by nothing but water. Hitchcock solved this problem by appearing in an advertisement on the back page of a newspaper actor William Bendix peruses. Having recently lost weight, the director appears in before and after profile photos for “Reduco Obesity Slayer” ad.
