Lifeboat (1944)

During World War II, several British and American passengers of a ship get stranded on a lifeboat in the ocean after their ship is torpedoed by a German submarine, which was also destroyed in the process. One of the survivors of the U-Boat is rescued by them.

 You can read the story of this film's reception on Wikipedia (here's the link). In short, critics Bosley Crowther and Dorothy Thompson, and others who go unnamed, pointed out that the film was actually pro-Nazi propaganda. The film's director gave a half-assed defense statement, which was followed by a moronic one by his lead actress. In the context of the plot, the German character is the one with a solid reasoning, and without him the allies would all perish were it not for a deus ex machina event. The argument saying that this is supposed to awaken the allies to their disunion is ridiculous. How is that cohesion to be achieved? The film does not say. The point that one should not trust a Nazi is such a trivial one -- considering you are a war enemy of the Nazis -- that it is hard to believe they would make a movie to demonstrate that. The film has an ambiguous take on democracy: the Nazis were bad because they were not democratic (never mind the fact that Hitler came to power by popular vote), but this is also depicted as a strength. From a factual perspective this is even more problematic, since England and America did not win the war by themselves. There was a hugely significant contribution by the USSR, which was never democratic in the commonly accepted sense of the word (and, in my opinion, in any sense one could imagine). Anyway, in the scope of the film's allegory, there is no room for discussing the spaces and subspaces of democracy. A military environment is not supposed to be democratic; any person of minimal intelligence should know that. It is the military organization as a whole who is or is not subordinated to a democratic power. But the major point perhaps is that the proposed allegory is a problematic one to begin with. People in general are not confined with their enemies in a restricted location in a real war.

Rating: 38