(Alfred Hitchcock, 1944, Eureka!, PG)
This wartime masterwork began when Alfred Hitchcock was invited to work at 20th Century Fox and commissioned novelist John Steinbeck to write an extended scenario set in the mid-Atlantic , where the survivors of a torpedoed ship and a German submariner from the U-boat that sank them debate the value of the second world war.
Hitchcock transformed Steinbeck's brief text into a virtuoso thriller in which nine characters are confined throughout to a lifeboat and the only music is a couple of popular songs sung by the German and some tunes on a flute played by the great Canada Lee as a steward. Significantly, instead of being a caricatured villain, the Nazi intruder becomes a complex figure, which resulted in the liberal columnist Dorothy Thompson absurdly attacking the film for making him too formidable.
An authentic ensemble cast is led by the legendary Tallulah Bankhead who, in her only significant film, plays a cross between her outrageous self and the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White.
Immediately after completing Lifeboat, Hitchcock crossed the Atlantic to make two fascinating half-hour films in French about the work of the resistance under German occupation (Bon Voyage and Aventure malgache), to be shown after the liberation of France. Neither reached the screen until the 1980s, and both are included on this excellent Blu-ray DVD disc.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/apr/29/lifeboat-classic-dvd-french
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