Lifeboat vs. Double Indemnity

Lifeboat

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Lifeboat is a single-location survival story set during World War II, when an American ship carrying civilians from the U.S. to Britain is bombed by a German U-boat, which is in turn bombed by the ship. Set around its 1944 release, it explores the morality of Americans from very different backgrounds when they’re forced to make decisions for their own and others’ survival. 

The opening credits play over the sinking ship, then foreshadow what’s to come as the camera pans over wreckage floating in the water: an American Red Cross container, a magazine, playing cards, and a dead German soldier floating facedown. Then we meet Tallulah Bankhead as Connie Porter, sitting alone in a lifeboat, surrounded by her bags, wearing a mink coat and diamond bracelet, sighing at the run in her stocking. She is a celebrity reporter, and she is absolutely fabulous.

Gradually, other survivors join her on the boat. One of the last is a young woman clinging to her dead baby. Finally, a pair of hands appear on the side of the boat, and the others help him up. He thanks them: “Danke schön.”

The young mother, Mrs. Higley, is an incredibly tragic character and represents the horrors of war. She survived a bombing in England, went to New York to be treated for shell shock, gave birth to her baby, and was sailing home to be with her husband when the ship was bombed. She drifts in and out of reality, unable to accept that her baby has died. When she’s asleep, the others pray and bury her baby at sea. When she wakes up, she notices that Connie has put her mink coat on her and fixates on it, saying how nice it is, before suddenly realizing her baby is gone. She screams at the German, who’s framed in close-up by dark, sinister clouds, “You killed him, didn’t you?” Unconcerned, the German yawns and goes to sleep. The next morning, the others realize that Mrs. Higley jumped overboard while they slept.

As the survivors settle into a routine, differences in class and ideology drive how they behave. Connie is ostentatiously rich and relishes her nice things that she earned through her smarts and charm. Fluent in German, she translates for the German and is central to the dilemma of what to do with him. Over time, she loses all her prized possessions she’d hauled into the boat: her camera, typewriter, mink coat, and finally her good luck diamond bracelet. This strips away the armor she’d used to protect herself.

Connie has an enemies-to-lovers story with Kovac, a handsome, working class guy with tattoos of his ex-girlfriends’ initials all over his chest. Kovac despises the German and repeatedly suggests throwing him overboard. During an argument, he implies that Connie is bourgeois, and she calls him a “fellow traveler,” meaning he’s sympathetic to leftist politics. He has family in Czechoslovakia and feels a personal hatred towards Nazis.

Gus, a sailor with a badly injured leg, is funny and loves talking about his girlfriend Rosie. At one point, he flips through a newspaper featuring Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo as the before-and-after models in a weight-loss ad for “Reduco OBESITY SLAYER.” He says he agrees with Kovac because his name was Schmidt before he changed it to Smith. Ritt is a wealthy factory owner who advocates treating the German like a POW. Other minor characters include Alice, a nurse; Stan, a sailor who flirts with Alice; and Joe, the only Black man on the boat, who mostly keeps to himself.

The German, speaking through Connie, insists Kovac is sailing them in the wrong direction. He knows this because he secretly checks his hidden compass. Suspicious, Connie addresses him as “Herr Kapitan,” and he immediately replies, revealing he was the U-boat captain who torpedoed their ship. He introduces himself as Willi, explains that he was a surgeon, and says Gus’s leg has gangrene and needs to be amputated.

Gus refuses, terrified that Rosie will leave him if he can’t dance with her anymore. Connie persuades him, “Some of my best friends are women,” and convinces him that Rosie would want him to stay alive. With help from the others, Willi performs the amputation during a storm.

Later, Alice shocks everyone by blurting out, “I’m glad the freighter was torpedoed.” Connie asks her why, and Alice admits she had an affair with a married man and didn’t want to return to him in London. Connie says she knows all about married men, and starts to repeat her line, “Some of my best friends . . . ” before falling asleep. Alice confides in Stan, who listens without judging.

As Gus’s health gets worse, the group presses Kovac to follow Will’s navigational advice, and he gives in. But that night Stan uses the planets to navigate and realizes Willi lied. The group confronts Willi and find his secret compass. Kovac pulls a knife on him, but they’re suddenly caught in another storm, destroying their sail and washing away their supplies. In all the chaos, Connie falls into Kovac’s arms and they kiss. Willi suddenly shouts orders in English, and Gus remarks, “What do you know? We got a Fuhrer.”

After the storm, everyone lies around, thirsty and starving, except for Willi, who energetically rows while singing. When everyone’s asleep but Willi, Gus wakes up and hallucinates that he’s talking to Rosie. He asks Willi what he can do to thank him for saving his life, and Willi says, “Remember your name is Schmidt” then points to Rosie waiting nearby. When Gus turns, Willi pushes him overboard.

The others wake up and see that Gus is gone. They confront Willi, who calmly explains that he went overboard, and discover his hidden stash of water and energy tablets. He tells them they’ll be at the German supply ship soon and it’s too bad Schmidt couldn’t wait a little longer. Alice screams and attacks him, and the others join in, beating and throwing him overboard, using Gus’s shoe until he goes under.

Close to death, everyone is brutally honest. Stan proposes to Alice, and she says yes. Ritt laments joining a mob to kill a man, and Connie, no longer detached, rants that they had been “Prisoners of the man we’d saved . . . practically heilling him because he was kind enough and strong enough to take us to a concentration camp!” She calls them quitters, then proposes they use her diamond bracelet as fishing bait. They catch a fish, but drop the line with her bracelet on it when they spot a ship.

This is the German supply ship, and Connie jokes, “Well, some of my best friends are in concentration camps.” Suddenly, a nearby American ship bombs the German ship. The survivors escape and pull a German soldier from the water. He says, “Danke schön.” Ritt says they should throw him back, but Alice instead treats his wounds, and the group remembers Mrs. Higley, her baby, and Gus.

While it was provocative for Hitchcock to make a movie about Americans facing off with a Nazi during World War II, the moral lessons in Lifeboat are unsatisfying. The characters either swing from one extreme to another or sand down their rough edges just enough to seem more human. Ritt regrets joining a mob to kill Willi, only to demand they kill another German soldier. Sweet, nurturing Alice admits she was so afraid of facing the consequences of her affair that she was glad her ship went down, killing dozens of people. Meanwhile, Kovac and Connie, complete opposites at the beginning, find common ground and maybe even romance after their shared suffering. The problem is that morally complex protagonists need a morally complex antagonist. Instead, Willi commits a war crime, lies to and manipulates his rescuers, hoards supplies, and encourages a suffering man to drown. He’s completely evil. This may have satisfied 1944 audiences’ desire to see a Nazi villain with no ambiguity, but it doesn’t make a very compelling story.

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Double Indemnity

Directed by Billy Wilder

Double Indemnity explores the ways self-delusion can ruin a person. Three examples are presented: the confident young man who thinks he’s smarter than he really is but allows greed and lust to overtake him, the femme fatale who manipulates everyone around her but has no moral center, and the unassuming but clever boss who unravels the mystery by listening to his gut but can’t see what’s happening right in front of him.

The movie opens with a silhouetted man on crutches walking toward the camera. It’s insurance salesman Walter Neff, played by cleft-chinned Fred MacMurray, pretending to be injured. He starts out completely healthy, handsome, flirtatious, and confident, ringing the doorbell of Phyllis Dietrichson to sell insurance to her husband. She easily seduces him and persuades him to help kill her husband, a scheme that involves Walter faking an injury and staging the body. By the end, after Walter’s boss Keyes figures out their plot, Walter pays for his actions, bleeding to death.

Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson is an iconic femme fatale because she uses her charm and beauty to manipulate people, then discards them once she gets what she wants. At first, she appears to be a beautiful young woman stuck in a miserable marriage with a man who hates her and favors his daughter. She seems to save herself by convincing Walter to help her kill him. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that she’s not just a victim. She forced her way into that marriage by letting the first wife die, tried to kill her husband’s daughter, and attempted to murder the men who helped her commit her crimes. She’s much more calculating and sinister than she lets on. And, of course, she receives the fatal punishment required by the Hays Code.

The final character is Walter’s boss Keyes, played by Edward G. Robinson. He and Walter have a close bond, shown when Keyes pats himself down for a match and Walter pulls one out and flicks it with his thumbnail to light Keyes’s cigar. Keyes is a short, doughy, clever investigator of insurance fraud, relying on his “little man,” which he calls his intuition, to suss out people trying to cheat the company. He’s usually right, but his affection for Walter, who he even vouches for when the cops suspect him, clouds his judgment. He basically pieces it all together, but he just can’t make himself see Walter’s role in it.

The movie is framed by Walter’s confession. He stumbles into his office late at night and records a message for Keyes while a blood stain spreads across his jacket. He tells Keyes he killed a man for money and a woman but got neither.

Walter first visits the Dietrichson house to sell auto insurance. Phyllis’s seduction begins immediately. She greets him from the second-floor landing wearing only a towel before disappearing to get dressed and slowly walking down the stairs, still buttoning her blouse as he looks up at her. They sit together, and he starts flirting: “That’s a honey of an anklet you’re wearing, Mrs. Dietrichson.” She tells him it has her initial engraved on it, signaling who the most important person in her life is. He finds her so alluring that he barely registers when she asks about accident insurance. She finally shuts him down by telling him to come back when her husband is home, and he asks if she’ll be there when he comes back: “Same chair, same perfume, same anklet?” The Hays Code was so conservative that a woman flashing her ankle was enough to get a man all riled up.

Walter returns a few days later to speak with Mr. Dietrichson, but he’s still not home. Phyllis again asks about accident insurance, claiming that her husband’s work at an oil company is dangerous. But when she suggests buying it without his knowledge, Walter grows suspicious: “Look baby, you can’t get away with it. You want to knock him off, don’t you?” He leaves.

He’s still thinking about that anklet when she comes to his apartment that evening. She complains that her husband is mean and abusive. She met him while nursing his first wife as she was dying. She hints at ways he might conveniently die, but Walter tells her Keyes would figure it out and she would hang. She tells him that her husband beats her. Walter figures out a way to deal with her husband.

They set the plan into motion. Walter convinces Mr. Dietrichson to sign a policy for auto insurance, which is secretly for accident insurance. He tells Phyllis that a fatal accident on a train would pay out double. She agrees to convince her husband to travel on his upcoming trip by train instead of driving. They covertly meet at a grocery store and make sure the accident policy is all set up. But Mr. Dietrichson breaks his leg at work, delaying his train trip. Phyllis grows anxious.

Eventually, Mr. Dietrichson decides to take the train after all. Walter makes sure he’s seen at home before sneaking over to Phyllis’s house and hiding in the back seat of her car. She starts driving her husband to the train station, but stops on a dark street and honks the horn. Walter sits up and strangles Mr. Dietrichson to death. They drive to the train station, where Walter impersonates him by using his crutches and keeping his face hidden under his hat. After distracting a fellow passenger, he jumps from the back of the train, and he and Phyllis place the body on the tracks. Driving home, he grills her on what she’s going to say to investigators and is surprised that she shows no emotions.

With Mr. Dietrichson taken care of, the next challenge is collecting the insurance money. Keyes considers that it could be an accident or suicide, which would void the policy. He doubts it was suicide since a man trying to kill himself wouldn’t jump from a train going only fifteen miles an hour, although an accident is still possible. Thinking they’re in the clear, Walter shows his affection for Keyes by flicking a match with his thumbnail and lighting his cigar.

But Keyes’s intuitive “little man” still isn’t satisfied. He says it doesn’t make sense that Mr. Dietrichson would take out accident insurance, break his leg, not file a claim, and then fall off the back of a train right after. He suspects that Phyllis murdered her husband, possibly with help from her stepdaughter Lola’s boyfriend, Nino.

Lola is also suspicious. She tells Walter that six years ago, her mom was treated for pneumonia by a nurse who left her exposed and alone in a room with the windows open, leading to her death two days later. The nurse had a look on her face that Lola never forgot. That nurse, Phyllis, later married her dad, and two days before he died, Lola caught her trying on black mourning hats and recognized the same expression in the mirror. She also mentions that she recently broke up with Nino, who has been spending a lot of time with her stepmother. Like Keyes, she thinks they killed her dad together.

Keyes eventually outlines to Walter what he believes happened, accurately reconstructing the crime except for mixing up Walter with Nino. He tells Walter that when two people commit a murder, they’re stuck with each other, headed straight for the cemetery. 

Walter confronts Phyllis at her house. He remembers the first time they met: “We were talking about automobile insurance. Only you were thinking about murder. And I was thinking about that anklet.” She reveals she’d been trying to make Nino jealous enough that he would go into a rage and kill Lola, taking care of that loose end. Walter realizes he was just a small part of her larger plan to eliminate everyone between her and her husband’s inheritance. He calls her rotten. When his back is turned, she shoots him. He walks toward her, asking why she won’t shoot again, and she says she can’t because she loves him. They hug, and he shoots her twice, killing her.

The story returns to Walter finishing his confession. Keyes appears behind him after following the trail of blood and says, “Walter, you’re all washed up.” Walter tells Keyes he didn’t suspect him because he was too close, sitting right across the desk. Keyes says, “Closer than that, Walter.” Walter struggles to light a match, and Keyes repeats their friendly gesture, using his thumbnail to light it for Walter.

Double Indemnity shows that nobody is as perceptive or in control as they think they are. Walter believed he could pull off the perfect murder, but he was so enamored with a beautiful woman that he couldn’t see how self-interested she really was. Phyllis assumed she could callously manipulate everyone around her, but her feelings for Walter stopped her from killing him before he killed her. And Keyes, genuinely decent but hardened by years uncovering deception, couldn’t see his close friend’s true intentions. Walter considered himself conniving, Phyllis saw herself as untouchable, and Keyes believed he was purely objective. Their distorted sense of themselves kept them from recognizing the truth until it was too late.

AND THE OSCAR GOES TO . . . BILLY WILDER