Definitely there's provocation: the Nazi has murdered the seaman whose leg he previous amputated: yet Hitchcock's remedy of the scene leaves doubtless as to his reaction and ours. The killing is characterised by way of a messy, out of control violence within which we're stunned to work out the nurse (especially) engaging: a reaction conrmed by means of the protest of the one personality who holds again from what quantities to mob violence and lynch law—the Negro. The scene is intensely annoying simply because we percentage the fury of the attackers sufciently to suppose ourselves in my opinion interested by the killing, and are whilst made to suppose ashamed of that involvement. The lm conveys the experience that the attackers‘ basic motivation is a wish for revenge on a guy who has made fools of them. We nd within the lm that common Hitchcockian counterpointing of depression and optimism. The despair—amazing, relatively, for an American ‘I6 HITCHCOCKS motion pictures made in i94;——arises from the experience that the Nazi is the one one who can regulate the placement, and that his energy is the power of the Nazi doctrines—-the energy of ruthlessness and inhumanity, of whole loss of scruple achieve an finish. And it's a power which may serve strong ends. Joe, the seaman (William Bendix), will surely have died from his gangrenous leg if the Nazi (a physician in civilian lifestyles) had now not amputated it; and it truly is transparent that nobody else has both the facility or the determination to accomplish the operation with out him. lt is made nearly unendurably terrible through the implied primitiveness: the shot of the jackknife held over the ame to be sterilized makes the blood run chilly: the Nazi plays it with no the slightest lack of composure. we can't aid admiring him, and it turns into very difcult for us, during the lm, to retract our admiration: to attract the road among what's admirable and what detestable, considering that either spring from a similar resource. The Nazi is risky (as such a lot of lm Nazis usually are not) simply because there's lots to be acknowledged for him. in addition to him, the morally natural characters are impotent. And it truly is signicant that the nature who lm comes nearest to being a “hero"—the Marxist stoker (john Hodiak)— is the closest (the aspect is made explicitly) to the Nazi in outlook, having an analogous ruthless choice whose influence is softened, in spite of the fact that, by means of our knowledge that it springs from hot human sympathies. lf Hitchcock indicates himself, in Lifeboat and in Rope, a devoted anti-fascist, he doesn't nevertheless exhibit himself a devoted democrat. The alert reader might imagine forward to Mark Rutland in Mamie; even though it's going to be insisted that Hitchcock may not likely advocate the interpretation of Mark's habit into political phrases: it's made legitimate purely by way of being rooted in a deep instinctive-sympathetic stream. The optimism that qualies this implicit depression is published in a edition at the experience-therapy subject matter. The Tallulah Bankhead personality is marvelously discovered in the course of the lm, a truly distinctive, complicated perspective to her dened: issues for, issues opposed to.