Civilians at War in Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, and Lifeboat

Abstract

Civilians at War in Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, and Lifeboat Nicholas Warner (bio) This essay seeks to demonstrate the distinctiveness and significance of an underappreciated aspect of Hitchcock's work: his contribution to the cinema of World War II. Although the Master of Suspense earned that sobriquet with pictures far removed from combat or military affairs, three films from his first years in America deal directly with war-related issues: the way that war can unexpectedly sweep up noncombatants in its wake; the importance of civilians playing active rather than passive roles in war; and the attempt to understand, properly identify, and accurately portray the enemy. Not surprisingly, the production of these films coincided with the war itself. Foreign Correspondent was released in August 1940, almost a year after the conflict began but before U.S. involvement; Saboteur, on which Hitchcock was working when Pearl Harbor was attacked, appeared in the spring of 1942; the third film, Lifeboat, premiered in January of 1944, when an Allied victory, though increasingly likely, was still far from certain. "Instinctively anti-fascist and deeply concerned about the fate of Britain," the London-born director was naturally drawn to the subject of war in the early 1940s.1 And, as we might expect, Hitchcock's treatment of war aligned with his own distinctive themes and style, rather than with those of more conventional war films. Accordingly, instead of battlefield scenes or troop maneuvers, his war films revolve around spies, saboteurs, fifth columnists, and the unexpected encounters of Allied civilians with Nazis, whether in or out of uniform.2 [End Page 67] Despite occasional accolades, Hitchcock's anti-fascist war films have received modest or qualified praise at best. Lifeboat is the most highly esteemed of the three, yet even it, as Thomas Leitch notes, "has attracted little sustained critical attention."3 I would argue that Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, and Lifeboat all deserve greater recognition for their unusually humanized depiction of the enemy, and their emphasis on the capacity—the necessity, even—of civilians assuming unofficial leadership roles in wartime. In pursuing this analysis, I build on a series of articles by Ina Rae Hark that deal extensively, though not exclusively, with the war films. Hark provides brilliant analyses of Hitchcock's contrast between the principled citizen-amateur and the jaded (or worse) professional; his presentation of the relationship between the press and democracy; and his explorations (as a relatively new resident of the United States) of the American character.4 While indebted to this work, my essay takes a different approach in its focus on the themes of the enemy and of leadership, and in its application to Hitchcock's films of leadership theory based on recent research in the social sciences. At this point, a brief overview of these issues is in order, after which I turn to a more detailed analysis of the films themselves. In contrast to stereotypical portrayals of the enemy, such as those found in innumerable propaganda posters and movies, Hitchcock's war films depict Axis agents not as caricatures or ogres, but as credible, multi-dimensional human beings. To be sure, some of Hitchcock's fascists, like the brutal thugs who torture Van Meer (Albert Basserman) in Foreign Correspondent, resemble the stereotypically evil Hollywood Nazi. But other fascist characters in Hitchcock's war films are more subtle and individualized.5 This is not to say that Hitchcock's anti-fascist war films attain some Tolstoyan height of character development; in Foreign Correspondent alone the dramatis personae draw on an array of standard types—the brash young American, the idealistic ingénue, the curmudgeonly newspaper editor, the comic drunk, the witty Englishman. Similar models account, in part, for characters in Hitchcock's other war films as well. But only in part. While clearly evil, [End Page 68] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Fisher and his accomplice plot murder over dog biscuits. Hitchcock's fascists are not just "stock figures" or, as some have claimed regarding Lifeboat, awe-inspiring supermen (an issue to be addressed when we come to that film).6 There is, rather, a greater psychological complexity in these characters than in the more common, less...