It’s not just me any more. New York Press critic Armond White has stood up and strongly praised Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, which recently came out on a Fox Home Video DVD. Lifeboat shows Hitchcock using “suspense tactics to reveal spiritual and philosophical mystery, [and] thus achieves profundity akin to The Birds. Hitchcock’s famous toying with psychological dread [in this film] has a complexity that also speaks to the present political moment. Contemporary critics feel no relation to John Steinbeck’s story, to judge by the DVD’s recent reviews; they simply dismiss it as WWII sentimentality. [But] Lifeboat deals with moral and sexual compulsion no less effectively than Vertigo. Hitchcock looks deeply into the circumstances of human crisis and creates in your mind (before your eyes) the essence of their terror, passion, vitality and horror. The reason Godard called Hitchcock ‘the greatest poet among us’ was to point out this gift for imagining the depth of human experience in the most deceptively simple, ‘popular’ ways. Between silent Griffith and Spielberg/DePalma, Hitchcock stands as the finest exemplar of genre filmmaking. But actually, his best films transcend genre and become strangely poetic visions”.