Tallulah Bankhead wears a Patek Philippe

Alfred Hitchcock spent 1944 inside a single set: one lifeboat, nine survivors, and the German U-boat man they pull from the same water that sank them all. John Steinbeck wrote the story for fifty thousand dollars and then tried, without success, to get his name taken off the picture. Tallulah Bankhead, who had not appeared in a major film since 1932, took seventy-five thousand to play Connie Porter, the columnist who comes aboard immaculate, mink on her shoulders, camera and typewriter beside her, a Cartier diamond bracelet on her wrist, and the New York Film Critics Circle named her the year's best actress for what the film does to that woman. Hitchcock, with no crowd to walk through, hid his cameo in a newspaper ad for a fictional reducing product called Reduco, and found himself besieged by letters from viewers asking about it.

The sea takes Connie's things one by one. The camera goes early, the mink leaves the boat wrapped around a grieving mother who slips overboard in the night, and the bracelet ends as fishing bait, bitten once and lost in the scramble when a ship is sighted. Lifeboat is unusual in naming its luxuries out loud: the script calls the fishing rig bait by Cartier, and the watch gets its credit during the stretch when the survivors, suspicious of the German, want the time checked against his watch. Somebody tells Connie hers is running slow. Her answer is the identification: slow? That is a Philippe Patek. The brand arrives inverted, and the script preserves it that way.

Whether the watch on her wrist was in fact a Patek Philippe, and which one, the camera never settles. The rough production stills do not show a readable dial, and no watch writer has pinned a model, which is why the brand is as far as the identification goes. What exists is the dialogue and the film-watch column that flagged it: in Lifeboat, Tallulah Bankhead wears a Patek Philippe and says so. For a film from 1944, a brand name spoken on screen is about as good as documentation gets. The picture took three Academy Award nominations, for Hitchcock, for Steinbeck's story, and for Glen MacWilliams's black and white photography, and won none of them.