Alfred Hitchcock had a hard time devising one of his signature walk-ons for Lifeboat (1944), a film about a small group of people trying to survive on a small boat. What he eventually came up with was to have his picture in a newspaper advertisement for weight loss that floated among some debris around the boat. He had happened to have lost a considerable amount of weight from dieting around that time, so he was seen in both the “Before” and the “After” pictures. The text of the ad uses the tag line, “Reduco Obesity Slayer.”
The confined setting of the film limited Hitchcock’s options for his now obligatory cameo. After toying with the idea of appearing as a corpse floating past the boat, he decided instead to make use of 1943 photographs showing his dramatic weight loss from dieting:
In 1943, Hitchcock made a New Year’s resolution: From now on, he would eat and drink sensibly. He liked to tell interviewers that his weight-loss diet consisted of only a cup of coffee for breakfast and lunch, and a steak and salad for dinner. It wasn’t always that ascetic, but his resolve to lose one hundred pounds in record time was proof of tremendous willpower, and he swiftly lost enough to unveil the new “thin” Hitchcock for Lifeboat.
How would the director contrive to squeeze his expected cameo into a film set entirely at sea, in a lifeboat? Even Hitchcock was stumped for a while, until the solution dawned on him. He would immortalize his profile in a before-and-after newspaper advertisement for the Reduco Obesity Slayer corset. “My favorite role,” he crowed to François Truffaut.
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| Alfred Hitchcock eating lamb chops. |
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| Alfred Hitchcock during the making of Lifeboat. |
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