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:
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