Women's Pictures - Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker
Thursday, March 12, 2015 at 2:00PM
What a difference four years make! Well, four years and three movies. The disadvantage of having only a single month to cover a director’s entire body of work is that we have to cherry pick individual films representative of overall trends. So, even though Ida Lupino spent the period between 1949 and 1953 directing three (and a half) films which would fall under the category of women’s pictures that we advocated for so strongly last week, we now have to skip forward to the next moment in her career: film noir. However, while Lupino stopped making films featuring exclusively female protagonists, she maintained her commitment to mixing truth and drama in her stylish thriller, The Hitch-Hiker.
The film opens with a title card to inform the viewer that The Hitch-Hiker is “...the true story of a man and a gun and a car.” Surprisingly, despite the Motion Picture Production Code’s prohibition of true crime stories, The Hitch-Hiker actually is based on fact: in 1951, two hunters were kidnapped by killer Billy Cook. Cook forced the two men to drive him to Baja California, where he was recognized and apprehended by Mexican police. In order to tell this tale of survival and murder, Lupino circumvented the Production Code two ways: First, by changing just enough of the facts and names to give the story plausible deniability (and added drama). Second, by hiding violence in shadow and suggestion as only film noir can.
See how well film noir survives in the desert after the jump...
The film opens with a wordless prologue obscured by darkness. The eponymous killer, posing as a hitchhiker, goes on a murderous spree. His body count climbs but is hidden offscreen, suggested by a woman’s purse falling from a car or an ominous shadow cutting across car door. Neither the killer (renamed Emmett Myers and played with psychotic quiet by William Talman) nor the extent of his crimes are revealed until he’s picked up on a pitch-black highway by two unwary fisherman, Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and Roy Collins (noir veteran Edmond O’Brien). From this simple premise - three men, one gun, and a car on the border to Mexico - Lupino spins a story of survival and sadism.
As we saw in Young Lovers, Ida Lupino’s initial struggle as a director was raising stakes without tripping into melodrama. The Hitch-Hiker revels in the macabre; most notably Emmet Myers’s deformed right eye cannot shut, making it impossible to tell if he is asleep. But Lupino directs these details deftly, using the uncertainty of Myers’s always open eye to stage a terrifying midnight escape attempt by the two fishermen. As they crawl away, they don't dare look back. Myers awake? Can he see the desperate men as they try to sneak away?
The best part of The Hitch-Hiker is how unconventional it is for a film noir. Noir, when considered as a genre, is most often the shady setting for the corrupt city. However, The Hitch-Hiker is set in the Mexican desert, miles from mankind. Under the Lupino’s eye, the desert maroons the three men in a white expanse of rock and dust by day, and swallows them in darkness at night. In this context, noir shadows elevate the threat of violence from one man with a gun into a constant presence lurking around the kidnapped fishermen. Though it lacks the social justice message of her previous films, The Hitch-Hiker is a giant leap in skill for Ida Lupino. The actress who had vaulted to fame in film noir had mastered it as a director as well. And in the process, Lupino gave drivers a reason to fear the man on the side of the highway.
3/19 - The Bigamist (1953) - Ida Lupino and Joan Fontaine are married to the same man. (Available on Amazon Prime)
3/26 - The Trouble With Angels (1966) - Lupino's last feature film involves Rosalind Russell, Hayley Mills, and nuns. (Available on Amazon Prime)
Reader Comments (4)
Great choice, and quite a creepy little movie. I always forget to bring up this film in discussions about noir. It's too bad that Talman is most known for the thankless role of Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason (although an arrest for possession of marijuana and indecent exposure - charges later dropped - almost derailed that).
As much as I adore The Trouble with Angels I think this is Ida's best film as a director. It's incredibly lean and perfectly cast with three actors just made for film noir. As with many directors that were also actors she elicits terrific performances from her cast in all her films.
I was very impressed by Lupino's use of shadows to give that classic noir look and feel in this film. I thought the scenes in the car were particularly claustrophobic. Who knew that good old Hamilton Burger, actor William Talman could ooze creepiness so well ? A very effective film of it's type, and it makes it obvious that she could add style to a screenplay.
Yeah, this is definitely the best of Lupino's films---it sucks that she didn't do more movies in that genre, since she showed a real talent for it. There are virtually no film noirs form that era directed by women, which makes this film even more notable from a historical perspective.