is an incredibly tense movie, with the question of what Myers might do to these men left hanging over the entire run time. Will he kill them? Will they escape? At seventy-one minutes, The Hitch-Hiker is a taut, economical film, sparse in dialogue and completely without subplots. It features only a handful of characters and just a few locations. This ramps up the tension, keeping the focus on the three men inside the car, all driving toward an inevitable end—one way or the other.
The constant threat of violence is heightened by the enclosed space of the car, a tension Lupino maintains by using a series of tight shots centered on the faces of the men. Outside the car lies the vast, desolate landscape of the Mexican desert, but even these wide-angle shots feel constricted. She uses white-hot lighting to demonstrate just how inhospitable the terrain is, making any escape impossible. Lupino has explained her thinking in the book, The Making of The Hitch-Hiker, saying, “To heighten the film’s suspense, I shot scenes in the claustrophobic confines of the car, and to intensify the grit outside, on hot, barren expanses of the desert.”
In those rare moments when the three men stop and get out of the car, Lupino offers tantalizing glimpses of a possible escape. But as each of those ideas are thwarted, the tight close-ups return, echoing the constriction felt inside the car…until soon that is where they are, once again.
It is also a beautifully atmospheric film, shot in exquisite black-and-white by cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. Musuraca was especially gifted at stark chiaroscuro camerawork, as demonstrated by his work on Out of the Past and The Spiral Staircase. His style involved highly contrasting the light and shadows—a signature of the film noir genre.
Notably absent from this example of film noir is the femme fatale. The villain here is Myers, portrayed in a chilling performance by William Talman. Like the real killer, William Cook, Emmett Myers has one paralyzed eye that always remains open. Roy and Gil never know when he’s asleep or awake. And the way he toys with them is disturbing—there is a scene where Myers forces Gil to shoot a can out of Roy’s hand. “It’s just a game,” he says; “What’s the matter? You scared?”
At the time The Hitch-Hiker was made, Ida Lupino was the only female director working in Hollywood. She was born into a family of entertainers in England in 1918. When she arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s, Lupino was initially styled as a Jean Harlow-esque teenage sexpot, and she fought for years to win more substantial acting roles. But by the 1940s, with films like High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart behind her, Ida Lupino had become one of the most successful actresses around. She studied the work of the directors with whom she was paired and had her first chance to step behind the lens by accident. In the late 1940s, Lupino and her husband Collier Young had decided to set up their own production company called, “The Filmmakers.” Their goal was to make realistic movies based around social issues. The first film they produced was Not Wanted, which looked at the stigma surrounding unwed mothers. Lupino and Young had hired veteran Hollywood director Elmer Clifton to helm the picture, but when he suffered heart problems during preproduction, Ida Lupino stepped in to finish it.
From there, her directing career took off. And after making four films focused on women’s issues, she transitioned into hard-hitting, fast-paced thrillers with The Hitch-Hiker. Lupino wrote the screenplay alongside Collier Young, who by that stage had become her ex-husband, with writer Robert Joseph also doing some work on the script. For research, Lupino interviewed the real-life hostages of William Cook and was able to get permission to make the film from both the victims and from Cook himself. This allowed her to sprinkle in true facts among the fiction—though in order to appease the censors, Lupino had to cut down the body count from six to three.
The Hitch-Hiker ended up being one of her most successful films. Made on a budget of just $100,000, the movie earned large profits at the box office. It also garnered great reviews, with TIME magazine calling it “a crisp little thriller.” But ironically, this success ended up contributing to the demise of Lupino’s production company. Collier Young was unhappy that RKO Pictures were walking away with the bulk of the film’s profits, so he decided that he would start to distribute their films himself. But without the experience necessary to pull this off, the company’s finances crumbled.
Despite making a hit, after The Hitch-Hiker, Ida Lupino was only given the opportunity to direct two more features. She later transitioned into directing television and continued to act until 1978, before passing away in 1995.
Included in the official press notes for The Hitch-Hiker was an interview with Lupino called “Ida Lupino Retains Her Femininity as Director.” Speaking about her style as a filmmaker on set, Lupino was quoted as saying: “I retain every feminine trait. Men prefer it that way. They’re more cooperative if they see that fundamentally you are of the weaker sex even though [you are] in a position to give orders, which normally is the male prerogative, or so he likes to think, anyway. While I’ve encountered no resentment from the male of the species for intruding into their world, I give them no opportunity to think I’ve strayed where I don’t belong. I assume no masculine characteristics, which can often be a fault of career women rubbing shoulders with their male counterparts, who become merely arrogant or authoritative.”
Considering the time in which she lived, it’s remarkable that Ida Lupino had the type of career that she did at all. She was an actress who made the decision to step away from her successful and promising career to go behind the camera, as well as a filmmaker who made bold movies looking at gender roles at a time when there were no other women doing anything similar in Hollywood. To survive, Ida Lupino knew she had to be strong-willed, ambitious, and cunning. She wasn’t taught how to direct, she simply did it instinctively. And as The Hitch-Hiker shows, she could do it just as well as any man.
With The Hitch-Hiker, Ida Lupino was a rare woman director who explored masculinity and identity within the genre of film noir. Gone are the femme fatales and damsels in distress; here Lupino focuses solely on male characters. Her protagonists must decide if they are heroes (i.e., “real men”) or not. She uses simple camera techniques to enhance and hold the tension throughout the entire story. By making this film, Lupino proved that women could be just as adept at directing suspense thrillers as their male counterparts.
★Ida Lupino is credited with directing six feature films on subjects ranging from rape to kidnapping. She was the first woman to helm a film noir and the first since Dorothy Arzner to consistently work in Hollywood.
★Lupino’s director’s chair bore her nickname:
“Mother of All of Us.”
★The tagline for The Hitch-Hiker read “There’s Death in His Upraised Thumb!”
★As part of her research, Ida Lupino visited the real serial killer, William Cook, at San Quentin prison. She later called the experience “very scary.”
★Though he portrayed a dangerous killer here, actor
William Talman went on to find fame playing Raymond Burr’s nemesis, LA District Attorney Hamilton Burger, in the TV show Perry Mason.
★Lupino often appeared in her own movies, making cameo appearances—just like Alfred Hitchcock.
Cleo from 5 to 7
(Cléo
