Generally considered the first film noir directed by a woman, The Hitch-Hiker, a trim, nasty true-crime saga set mostly in dusty Mexico, doesn’t reflect a feminine sensibility in any way.
Director Ida Lupino had been an actor for nearly two decades – her best-known films in that capacity are They Drive By Night, High Sierra, The Sea Wolf, and Out Of The Fog, all made ca. 1940-41 – when she stepped behind the camera, blithely unconcerned by the fact that female directors essentially didn’t exist at that time.
Her first four efforts centred on troubled women (and one of them, 1950’s Outrage, dared to directly tackle rape as a subject), but there’s no oestrogen whatsoever in The Hitch-Hiker, as spare and muscular a picture as the 1950s ever produced. The film was inspired by actual events that were still fresh in the public’s mind, and Lupino could do tense atmosphere with the best of them.
In December 1950 and January 1951, an ex-con named Billy Cook went on a killing spree that took him halfway across the country, from Missouri to California, and eventually into Mexico. He murdered an entire family that stopped to pick him up, a crime so well-publicized that Jim Morrison referred to it 20 years later in “Riders On The Storm” – Cook was the second verse’s “killer on the road, [whose] brain is squirming like a toad.” Released in March 1953, only three months after Cook was executed, The Hitch-Hiker fictionalises his final run, when he bummed a ride from two men on a hunting trip and forced them to drive him across the border. Here, the sadistic killer is called Emmett Myers (William Talman, who went on to play Hamilton Burger, the prosecuting attorney Perry Mason defeated every week), and his largely helpless victims are Roy (Edmond O’Brien) and Gil (Frank Lovejoy), best friends who were kind enough to help out a guy whose car appeared to have broken down.
After the screening, Mia Bays and Joanna Duncombe from the agency-for-change Birds’ Eye View will host an illustrated talk about the film, about director Ida Lupino’s journey from S.E London to Hollywood stardom as an actress then director, and on the female gaze in film noir.
Birds’ Eye View’s mission is to bring ever-greater audiences to films by women. We celebrate our 15th anniversary in 2018 as an agency for change, and are now a year-round campaign, having once been the UK’s foremost film festival for films by women. Birds’ Eye View is run by industry heavyweights from across the film value chain and have over 25k followers, and is run by Mia Bays, a producer of an Oscar winner and multiple BAFTA nominated fiction and documentary features. We are avid film lovers who celebrate the female gaze in all its different incarnations in an intersectional and inclusive way. All welcome.
Joanna Duncombe is a film programmer and curator. She is now the curator and producer for Birds’ Eye View’s new Film Influencer programme, and previously worked as a film programmer for the Independent Cinema Office and programme director for the London Short Film Festival. She is the UK programmer for the Victoria Film Festival in Canada.
