The Hitch-Hiker was the first American mainstream film noir directed by a woman. It was selected in 1998 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."[4][5][6]
Plot
In the early 1950s, a hitchhiker robs and kills motorists who offer him rides. A suspect, Emmett Myers (Talman), is publicized in newspaper headlines.
Collins and Bowen comply, hoping they will be identified and stopped at the Mexico–United States border at Mexicali, but to their dismay they are let through. In Mexico, Myers sadistically terrorizes the pair—at one point forcing Bowen to shoot a tin can out of Collins' hand from a long distance—and revels in the ineffective attempts by Mexican law enforcement to catch him using checkpoints. After a tense moment while stopping to get food, they stop for the night. Collins and Bowen discuss their plans to escape, and agree that they must act at the right time or they will be killed.
The next morning, the car radio fails, and Myers berates Collins for breaking it, so Bowen must drive. Meanwhile, police investigators learn the three are together and deduce where Myers is planning to go. At a gas station, Myers kills a dog, while Bowen leaves his wedding ring for the police to find. Overnight, Collins and Bowen attempt to escape, but Collins injures his ankle, and the pair are recaptured. As the police investigation proceeds, investigators release false information to trick Myers, which seems to work. Later, when the car is damaged, Myers forces the group to continue on foot at gunpoint, and taunts them for missing opportunities to escape even if it would mean the other would be killed.[7]
Collins, Bowen, and Myers reach Santa Rosalía and head to a bar, where Myers tries to conceal his identity and find an English speaker. Learning the regular ferry to Guaymas has burned, Myers pays a fishing boat to take him there instead. However, as he prepares to leave with Collins and Bowen, a local resident recognizes Myers and alerts the authorities, who prepare to catch him at the pier. After a shootout and a scuffle, Myers is arrested and Collins and Bowen are freed unharmed.
The Hitch-Hiker was based on the 1950 killing spree of Billy Cook who, posing as a hitchhiker, murdered a family of five, kidnapped a Riverside County Sheriff's Department deputy and abandoned him in a desert (the deputy survived), and killed a traveling salesman, before attempting to flee to Mexico by taking two men on a hunting trip hostage and forcing them to drive him to Santa Rosalía. There, Cook was identified and apprehended by local police without incident. As Mexico then lacked a formal extradition treaty with the United States, Mexican authorities "extradited" him back to the U.S. by physically pushing him over the border, where he was taken into custody by waiting American law enforcement. Cook was tried, convicted, and received the death penalty. On December 12, 1952, Cook was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison in California.[8]
Lupino was a noted actress who began directing when Elmer Clifton got sick and couldn't finish the film he was directing for Filmakers Inc., the production company founded by Lupino and her husband Collier Young to make low-budget, issue-oriented movies. Lupino stepped in to finish the film and went on to direct her own projects. The Hitch-Hiker was her first hard-paced, fast-moving picture after four "women's" films about social issues.[13]
Lupino interviewed the two prospectors whom Billy Cook had held hostage, and got releases from them and from Cook as well, so that she could integrate parts of Cook's life into the script. To appease the censors at the Hays Office, however, she reduced the number of deaths to three.[8]The Hitch-Hiker premiered in Boston on March 20, 1953, to little fanfare[14] and immediately went into general release.[9] The film was marketed with the tagline: "When was the last time you invited death into your car?"
The Philadelphia Inquirer said that "with nothing more than three able actors, a lot of rugged scenery and their own impressive talents as producers, authors and director, Collier Young and Ida Lupino have brewed a grim little chiller". The Inquirer critic praised the performances and said the film was "directed with masculine strength by the amazing Miss Lupino".[16]
The New York Daily News gave the film three and a half of four stars, saying Lupino made "good and exciting use" of the real-life incident.[17]
The New York Times called the film an "unrelenting but superficial study of abnormal psychology coupled with standard chase melodrama". Critic A. H. Weiler complimented the performances and Lupino's "brisk direction", but criticized the plot as excessively predictable.[7]
The Detroit Free Press said that the film performed a public service by warning motorists about the dangers of picking up hitchhikers.[18]
Legacy
The film has been widely praised in the years since its release, and holds a 93% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 43 reviews.[19]
Critic John Krewson lauded the work of Ida Lupino, and wrote,
As a screenwriter and director, Lupino had an eye for the emotional truth hidden within the taboo or mundane, making a series of B-styled pictures which featured sympathetic, honest portrayals of such controversial subjects as unmarried mothers, bigamy, and rape ... in The Hitch-Hiker, arguably Lupino's best film and the only true noir directed by a woman, two utterly average middle-class American men are held at gunpoint and slowly psychologically broken by a serial killer. In addition to her critical but compassionate sensibility, Lupino had a great filmmaker's eye, using the starkly beautiful street scenes in Not Wanted and the gorgeous, ever-present loneliness of empty highways in The Hitch-Hiker to set her characters apart.[20]
Absolutely assured in her creation of the bleak, noir atmosphere – whether in the claustrophobic confines of the car, or lost in the arid expanses of the desert – Lupino never relaxes the tension for one moment. Yet her emotional sensitivity is also upfront: charting the changes in the menaced men's relationship as they bicker about how to deal with their captor, stressing that only through friendship can they survive. Taut, tough, and entirely without macho-glorification, it's a gem, with first-class performances from its three protagonists, deftly characterised without resort to cliché.[21]
In January 2014, a restored 35mm print was premiered by the Film Noir Foundation at Noir City 12 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. On April 6, 2014 The Hitch-Hiker was shown again at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Mary Ann Anderson author of The Making of The Hitch-Hiker appeared at this event.
While most films noir were filmed in claustrophobic cities, The Hitch-Hiker was filmed in the desert southwestern United States (territory similar to that of Baja California, where most of the story takes place), mostly in wilderness and small villages. Critics Bob Porfiero and Alain Silver, in a review and analysis of the film, praised Lupino's use of shooting locations. They wrote, "The Hitch-Hiker's desert locale, although not so graphically dark as a cityscape at night, isolates the protagonists in a milieu as uninviting and potentially deadly as any in film noir."[22]
"The Hitch-Hiker" is the sixteenth episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone which originally aired on January 22, 1960, on CBS. It is based on Lucille Fletcher's radio play The Hitch-Hiker. It is frequently listed among the series' greatest episodes.
The year 1953 in film involved some significant events.
Ida Lupino was a British actress, director, writer, and producer. Throughout her 48-year career, she appeared in 59 films and directed eight, working primarily in the United States, where she became a citizen in 1948. She is widely regarded as the most prominent female filmmaker working in the 1950s during the Hollywood studio system. With her independent production company, she co-wrote and co-produced several social-message films and became the first woman to direct a film noir, The Hitch-Hiker, in 1953.
High Sierra is a 1941 American film noir directed by Raoul Walsh, written by William R. Burnett and John Huston from the novel by Burnett, and starring Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart. Its plot follows a career criminal who becomes involved in a jewel heist in a resort town in California's Sierra Nevada, along with a young former taxi dancer (Lupino).
Eamon Joseph O'Brien was an American actor of stage, screen, and television, and film director. His career spanned almost 40 years, and he won one Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
William Whitney Talman Jr. was an American television and movie actor, best known for playing Los Angeles District Attorney Hamilton Burger in the television series Perry Mason.
Frank Andrew Lovejoy Jr. was an American actor in radio, film, and television. He is perhaps best remembered for appearing in the film noir The Hitch-Hiker and for starring in the radio drama Night Beat.
Howard Green Duff was an American actor.
Road House is a 1948 American film noir drama film directed by Jean Negulesco, with cinematography by Joseph LaShelle. The picture features Ida Lupino, Cornel Wilde, Celeste Holm and Richard Widmark.
Sally Forrest was an American film, stage and TV actress of the 1940s and 1950s. She studied dance from a young age and shortly out of high school was signed to a contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
William Edward Cook Jr. was an American spree killer and mass murderer who murdered six people, including a family of five, on a 22-day rampage between Missouri and California in 1950–51.
The Devil Thumbs a Ride is a 1947 American film noir directed by Felix E. Feist and featuring Lawrence Tierney, Ted North, Nan Leslie and Betty Lawford. It was produced and distributed by RKO Pictures.
Louis Antonelli is a filmmaker and poet.
The Bigamist is a 1953 American drama film noir directed by Ida Lupino starring Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmond O'Brien, and Edmund Gwenn. Producer/Screenwriter Collier Young was married to Fontaine at the time and had previously been married to Lupino. The Bigamist has been cited as the first American feature film made in the sound era in which the female star of a film directed herself.
Hitch-Hike, also known as Death Drive and The Naked Prey is an Italian crime film directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile. The film stars Franco Nero and Corinne Cléry as a couple in a troubled marriage, and David Hess as a fugitive who takes them hostage. The musical score was written by Ennio Morricone. The film is based on Peter Kane's novel The Violence and the Fury.
Natividad Vacío was an American character actor in films and television from the 1950s through the 1980s. Born Natividad Domínguez Vacío in El Paso, Texas, he was Mexican-American. He nearly always played a Hispanic character in his 65 film and television appearances. He was married to Henriqueta (Queta) Vacío.
The Hitch-Hiker is a radio play written by Lucille Fletcher. It was first presented on the November 17, 1941, broadcast of The Orson Welles Show on CBS Radio, featuring a score written and conducted by Bernard Herrmann, Fletcher's first husband. Welles performed The Hitch-Hiker four times on radio, and the play was adapted for a notable 1960 episode of the television series The Twilight Zone.
Jennifer is a 1953 American film noir drama mystery film directed by Joel Newton and starring Ida Lupino, Howard Duff, and Robert Nichols. The film is notable for the introduction of the jazz standard "Angel Eyes," composed and performed by Matt Dennis.
Woman in Hiding is a 1950 American melodrama thriller film starring Ida Lupino, Howard Duff and Stephen McNally. It was directed by Michael Gordon, with cinematography by William H. Daniels. Peggy Dow, John Litel, and Taylor Holmes, appear in support. Some observers regard the picture as a film noir, a view not universally embraced.
1 2 A.H. Weiler (April 30, 1953), "The Hitch-Hiker at the Holiday", The New York Times, ... in selecting the rocky, dusty Mexican wasteland as a setting, the producers have added a graphic inflection to the helplessness of the victims.
↑ Morfin, Charles Michael (September 29, 2014). Location Filming in the Alabama Hills. Arcadia Publishing. p.77. ISBN9781467131315. [Lupino] returned to direct a very interesting and suspenseful film called The Hitch-Hiker (1953). In The Hitch-Hiker, the Alabama Hills are used to represent Mexico.
↑ Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, eds. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, film noir analysis by Bob Porfiero and Alain Silver, page 130, 3rd edition, 1992. New York: The Overlook Press. ISBN0-87951-479-5.
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