| Matt Levine |
The Hitch-Hiker plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, December 1st, through Tuesday, December 3rd. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. Happy Holidays!
On the surface, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) is a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about a homicidal maniac who hitches a ride with two friends on their way to Mexicali as murder looms just around the corner. Even the onscreen title that opens the film indicates its true crime origins: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours… What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.”
Those facts are lifted from the real-life story of Billy Cook, who in 1950–51 killed six people while posing as a hitchhiker, including a family of five (and their dog), before being apprehended by the Mexican police in Santa Rosalia. Cook’s backstory was tragic: his mother died when he was five years old, and his father abandoned him and the rest of his ten siblings in a mine, leaving them to fend for themselves. After living among foster families, reform schools, and prisons in his early years, Cook embraced a life of crime by the time he turned twelve. When he was arrested, Cook reportedly stated, “I hate everybody’s guts, and everybody hates mine.”
With this bleak and sordid story serving as inspiration, it’s not surprising that The Hitch-Hiker is often referred to as a film noir (and Lupino is deemed the first woman to have directed a film in the genre). Though it mostly takes place in desert exteriors, the aesthetic is still dark and shadowy, thanks to cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca, who had created memorably stark visual styles for directors like Jacques Tourneur, Fritz Lang, and Robert Siodmak. While The Hitch-Hiker is set far from urban environs and has no femme fatales to speak of, it still captures a disquieting postwar pessimism, showing how pervasive cruelty and violence truly are in the modern world.
Despite all that, I don’t think it’s accurate to label The Hitch-Hiker a film noir—a term that can be too all-encompassing, often applied to any movie with high-contrast lighting and dismal themes. The movie seems closer to a male melodrama, focusing on the friendship between the two men who decide to pick up the hitchhiker—Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and Roy Collins (Edmond O’Brien)—and their terse but genuine bond. The tenderness between these two men is contrasted with the vicious barbarism of the hitchhiker, here named Emmett Myers (William Talman), who has no qualms about robbing and killing to get whatever he wants.
At only 71 minutes, The Hitch-Hiker is a marvel of narrative efficiency, and the relationship between Gil and Roy is believably conveyed in a matter of minutes. Gil is a draftsman with a wife and kids whom, he says early on, he hasn’t left for an extended period of time since “the war.” Roy, on the other hand, is an auto mechanic with a wife but no kids. There’s an implied class discrepancy between the two, and when we first meet them in the car’s dim interior, there seems to be a lingering tension. Though the initial plan is to go on a fishing trip in California’s Chocolate Mountains, it’s Roy who impulsively decides to drive to Mexico while Gil is asleep, seemingly with the intention to blow off some steam and revisit the earlier, more reckless days of their friendship. Later, after they pick up Emmett, the sadistic hitchhiker recognizes their antagonism, striking a raw nerve when he claims that Gil is “smarter” than his friend due to his lofty profession.
The beginning of the film swiftly introduces Emmett’s brutality via a montage that conveys the offscreen murders of three people: we see only the killer’s feet in brief tracking shots as he leaves his victims behind. This is an example of The Hitch-Hiker’s narrative efficiency, simultaneously depicting Emmett’s villainy while skirting censorship codes in chilling fashion. With his partly paralyzed right eye (which remains open even while he’s sleeping) and a bloodthirsty smile that erupts on his face at unexpected times, Emmett is an unforgettably vicious character, and William Talman (who had co-starred with Ida Lupino in Beware, My Lovely one year earlier) is terrifying in the role.
The Hitch-Hiker evokes simmering tension and thematic depth through the contrast between Emmett’s cruelty and Gil and Roy’s sensitivity. The film makes this point clear when Emmett tells them, “You guys are soft. Do you know what makes you that way? You’re up to your neck in IOUs. You always had it easy, so you’re soft.” Emmett, on the other hand—like the real-life criminal on which he’s based—has been hardened by an arduous life filled with the nastiness of humanity. The essential goodness of Gil and Roy is reaffirmed near the end of the film, when Emmett mockingly says, “You guys are really fools. If you weren’t, one of you would’ve gotten away. But you kept thinking about each other, so you missed some chances.” The disparity between Emmett and the two men is even suggested by the way they treat the film’s Mexican characters: Gil speaks with them in Spanish and shields them from Emmett’s violence, while the latter barks orders in English and insists that they stop speaking “Mexican.”
In short, The Hitch-Hiker functions as a study in American masculinity—rage and resentment in Emmett’s case, fondness and compassion in Gil’s and Roy’s. The final image of the film epitomizes this tension, which offers an unexpected but totally logical (and extremely moving) sign of physical affection between the two friends. Gil and Roy don’t always voice their love for each other in clear or uplifting ways, but The Hitch-Hiker is in part the story of their rekindled relationship, as the two men come to understand the other’s significance in their lives and the more general need for emotional intimacy.
It’s tempting to attribute this emotional subtext to Lupino’s presence behind the camera. She had long exerted an unusual amount of power for an actress with a studio contract, provoking the ire of Warner Bros. head Jack Warner by refusing roles she felt were beneath her and rewriting dialogue on set. She and her then-husband, Collier Young, formed their own production studio, The Filmakers Inc., in 1948, specializing in short, inexpensive B-movies that tackled difficult subject matter like rape (Outrage, 1950) and polygamy (The Bigamist, 1953). Lupino’s first uncredited stint as a director came in 1949, when she filled in after Elmer Clifton suffered a heart attack while directing Not Wanted (which Lupino co-wrote and co-produced). Two years later, she stepped in to direct some of On Dangerous Ground when Nicholas Ray became ill. A string of directorial efforts followed, typically focusing on socially conscious subjects through melodrama, including Never Fear (1949) and the aforementioned Outrage and The Bigamist.
The Hitch-Hiker is somewhat atypical among Lupino’s filmography, with its dark, foreboding tone, emphasis on suspense, and lack of urgent hot-button social issues. It carefully dissects the extremes of male behavior, with its penchant for rage and destruction on one hand and its potential for love and sensitivity on the other. The movie even alludes to the connection between gun culture and masculinity, as Roy (accurately) tells Emmett that without the handgun he carries at all times, he would be nothing. Like later female directors such as Elaine May and Kathryn Bigelow, Lupino depicts white American men in ways that are simultaneously scathing and sympathetic. Maybe that’s a result of her more nuanced understanding of gender dynamics, or her rise to power in a male-dominated field, or simply her directorial skill at building characters and presenting thematic subtexts. Whatever the case, it results in one of the most remarkable American films of the 1950s, both tense and unexpectedly poignant. Its titular psychopath tries to emasculate Gil and Roy by calling them soft, but one of The Hitch-Hiker’s boldest achievements lies in making us realize it’s that very softness that helps them survive—that makes them human.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon