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What's the matter, you scared?
Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker (1953) may or may not be rightly considered the only film noir of the classic period directed by a woman, but it is a hell of a nightmare whichever way you view it.
It's a stark, tiny picture, as dry in the throat as a bone. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you, the title card feints like a docudrama before the hitch-hiker himself is haunting the margins of the credits like something dealt out of a bad hand of Tarot, his thumb hooked anglerfish patient and the long day's spill of his shadow dividing the highway into before and after. We don't see his face until the newspaper splash of his mug shot, only his spoor of cars and corpses, the dust-devil wind whisking dead leaves around his boots like one of Bradbury's autumn people inexorably this way coming. Neither Gil Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) nor Roy Collins (Edmond O'Brien) knows what they are driving toward as they turn south from the Chocolate Mountains toward San Felipe in Baja California, but their long-planned boys' vacation becomes its own black mirror the second the stranded motorist they stop for turns out to be Emmett Myers (William Talman), the ultimate back seat driver with all his directions in the chamber of his gun. The days are white as ash under a leaching sky, the nights so dark they hardly seem to exist beyond the traveling cell of the automobile. The weekend stretches into a floating static of flash bulletins of missing persons and a manhunt. There's a stop at a grocery, at a filling station, at an abandoned airstrip where headlights slice as mercilessly out of the dark as an eye that never closes. "This car rides pretty good," Myers appraises professionally as they coast down the deserted, scrub-lined road to Santa Rosalía, then drops the fate of his captives as casually as he chews on a sandwich packed by one of their never-seen wives: "When I get where I'm going, I think I'll sell it."
Whatever his roots in the case of real-life spree killer Billy Cook, whose still-fresh crimes Lupino—working with Collier Young from a story by Robert L. Joseph and an uncredited Daniel Mainwaring—was not permitted to dramatize directly, Myers is a mesmerizing creation even by the standards of weirdos and sickos in noir. Redheaded as a Devil at the crossroads of urban legend and true crime, he makes the film feel supernatural even as it grinds the reality of a back-country road trip into sweat and dust and stubble, shimmered elementally out of the hot asphalt hum of wheels inside white lines to play a game of human weakness whose rules are always changing at a prod from his Colt Official Police. His weathered punk's face blurs him ageless, wrapped like one of Death's outriders in his black leather coat. His telltale eye, always half-closed awake, half-open asleep, makes his default expression a liminal, malicious wink. He's an American mythago, a haunter of the wide open spaces which promise such freedom and desolation: the land into which you can disappear. And yet he is human; he has to be, because the nightmare doesn't hit half as hard if it couldn't happen for real instead of in the Twilight Zone. "My folks were tough," he recalls one night as his suburban prisoners build the fire, rustle up dinner from the day's canned goods under his watchful armed guard. "When I was born, they took one look at this puss of mine and told me to get lost. I didn't need them. I didn't need any of them . . . When you get the know-how and a few bucks in your pocket, you can buy anything or anybody. Especially if you got them at the point of a gun. That really scares them." A bad childhood and a blunt force credo are standard issue for screen hoods, but that bitter boast of independence strikes a strange, fragile note. If Myers is all that shark-heart self-sufficient, then what are Gil and Roy doing alive? Why didn't he shoot them at his earliest convenience like the honeymooning couple in Illinois, the salesman in Oregon whose lives were worth less to him than the bills in their wallets and the keys to their cars? Did he reckon a couple of middle-aged tourists sufficiently useful as camouflage from the authorities now searching both sides of the border for a lone gunman? Or is he keeping them around for some needier, less cold-blooded reason, a literally captive audience for his hair-trigger threats and the commands he barks in some deadly man-sized version of Simon says? The film knows to leave the question open; its raw and clinical study of damaged masculinities does not condescend to pop-psych. When Roy challenges his carjacker at the conclusion of his nihilist's manifesto, "You ever been at the other end of a gun?" it is scarier than any flare of nerves or bluster that Myers answers so quietly, "No. And I never will be."
Especially because they are the regular people in this story, it matters that Gil and Roy are as real as their roadside daemon and specifically so, their stressed and particular selves as opposed to placeholders for that object of fascination to the '50's, the average American male. It is not irrelevant to the plot that Gil is a draftsman whose head swims when he's forced to shoot a tin can out of his best friend's hand or Roy a mechanic whose pessimism about off-roading in a 1952 Plymouth four-door sedan is vindicated when the crankcase tears out, but it's more important to the volatile dynamics of this camping trip from hell that Gil almost sobs with relief as he pulls an innocently fearless child away from Myers as if she were one of his own daughters caught petting a rabid dog while Roy's humiliated hot temper leaves him even more vulnerable to his taunting captor when he wrenches his ankle in an abortive escape attempt and has to be cold-cocked for his own protection. He cries like a child in a fever dream, dust-throated from screaming at the indifferent drone of a low-flying plane, "Oh, please God, hear me, hear me! Come back!" Gil's wedding ring left stealthily beside the gas pump could be a hail-Mary breadcrumb or a condemned man's farewell. Not once are we encouraged to feel superior to the machismo they do not demonstrate, the maddening terror of helplessness which Gil—identified as a veteran, so perhaps more experienced in the tight-jawed endurance of uncontrollable, unrelenting strain—handles just marginally better than the more sullen and impulsive, unraveling Roy. The Hitch-Hiker is not a moral tale. Nothing the two men have done merits the crash of a serial killer into their lives. They are not cheating on their wives, neglecting their breadwinning, engaging in any of the extracurricular middle-class sins from which they might need to be scared back into the line of the white picket fence; their midlife restlessness maxed out at a detour through Mexicali, where Roy had wistful intentions of sampling the nightlife and Gil unsubtly pretended to sleep through a neon-backed hard sell for Juanita's famous fan dance and if they had stopped for their drink at the Alhambra Club, they might well have missed their appointment with Emmett Myers. Over and over, he mocks the bond between them, needling at their conformity, their domesticity, their mutual loyalty that so effortlessly rendered them hostages for one another: "You guys are really fools. If you weren't, one of you would have got away. But you kept thinking about each other, so you missed some chances . . . Now it's pretty late." But if the film is merciless in its perspective on male powerlessness, it's equally sensitive to male tenderness, rebuking Myers' self-aggrandizing individualism with the unselfconscious embrace in which Gil shelters his dazed, injured friend from their captor's sneer, a dogged care that may not save either of them and yet asserts something as important as survival. Auden may have found it geopolitically facile in hindsight, but there's a reason generations of readers still quote despite him, We must love one another or die.
The desert scenes of The Hitch-Hiker were shot in the fantastically rugged badlands of the Alabama Hills, defamiliarized by echt noir DP Nicholas Musuraca from the locus classicus of Hollywood Westerns to a harsh and alien panorama of dust-veiled ridges and sage-clumped tracks, flats of cracked clay and jumbled skulls of stone like fossilized clouds. Myers looks as natural as a lizard lying back among the dinosaur-haunched boulders with a rifle in his hands, but Gil and Roy rolled to the chin in their sleepless blankets could have been mummified by the hard-boiling air in which vultures spiral more lazily than the occasional passer-by leading a burro on foot, pulling over a fender-bent jalopy to offer an assistance which the captives bent over their blown tire are not permitted to acknowledge. Even when the action reaches the sea-coast of Santa Rosalía, it's all heaps of limestone as rough as sharkskin, as driftwood-bleached as the white strings of the surf. Nowhere, not the trickle of a creek by night, the refuge of a canebrake by day, looks really hospitable unless it's indoors and serving beer, which makes it all the more important that Lupino's Mexico is more than a dustily picturesque backdrop for some gringo psychodrama. All Spanish in this film is unsubtitled, translated only when Gil is acting as interpreter for the impatient bigotry of Myers who doesn't like him speaking "Mex." Most of it is exchanged between locals, like the husband and wife puzzled by the silence of the Americans they addressed in English or the owner of the filling station distraught over the shooting of his dog, interviewed like the grocer and one of his customers by Captain Alvarado (José Torvay) as he pursues the possibility that the hitch-hike slayer's latest victims may still be alive. On the one hand, his scenes distract from the claustrophobia of what the title card described with Breen-baiting vagueness as the true story of a man and a gun and a car. On the other, they reinforce the reality of his country beyond the exigencies of the plot and prepare the audience for the brilliantly anticlimactic ending, the farthest thing imaginable from Tinseltown heroics. "Alto!" the Mexican police are shouting, Stop! as two men scrabble on gull-spattered boards in the silver-salt fog of a dockside night, hammering inelegantly at one another while bullets skip like stones across the foam-flecked black water; the fracas ends with one of them thrashing in his handcuffs like a panicked animal as one of his former prisoners slugs him viciously in the face, a violence without catharsis, without manliness, with no more restoration even in the final seconds than Gil saying out of a shuddering breath, as if he's trying to make them both believe it, "It's all right now, Roy. It's all right." Myers spits his contempt in his own blood like Loki poison-blinded, a quake at the roots of the white-bread world. How is anything supposed to be all right in the face of that gesture—or everything that led up to it? He leaves the audience shell-shocked and not because we've never seen anything like him. The only thing different nowadays would be the model of the gun.
I happen to believe that Lupino directed more than the one film noir, but I do not begrudge this one its laurels; in the same way that earlier projects like Not Wanted (1949) and Outrage (1950) explored the deliberately female traumas of pregnancy and rape, The Hitch-Hiker pushes full-tilt into the fears that keep men up at night or reaching for their guns and the results are uncompromising. We wait all movie for one of our beleaguered heroes to fulfill the promise, "When he gets ready to jump us, we'll jump him, not before," but that two-fisted moment never comes. The totality of their bravery is their ability not to be murdered before the federales have a chance to catch up, a fingernail of determination and a lot of dumb luck. Even for noir, it's demolishing. I watched it accidentally for Thanksgiving in 2018 and wish it hadn't felt even more all-American on rewatch. It can be found on YouTube or the Internet Archive if you feel like taking the hit; I note that Kino Lorber's Blu-Ray/DVD shares my feelings about nightmare. Slowly I am getting around to the full catalogue of the Filmakers, six out of ten of whose feature films were directed as well as co-written and produced by Lupino, who really seems to have been interested in breakdowns, of her characters, of their world, which remains ours. Even a stone killer isn't wrong when he says that dying is "just a question of when." This know-how brought to you by my ready backers at Patreon.
It's a stark, tiny picture, as dry in the throat as a bone. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you, the title card feints like a docudrama before the hitch-hiker himself is haunting the margins of the credits like something dealt out of a bad hand of Tarot, his thumb hooked anglerfish patient and the long day's spill of his shadow dividing the highway into before and after. We don't see his face until the newspaper splash of his mug shot, only his spoor of cars and corpses, the dust-devil wind whisking dead leaves around his boots like one of Bradbury's autumn people inexorably this way coming. Neither Gil Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) nor Roy Collins (Edmond O'Brien) knows what they are driving toward as they turn south from the Chocolate Mountains toward San Felipe in Baja California, but their long-planned boys' vacation becomes its own black mirror the second the stranded motorist they stop for turns out to be Emmett Myers (William Talman), the ultimate back seat driver with all his directions in the chamber of his gun. The days are white as ash under a leaching sky, the nights so dark they hardly seem to exist beyond the traveling cell of the automobile. The weekend stretches into a floating static of flash bulletins of missing persons and a manhunt. There's a stop at a grocery, at a filling station, at an abandoned airstrip where headlights slice as mercilessly out of the dark as an eye that never closes. "This car rides pretty good," Myers appraises professionally as they coast down the deserted, scrub-lined road to Santa Rosalía, then drops the fate of his captives as casually as he chews on a sandwich packed by one of their never-seen wives: "When I get where I'm going, I think I'll sell it."
Whatever his roots in the case of real-life spree killer Billy Cook, whose still-fresh crimes Lupino—working with Collier Young from a story by Robert L. Joseph and an uncredited Daniel Mainwaring—was not permitted to dramatize directly, Myers is a mesmerizing creation even by the standards of weirdos and sickos in noir. Redheaded as a Devil at the crossroads of urban legend and true crime, he makes the film feel supernatural even as it grinds the reality of a back-country road trip into sweat and dust and stubble, shimmered elementally out of the hot asphalt hum of wheels inside white lines to play a game of human weakness whose rules are always changing at a prod from his Colt Official Police. His weathered punk's face blurs him ageless, wrapped like one of Death's outriders in his black leather coat. His telltale eye, always half-closed awake, half-open asleep, makes his default expression a liminal, malicious wink. He's an American mythago, a haunter of the wide open spaces which promise such freedom and desolation: the land into which you can disappear. And yet he is human; he has to be, because the nightmare doesn't hit half as hard if it couldn't happen for real instead of in the Twilight Zone. "My folks were tough," he recalls one night as his suburban prisoners build the fire, rustle up dinner from the day's canned goods under his watchful armed guard. "When I was born, they took one look at this puss of mine and told me to get lost. I didn't need them. I didn't need any of them . . . When you get the know-how and a few bucks in your pocket, you can buy anything or anybody. Especially if you got them at the point of a gun. That really scares them." A bad childhood and a blunt force credo are standard issue for screen hoods, but that bitter boast of independence strikes a strange, fragile note. If Myers is all that shark-heart self-sufficient, then what are Gil and Roy doing alive? Why didn't he shoot them at his earliest convenience like the honeymooning couple in Illinois, the salesman in Oregon whose lives were worth less to him than the bills in their wallets and the keys to their cars? Did he reckon a couple of middle-aged tourists sufficiently useful as camouflage from the authorities now searching both sides of the border for a lone gunman? Or is he keeping them around for some needier, less cold-blooded reason, a literally captive audience for his hair-trigger threats and the commands he barks in some deadly man-sized version of Simon says? The film knows to leave the question open; its raw and clinical study of damaged masculinities does not condescend to pop-psych. When Roy challenges his carjacker at the conclusion of his nihilist's manifesto, "You ever been at the other end of a gun?" it is scarier than any flare of nerves or bluster that Myers answers so quietly, "No. And I never will be."
Especially because they are the regular people in this story, it matters that Gil and Roy are as real as their roadside daemon and specifically so, their stressed and particular selves as opposed to placeholders for that object of fascination to the '50's, the average American male. It is not irrelevant to the plot that Gil is a draftsman whose head swims when he's forced to shoot a tin can out of his best friend's hand or Roy a mechanic whose pessimism about off-roading in a 1952 Plymouth four-door sedan is vindicated when the crankcase tears out, but it's more important to the volatile dynamics of this camping trip from hell that Gil almost sobs with relief as he pulls an innocently fearless child away from Myers as if she were one of his own daughters caught petting a rabid dog while Roy's humiliated hot temper leaves him even more vulnerable to his taunting captor when he wrenches his ankle in an abortive escape attempt and has to be cold-cocked for his own protection. He cries like a child in a fever dream, dust-throated from screaming at the indifferent drone of a low-flying plane, "Oh, please God, hear me, hear me! Come back!" Gil's wedding ring left stealthily beside the gas pump could be a hail-Mary breadcrumb or a condemned man's farewell. Not once are we encouraged to feel superior to the machismo they do not demonstrate, the maddening terror of helplessness which Gil—identified as a veteran, so perhaps more experienced in the tight-jawed endurance of uncontrollable, unrelenting strain—handles just marginally better than the more sullen and impulsive, unraveling Roy. The Hitch-Hiker is not a moral tale. Nothing the two men have done merits the crash of a serial killer into their lives. They are not cheating on their wives, neglecting their breadwinning, engaging in any of the extracurricular middle-class sins from which they might need to be scared back into the line of the white picket fence; their midlife restlessness maxed out at a detour through Mexicali, where Roy had wistful intentions of sampling the nightlife and Gil unsubtly pretended to sleep through a neon-backed hard sell for Juanita's famous fan dance and if they had stopped for their drink at the Alhambra Club, they might well have missed their appointment with Emmett Myers. Over and over, he mocks the bond between them, needling at their conformity, their domesticity, their mutual loyalty that so effortlessly rendered them hostages for one another: "You guys are really fools. If you weren't, one of you would have got away. But you kept thinking about each other, so you missed some chances . . . Now it's pretty late." But if the film is merciless in its perspective on male powerlessness, it's equally sensitive to male tenderness, rebuking Myers' self-aggrandizing individualism with the unselfconscious embrace in which Gil shelters his dazed, injured friend from their captor's sneer, a dogged care that may not save either of them and yet asserts something as important as survival. Auden may have found it geopolitically facile in hindsight, but there's a reason generations of readers still quote despite him, We must love one another or die.
The desert scenes of The Hitch-Hiker were shot in the fantastically rugged badlands of the Alabama Hills, defamiliarized by echt noir DP Nicholas Musuraca from the locus classicus of Hollywood Westerns to a harsh and alien panorama of dust-veiled ridges and sage-clumped tracks, flats of cracked clay and jumbled skulls of stone like fossilized clouds. Myers looks as natural as a lizard lying back among the dinosaur-haunched boulders with a rifle in his hands, but Gil and Roy rolled to the chin in their sleepless blankets could have been mummified by the hard-boiling air in which vultures spiral more lazily than the occasional passer-by leading a burro on foot, pulling over a fender-bent jalopy to offer an assistance which the captives bent over their blown tire are not permitted to acknowledge. Even when the action reaches the sea-coast of Santa Rosalía, it's all heaps of limestone as rough as sharkskin, as driftwood-bleached as the white strings of the surf. Nowhere, not the trickle of a creek by night, the refuge of a canebrake by day, looks really hospitable unless it's indoors and serving beer, which makes it all the more important that Lupino's Mexico is more than a dustily picturesque backdrop for some gringo psychodrama. All Spanish in this film is unsubtitled, translated only when Gil is acting as interpreter for the impatient bigotry of Myers who doesn't like him speaking "Mex." Most of it is exchanged between locals, like the husband and wife puzzled by the silence of the Americans they addressed in English or the owner of the filling station distraught over the shooting of his dog, interviewed like the grocer and one of his customers by Captain Alvarado (José Torvay) as he pursues the possibility that the hitch-hike slayer's latest victims may still be alive. On the one hand, his scenes distract from the claustrophobia of what the title card described with Breen-baiting vagueness as the true story of a man and a gun and a car. On the other, they reinforce the reality of his country beyond the exigencies of the plot and prepare the audience for the brilliantly anticlimactic ending, the farthest thing imaginable from Tinseltown heroics. "Alto!" the Mexican police are shouting, Stop! as two men scrabble on gull-spattered boards in the silver-salt fog of a dockside night, hammering inelegantly at one another while bullets skip like stones across the foam-flecked black water; the fracas ends with one of them thrashing in his handcuffs like a panicked animal as one of his former prisoners slugs him viciously in the face, a violence without catharsis, without manliness, with no more restoration even in the final seconds than Gil saying out of a shuddering breath, as if he's trying to make them both believe it, "It's all right now, Roy. It's all right." Myers spits his contempt in his own blood like Loki poison-blinded, a quake at the roots of the white-bread world. How is anything supposed to be all right in the face of that gesture—or everything that led up to it? He leaves the audience shell-shocked and not because we've never seen anything like him. The only thing different nowadays would be the model of the gun.
I happen to believe that Lupino directed more than the one film noir, but I do not begrudge this one its laurels; in the same way that earlier projects like Not Wanted (1949) and Outrage (1950) explored the deliberately female traumas of pregnancy and rape, The Hitch-Hiker pushes full-tilt into the fears that keep men up at night or reaching for their guns and the results are uncompromising. We wait all movie for one of our beleaguered heroes to fulfill the promise, "When he gets ready to jump us, we'll jump him, not before," but that two-fisted moment never comes. The totality of their bravery is their ability not to be murdered before the federales have a chance to catch up, a fingernail of determination and a lot of dumb luck. Even for noir, it's demolishing. I watched it accidentally for Thanksgiving in 2018 and wish it hadn't felt even more all-American on rewatch. It can be found on YouTube or the Internet Archive if you feel like taking the hit; I note that Kino Lorber's Blu-Ray/DVD shares my feelings about nightmare. Slowly I am getting around to the full catalogue of the Filmakers, six out of ten of whose feature films were directed as well as co-written and produced by Lupino, who really seems to have been interested in breakdowns, of her characters, of their world, which remains ours. Even a stone killer isn't wrong when he says that dying is "just a question of when." This know-how brought to you by my ready backers at Patreon.
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(But what is the connection between Patreon and your writing this?)
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Thank you!
(But what is the connection between Patreon and your writing this?)
My film writing has been officially funded through Patreon since 2015. The maintenance has become somewhat chaotic as my health has worsened and I should probably just abolish the different tiers, but on the other hand I write far over the originally stated limit of 500 words per post (I don't know what I was thinking, I am not one of nature's short-form writers) and I happen to enjoy it very much. It is not any kind of log of the films I have watched in a given year, more a record of the ones I managed to write about. I used to see a lot more in theaters, but then we had this pandemic.
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Thank you so much! I hope you enjoy all of them.
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Thank you!
I understand the traditional framing of Lupino as writer-director is women's pictures plus an adventure with testosterone, but I really think she may just have made movies about gender.
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Thank you. I had remembered how stripped down it was, and how it never let up.
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Thank you! I am, too, and I am glad to be able to write about them.
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Thank you! It really is that tense in its own self. It runs 71 minutes and it just goes.
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at the crossroads of urban legend and true crime <--loved that line, just by the by.
What you say about the two kidnapped men's mutual support in the face of Myers's taunting makes me think--and you suggest this too, yes?--that the director is maybe making an oblique comment on the necessity of male friendship/tenderness/etc.? It's on my mind because of
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Right? However else your day is going . . .
(It is intense. It was bound by the Production Code—you can read the file—but it doesn't feel like it; it's brakes-off, anything can happen. I've seen other movies from this era with this same sense of terrifying possibility and they always stand out for me. I hope somebody studies them in the lineage of horror film, which I am less equipped to do.)
<--loved that line, just by the by.
Thank you!
What you say about the two kidnapped men's mutual support in the face of Myers's taunting makes me think--and you suggest this too, yes?--that the director is maybe making an oblique comment on the necessity of male friendship/tenderness/etc.?
I really think so. Even as they deteriorate, it's the thing that keeps them human, as sane as they have any chance of staying. Myers might have been right about their separate chances—he would never have gone back for a wounded comrade the way Gil does for Roy the night at the abandoned airstrip, even though Roy is shouting for Gil to save himself and run—but would either of them have wanted to survive at the deliberate expense of the other? Would we have wanted to see it? The film doesn't regard their attachment as a weakness, whatever Myers calls it. It isn't a failure of masculinity. It just isn't what we would now describe as toxic masculinity, which is the only kind Myers knows.
It's on my mind because of osprey_archer's The Sleeping Soldier, which is largely about the changing mores of male friendship.
I need to order that novel. I've been tracking the culturally allowable range of male emotional expression mostly on film.
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--there will be a paperback; there always is, so you can order that (not sure if the paperback order link is up yet, though).
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It looks like the paperback is go; I will contact my local bookstore!
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