The Hitch-Hiker: Ida Lupino's Desert Kidnap Noir

Two ordinary men are driving to a fishing trip in Mexico. They are the kind of men noir usually keeps in the background — a draughtsman and a garage owner, married, mortgaged, mildly bored, treating a few days away from their wives as a small holiday from being responsible. They stop for a man standing at the roadside. Within a minute he has a gun on them, and for the next hour of screen time the film never lets any of the three out of each other’s sight.

The Hitch-Hiker, released by RKO in 1953, runs about seventy-one minutes and contains almost nothing. There is no femme fatale, no city, no rain-slicked pavement, no cigarette-lit interrogation room. What it has instead is a car, a stretch of Baja scrubland played by the Alabama Hills outside Lone Pine, and a hostage situation that simply continues until it stops. Ida Lupino directed it, co-wrote it with Collier Young for their independent outfit The Filmakers, and produced a film so stripped of the genre’s furniture that it exposes the skeleton underneath. It is the only film noir of the classic cycle directed by a woman, and the fact that it is also one of the cycle’s tightest pieces of suspense construction has taken decades to be widely admitted.

The real case underneath

The film is built on the Billy Cook murders. Cook killed six people across the American southwest in the winter of 1950–51, including an entire family, and in the course of his flight he hijacked two hunters and forced them to drive him into Mexico. They survived. Cook was arrested, tried and executed in 1952, and Lupino, characteristically, went and talked to the men who had been in the car with him.

The Production Code would not let her name him, so the killer became Emmett Myers and the film opens with a title card asserting that this could happen to anyone. That disclaimer is usually the deadest thing in a semi-documentary crime picture, and here it does real work, because the film’s whole thesis is that the two hostages have done nothing to earn what is happening to them. There is no moral transaction. Noir generally insists that its victims bought their own doom on credit — the insurance man who wanted the money, the detective who wanted the woman. Lupino removes that consolation entirely. The men in this car are guilty of stopping for a stranger.

Daniel Mainwaring worked on the story and was denied screen credit because he had been blacklisted. Mainwaring, writing as Geoffrey Homes, had also written the novel behind Out of the Past, which makes the invisible line between the genre’s most romantic fatalism and its most clinical one a matter of the same typewriter. Nicholas Musuraca, who had photographed that film into its permanent gloom, shot this one too — and the collector’s pleasure here is watching a cameraman celebrated for shadow work do the opposite. The desert offers him nothing to hide in. He responds with a hard, flat, overexposed glare that turns daylight into the threat.

Why it works: the eye that never closes

The film’s engine is one physiological detail. Emmett Myers, played by William Talman with a slack, itching contempt, has a paralysed right eyelid. It does not close when he sleeps. So the two hostages, exhausted, lying in the dirt a few feet from a man with a revolver, cannot ever tell whether he is unconscious or watching them. Every night the film gives them the chance to escape and simultaneously takes it away, and the mechanism is entirely visual — one open eye in a sleeping face, held long enough that the audience starts squinting at the screen alongside the characters, trying to read it.

This is the sort of idea that a lesser film would explain once and forget. Lupino builds the whole rhythm of the picture on it. The structure is a series of nights, each one an escape attempt that dies before it begins, and the tension does not escalate through incident so much as through accumulation — the men get more tired, more frayed, more willing to consider abandoning each other, while Myers stays exactly the same. He does not develop. He is a fixed obstacle, and the drama is in the erosion of the two people forced to sit next to him.

Lupino’s staging inside the car is the technical achievement people miss. Three men in a sedan is a spatial nightmare: the driver, the passenger, and the gun in the back seat, which means one man can see the threat in the mirror and the other cannot see it at all without turning his head. She works that geometry relentlessly. Myers sits behind them, which puts the hostages in the humiliating position of being unable to look at their captor while talking to him, and puts the audience in the position of watching two faces try to have a silent conversation about escape while a third face floats between them in the frame, listening. The film keeps finding new compositions in a space roughly the size of a wardrobe.

Talman’s performance is the other half. He plays Myers as a man with a grievance rather than a philosophy — resentful of the two hostages precisely because they have wives and jobs and each other, and expressing that resentment through small cruelties designed to demonstrate that their ordinariness is a weakness. The most famous of these is a shooting demonstration: Myers makes one man hold a tin can while he shoots it out of his hand, ostensibly to prove his marksmanship, actually to prove that the man will do it. Talman never raises his voice. He is a bully with time on his hands, and the film understands that this is more frightening than a maniac.

Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy have the harder job, because they must play deterioration without theatrics. O’Brien’s Roy Collins runs hot and keeps almost doing something fatal; Lovejoy’s Gilbert Bowen stays reasonable long past the point where reason helps. Their friendship is the film’s real subject, and Lupino lets Myers work at it like a man picking at a scab, floating the observation that only one of them needs to survive.

Where it sits in the cabinet

The obvious ancestors are the poverty-row road pictures, above all Detour, which had already discovered that a car, a stretch of highway and two people who should not be in the same vehicle constitute a complete film. Ulmer’s picture is a fever dream of self-justification; Lupino’s is sober to the point of coldness, and the difference is that Detour’s narrator is lying to us while The Hitch-Hiker has no interior life at all to lie from. Lupino shoots her men from the outside, as behaviour.

The descendants are everywhere, and most of them do not know it. Every film in which a stranger enters a vehicle and converts a journey into a captivity — the whole hitcher-as-predator subgenre that ran through the drive-ins and then the video shelves — is working from this template, usually with more blood and less patience. Lupino got there first and did it without a single scene of violence staged for pleasure.

Within her own career, the film belongs beside her earlier work as the American cinema’s most persistent director of subjects nobody would touch, a run surveyed in the desk’s piece on women directing horror from Ida Lupino to Julia Ducournau. It sits even closer, though, to On Dangerous Ground, released two years earlier, in which she starred and on which she is reported to have directed material herself when Nicholas Ray was unavailable. Both films are about a violent man in a landscape with nowhere to hide, and both were shot at RKO, and watching them together is the best short argument I know for treating Lupino as a filmmaker rather than an anecdote.

The verdict

The Hitch-Hiker is the leanest film in the classic noir cycle, and its leanness is an argument. Lupino strips out the fatalism, the poetry, the doomed romance and the moral bookkeeping, and what she leaves is a claim about violence that the rest of the genre works quite hard to avoid: it is arbitrary, it is boring, it happens to people who were not asking for it, and surviving it is mostly a matter of endurance. The film refuses to make Myers interesting. That refusal is the point, and it costs Lupino the operatic finish that a director of Ray’s temperament would have reached for.

Watch it for the direction. Seventy-one minutes, three actors, one car, and not a wasted set-up in it. The film entered the National Film Registry in 1998 and has long since fallen into the public domain, which means the copies circulating range from watchable to appalling; find a restored transfer, because Musuraca’s desert glare is the performance nobody credits.

Spoilers below

The escape attempts fail in sequence, and the film’s cruellest structural joke is that each failure teaches the hostages nothing useful. Myers is heading for Santa Rosalía, where he intends to take a ferry across the Gulf, and his plan requires the car and one driver. He does not need two men. The film establishes this arithmetic early and then simply lets it sit there, so that every subsequent scene of the three of them together is haunted by the knowledge that Myers is carrying one passenger more than he can use, and that he knows it, and that they know he knows it.

The needling works. Myers spends the second half trying to pry Collins and Bowen apart with the suggestion that whichever of them proves more useful will be the one who lives, and the film’s best sustained sequence is the two men attempting to communicate in front of him — a plan mimed and abandoned, a message scratched out, a moment of coordination that Myers spots because he sees everything, always, with the eye that will not shut.

The resolution comes from the outside, which is the film’s last refusal of genre satisfaction. The Mexican police, whose investigation has been running in the background as a competent procedural nobody in the car knows about, close the net at Santa Rosalía. Myers, trying to pass himself off as one of the hostages, is undone by the very thing that made him legible to the audience — he cannot disguise the face. There is no shootout worth the name. He is disarmed and taken, and in the film’s final gesture Collins, who has spent the whole picture on the edge of doing something violent, walks up to the handcuffed Myers and hits him once. It is a small, human, insufficient act, and Lupino cuts away from it almost immediately, denying us the catharsis and leaving the two men standing in the dark exactly as ordinary as they were when they stopped the car.