The Hitch-Hiker
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
Two friends pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a psychotic killer. A high-tension journey begins. Edgy, oppressive, and driven by remarkably effective mise-en-scène: The Hitch-Hiker is a masterstroke by Ida Lupino, who became the first woman to direct a film noir.
Ida Lupino
Born in 1918 into a family that had been involved in the performing arts for generations, Ida Lupino grew up and made her acting debut in England before leaving to try her luck in Hollywood. She took on numerous roles starting in 1930s and achieved great success as early as the 1940s, playing over time for Raoul Walsh, Delmer Daves, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Fritz Lang and many others. But her success as an actress did not quite fulfill her: she was mainly interested in directing and founded the production company The Filmmakers with her husband, Collier Young. In 1949, she directed her first film, Not Wanted, becoming the following year the only working woman in the Directors Guild of America. In a few years, she forcefully established a distinctive voice as a filmmaker: because of the rarity of her gaze, her characters, and her themes in a male-dominated industry, as well as her remarkable mastery of staging and tension, which led her to be the first woman to direct a film noir with The Hitch-Hiker (1953).
