The Hitch-Hiker Totally Explained

Everything about The Hitch-hiker totally explained

The Hitch-Hiker (1953) is a film noir directed by Ida Lupino about two hunting buddies who pick up a mysterious hitchhiker. The movie was written by Robert L. Joseph, Lupino and her husband Collier Young based on a story by Out of the Past screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring, who was blacklisted at the time and didn't receive screen credit. The director of photography was RKO Pictures regular Nicholas Musuraca. The Hitch-Hiker is based on a true story, and is considered the first film noir directed by a woman.
In 1998, The Hitch-Hiker was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

Background

In California in 1950, Billy Cook murdered a family of five and a travelling salesman, then kidnapped two prospectors and took them to Mexico to kill them, but the Mexican police captured him before he could carry out his plan. He was extradited back to the U.S. and was tried and convicted. On December 12, 1952, Cook was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin.

Plot

Two men (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) on a fishing trip pick up a hitchhiker named Emmett Myers (William Talman), who turns out to be a psychopath who has committed multiple murders. Myers hates humanity because of his abuse as a child.

Cast

Edmond O'Brien as Roy Collins
Frank Lovejoy as Gilbert Bowen
William Talman as Emmett Myers
José Torvay as Captain Alvarado
Wendell Niles as Himself
Jean Del Val as Inspector General
Clark Howat as Government Agent
Natividad Vacío as Jose
Rodney Bell as William Johnson
Nacho Galindo as Proprietor

Production

The Hitch-Hiker went into production on 24 June and wrapped in late July. Location shooting took place in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine and Big Pine, California. Working titles for it were "The Difference" and "The Persuader". who fell into directing when Elmer Clifton got sick and couldn't finish the film he was directing for Filmways, the company started by Lupino and her husband Collier Young to make low-budget issue-oriented movies. Lupino replaced him 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 "woman's" films about social issue.
Lupino interviewed the two prospectors that 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 Production Code, however, she reduced the number of deaths to three.
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. Time Out Film Guide wrote of the film, "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."

Noir analysis

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 deadly as any in film noir."

Notable quote

Emmett Myers: My folks were tough. When I was born, they took one look at this puss of mine and told me to get lost.Further Information

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