The Hitch-Hiker

In The Sons of the Desert, Laurel and Hardy suffer awful punishment when they lie to their wives about a trip that they have planned.  Something similar befalls Gilbert and Roy, the hapless victims of a spree-killing hitchhiker, in Ida Lupino's 1953 The Hitch-Hiker.  Gilbert and Roy have told their wives that they are going fishing in San Felipe, a coastal town in Baja California.  On the way, Roy, who is impulsive and a bit of a hot head, decides to stop in Mexicali to sample the flesh-pots there.  Gilbert, who is more level-headed, doesn't want to get in trouble and, so, he pretends to be sound asleep when the two men drive between the garish neon-lights in the border town.  Roy is loyal to his buddy and the two men don't stop.  On the way out of town, they pick-up a hitchhiker -- before the credits, we have seen this guy, portrayed as a pair of sinister boots stalking around, gun down three victims, people who have picked him up.  The little and abortive "lark and spree" in Mexicali has now put the men in harm's way.  For the remainder of the short (71 minute) film, the hitchhiker torments them until his luck runs out and he is captured by the Mexican police.  Edmund O'Brien plays the excitable Roy; Frank Lovejoy takes the part of the even-keeled Gilbert (who can speak Spanish) and William Tallman, later well-known for playing the indefatigable DA Hamilton Burger on The Perry Mason Show, is very effective as the psycho-killer.  The hitch-hiker is like a figure from a horror movie -- he has a deformed eye that can not close and a broad grin of filthy teeth.  The guy is awful to look at and this mirrors, of course, his moral depravity.

The Library of Congress has cited The Hitch-Hiker as worthy of preservation primarily because it is the first film noir to be directed by a woman, Ida Lupino.  Unfortunately, the movie really isn't any good.  The acting is fine but the script is lackluster and the film isn't exactly plausible.  The movie's climax is so dull that it can't be called a climax -- the picture just ends in a muddle of very dimly lit shots on a dock.  I got tired trying to decipher the very dark pictures on my TV screen and fell asleep four minutes before the short film ended -- I had to go back to re-run the denouement to see if I had missed anything.  (I hadn't.)  For most of the film, we see repeated shots of the car carrying the three men driving aimlessly around the Alabama Hills, 20 or so hectares of picturesque-looking hoodoos in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada at Lone Pine.  Lupino shoots in the opposite direction of the Mount Whitney and, so, everything looks desolate, squat stone boulders heaped up in disarray against a dusty horizon.  But she uses the same vantage so many times that the imagery becomes tiresome -- it's obviously the same dirt road over which the car travels first in one direction and, then, the other direction.  Apparently, the script derives from the adventures of an actual spree-killer who haunted the upper Baja peninsula and was caught by Mexican police, as in this film, at the fishing village of Santa Rosalie.  (Certain other elements of the actual story find their way into the picture -- for instance, the real killer threw his victims down a mine-shaft; in this movie, some scenes are shot around a mine-shaft that is shown to be very deep and dark, but nothing actually happens there).  The story doesn't make sense -- it's not clear why the heroes can't run away at night (after all, the bad guy has to sleep.)  Furthermore, we don't know why the killer has taken the men hostage -- what is the use of lugging them around the country when he could just kill them somewhere in the badlands of the Alabama Hills and drive their car to his ultimate destination?  (We know he can drive a car -- he uses the car to hunt down the two men when they briefly escape.)  Clearly, Lupino is working on micro-budget:  In one night-time scene, shot in the studio, she puts the two hostages in sleeping bags on one side of a creek while the bad guy keeps his gun trained on them, even while he sleeps with his deformed eye open.  The creek looks like a trough with a garden hose running water down its center and the schematic shot doesn't look anything like a real place outdoors.  Throughout the film, the bad guy has taunted the two heroes (although this is also a misnomer -- they never do anything even remotely heroic):  at one point, he makes them shoot bottles out of each other's hands.  The killer's argument (and the moral of the film) is that he can prey upon the two men because they look out for one another -- Roy won't desert Gilbert and vice-versa.  Thus, they are vulnerable to his depredations.  "One of you coulda got away easy," he crows.  The guy is nasty and, of course, the audience wants to see him get his come-uppance.  But the film is decent -- there's no gory retribution:  after the cops handcuff the hitchhiker, Roy slugs him a couple times, but the police pull him away, noting somewhat incongruously that "(they) must prepare their report."  It would be nice to argue that this pioneering work by the very tough Ida Lupino is a masterpiece or, even, pretty good -- but, simply stated, it's mediocre. And, it's very merits, the film's decency, at its climax, detract from its effectiveness.  David Thomson noted in hs book of film biographies that Ida Lupino was capable of making movies as "tough and fast" as Sam Fuller.  But I think Fuller's movies are vastly overrated too.