00:09Hi, I'm Dave Karger. Thanks for joining me this afternoon here on TCM.
00:12Up next is a film that my good friend Eddie Muller has called the only noir of the classic era
00:18directed by a woman.
00:19The woman is Ida Lupino, and the movie is the tense 1953 thriller The Hitchhiker.
00:25The story begins when two friends on a fishing trip, played by Edmund O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy,
00:30stop to pick up a hitchhiker on the highway.
00:33You'll soon see what happens, but let's just say the two pals don't simply take their passenger from point A
00:38to point B.
00:38It's much more nightmarish than that.
00:41The movie was based on the true crime story involving a man named Billy Cook,
00:46which I'll tell you more about after you see the film.
00:49But it was after Ida Lupino heard about his story that she got the idea for this film,
00:53and she co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, Collier Young.
00:57By this point in her career, Ida Lupino had been working in movies for two decades,
01:01first in her native England and then in Hollywood, beginning in the mid-1930s.
01:05In the 40s, she rivaled Bette Davis as one of the most talented actresses at Warner Brothers.
01:10Then, by the end of the decade, she set her sights on another career as a director.
01:14Together with Collier Young, she formed an independent production company called The Filmmakers,
01:19which produced around a dozen films between 1949 and 1955.
01:25Lupino directed half of them, including the movie that you're about to see.
01:28Many of the films she directed were stories about women, but this one, as you'll see, is entirely different.
01:34From 1953, released by RKO and also starring William Tallman,
01:39directed and co-written by Ida Lupino, this is The Hitchhiker.
01:43See you next time.
01:44See you next time.
01:49Bye-bye.
01:49See you next time.
