Directed By Women: The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

By Andrea Thompson

Since the last two films in this column have been all about the new kids on the block, this week’s column features a throwback, a movie that’s every bit as lean and mean as its intro promises.

No, Ida Lupino’s slim, 70 minute 1953 thriller “The Hitch-Hiker” isn’t technically horror, but rather a noir. It takes place south of the border, and while we don’t travel the world and see its wonders, the cruelty of men, or more accurately, one man, is on full display, and that’s plenty.

The movie was inspired by the real life story of Billy Cook’s murder spree, which Lupino apparently had to soften to satisfy censors. But her introduction of the sociopathic Emmett Myers (William Talman) is nonetheless weighted with menace, with Myers coming off as demented as any slasher villain.

Like many of the best monsters, “The Hitch-Hiker” shrouds its killer with an air of mystery, only showing the lower portion of Myers’s body as he unrepentantly shoots those who have the bad fortune to offer him a ride before Roy Collins (Edmond O'Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) unwittingly kick off their own nightmarish odyssey by inviting him into their car. Face enshrouded in shadow in the backseat, Myers quickly reveals himself, producing a gun and issuing orders clearly borne of a long history of brutally using and disposing of people as he sees fit.

Collins and Bowen are everymen who share a long history of friendship, and much of the movie’s suspense, and Myers’s sadism, is borne of the fact that the two refuse to abandon each other. Each pit stop, from a gas station to a store where they stop to grab necessary supplies, we all hold our breath for that false move that could mean the end of every innocent person the trio happens to come across.

Because make no mistake, Myers is so human that his character lends itself to the many ways he seems inhuman. His vigilance, the gleeful ways he psychologically tortures Collins and Bowen, the tattered pieces of his backstory - all of it confirms that this is a tortured man who is beyond redemption. Myers views the care his captives show for each other as soft, nothing more, and his guiding philosophy is that since no one gave him anything, he owes nothing to any human being, least of all mercy.

But the most chilling thing of all is his and the movie’s lack of pretense. Myers makes plain that he plans to kill the duo once they’re no longer useful, and as they make their way through the Mexican countryside, whether or not the radio reports the police tracking their progress, the discovery of a wedding ring, could mean the difference between an extra few hours of life. They are also completely unable to tell when they can make a break for it, since one of Myers’s eyes refuses to close all the way.

It’s very likely Lupino also felt like she had something to prove. In a time when female directors were nearly nonexistent, she had a number of women’s pictures under her directorial belt, including “Outrage,” which in 1950 was one of the first films to deal with the subject of rape, before turning her attention to a thriller. And that was only due to the fact that the film’s original male director fell ill and was unable to finish filming.

Clearly the film didn’t suffer for it. It remains a classic, well worth the investment of its relatively paltry $100,000 budget, still earning praise for how gleefully we root for the noose to tighten around the Myers’s neck. Unsentimental, unsparing, and utterly exhausting once the climax finally puts an end to a very American brand of senseless violence, it remains one of Lupino’s finest works in a long career that nevertheless should’ve seen far more.

52 Films By Women: Shirley (2020)

By Andrea Thompson

Do we really want to know how the sausage is made? Of course we do. If it were made humanely, it wouldn't be nearly as fun. Take the creative process for instance. How much more do we enjoy watching from afar as our favorite artists gloriously destroy in the name of our most beloved works of art? Conflict is, after all, the beating heart of so many of our favorite stories, and if our artistic heroes turn out to be jackasses, so much the better. Provided we ourselves can keep a safe distance.

The question in the film “Shirley” is what happens if this terrible artist happens to be a woman. In this case, she's horror writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), who is as formidable as the stories she wrote. How could this supposedly frail woman not be, given her disinterest in everything the conformist 1950s demands of her? She's everything her gender is told to reject: prickly, difficult, paranoid, agoraphobic, and merciless about prying into the lives of those around her, probing for their most vulnerable points. Even her body, wracked by depression, anxiety, and mental illness, resists being stifled by the rigid demands of the period, nearly bursting out of the attire that tries and fails to mold her into gentility.

Needless to say, newlyweds Fred (Logan Lerman) and Rose (Odessa Young) don't stand a chance. They have the kind of happiness that depends on innocence, and above all, ignorance. When they arrive in town to visit Shirley and her college professor husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), they come off as intelligently as the people who willingly walk in the creepy woods the locals avoid. Then again, these locals they're benevolently smiling at look as though they'd shove them right in.

If their arrival at Stanley and Shirley's home feels like a soothing balm, filled with laughter, debate, and intellectualism, it's quickly revealed to be a Venus flytrap. Rose is a fan of Shirley's who is fascinated, then unsettled by the off-putting writer, who has little taste for social niceties and less use for another adoring fan. It makes Rose reluctant when she's recruited by the husbands to live in the Shirley's home, basically as an unpaid servant, allowing Fred to fulfill his teaching ambitions at the college, and Stanley to have another watchful eye on his unstable wife, who is struggling with writer's block on her latest novel.

But if nice girls don't say no, neither do good wives, and Rose is under more pressure than most women in her situation. Not only is she pregnant, Fred married her even though his parents disowned him for it. Guilt can go a long way in silencing women, and it leaves Rose especially vulnerable to Shirley's manipulations. In another time, their friendship might have become a nourishing love affair, but part of the gendered horror of the film is the knowledge that for the few women who managed to rise above it all and find happiness, there were so many more who fell through the cracks. The missing college girl who inspired the manuscript Shirley is struggling with is merely one example. Cruelty and madness take many forms, many of them far more subdued.

Films like “In The Cut” explored the outright violence of everyday sexism when taken to extremes, but “Shirley” more subtly, psychologically explores how women are united and divided by their oppression. Shirley may at first be envious of Rose's youth, beauty, and supposed happiness, but Rose gazes upon the even younger, lithe college coeds who cluster adoringly around both husbands with much of the same envy for them and the carefree life she's already beyond. In such ways do men create monsters.

Rose is drawn to Shirley for much the same reason these girls are drawn to their husbands, but of course there's far more to it. For all her suffering and dysfunction, Shirley represents a kind of freedom, a rejection of the social mores Rose finds so suffocating but feels powerless to fight. As their friendship intensifies, so does the void in Rose's life, as she's forced to realize how much she isn't seen, by her husband or anyone. Shirley is the one who creates a meaning that is entirely hers, and she ultimately can't respect anyone who derives all the meaning in their life from someone else's work.

If writer Sarah Gubbins nimbly navigates the slow psychological terror of women on verge of a nervous breakdown, director Josephine Decker is her partner in crime, bringing the same splintered, manic energy that was so spellbinding in “Madeline's Madeline.” That their focus is insular is to be expected, but it outright refuses to address the fact that in reality, Shirley Jackson had four children and wrote irreverent stories on the topic when the image of the perfectly coiffed, smiling housewife was at its height.

What it might come down to is simply a disinterest in family life. Tortured artists may have always been all the rage, but seldom have they been as gloriously unhinged and female, or as capable of being understood without being excused. That “Shirley” ends with its title character's triumphant laughter and confidence that her latest book will be a smash hit says just as much about us as it does about her. It came about at much personal expense, but after all, the film posits, wasn't it all in the name of art?