Le Voyage de la peur

"The Hitch-Hiker" is an excellent little independently produced film-noire thriller directed by Ida Lupino. It is essentially a three character story about two pals on a fishing trip (or is it?) who stop to pick up a hitch-hiker whose car has apparently broken down, What they don't realize is that the hitchhiker is a crazed killer.

The two buddies are played by two of the best character actors of the period, Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy. The hitcher, in the role of his career, is played by William Tallman (of TV's Perry Mason fame).

The story covers their trek across the desert back roads of Mexico in an effort to evade the law. Most of the film takes place within the claustrophobic confines of O'Brien's car as he and Lovejoy remain at the mercy of loose cannon Tallman never knowing where or when he might decide to shoot them. Lupino gives us a compact, tense and suspenseful thriller. Shot in black and white, it runs a brief 71 minutes and delivers an excellent drama on a limited budget.

Rarely seen today, this movie is a buried little treasure.

Thanks to modern technology, another film noir classic has escaped from Hollywood's vault of too-often-overlooked or forgotten films. Albeit a minor classic, "The Hitch-Hiker," directed by Ida Lupino, is a taut drama notable for it's realism, as well as a haunting performance by William Talman.

Reputedly based on a true incident ("Penned from the headlines"), the story traces the movements of a hitch-hiker, Emmett Myers (Talman), who repays his highway hosts by robbing and murdering them. Initially, we are shown mere glimpses of Myers and his victims, which successfully sets the stage for the introduction of Roy Collins (Edmond O'Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy), two friends on their way to a fishing trip in Mexico, when, unawares, they pick up Myers.

What follows is a realistic depiction of what most likely would transpire when ordinary people are suddenly faced with such extraordinary circumstances. And the strength of the film lies in the fact that when Collins and Bowen are kidnapped, held at gunpoint and forced to do the bidding of their captor, they react and behave in a manner that is both consistent with their current state of affairs and believable. There are no feigned heroics or superhuman contrivances that allow the two captives to effect an escape; instead, the story plays out in much the way one would, in reality, expect in such a situation, which, when extrapolated, effectively drives home the true horror of Collin's and Bowen's circumstance.

The lion's share of the credit for the success of this film must go to director Ida Lupino, whose almost documentary-style approach to the story lends it the necessary grit and intensity. She scores double points, as well, for not only delivering a memorable film, but doing so at a time in which few women were afforded the opportunity to perform at such a level behind the camera. Lupino's success no doubt helped pave the way for the likes of Jane Campion, Jodie Foster, Gillian Armstrong, Allison Anders and a host of other women who have since proved that gender alone does not equate to excellence and ability in the director's chair.

In arguably his best performance, character actor William Talman turns in a memorable performance as the sociopath, Myers. Forget your Freddys and Jasons; Talman's portrayal creates the kind of character that nightmares are really made of. Myers is a guy you could pass on the street, or-- yes, even give a lift to if you saw him with his thumb out on the highway-- without giving him a second thought. And that's what makes him so scary; his disguise is that he doesn't have a disguise, and it's so much more effective than having a hockey mask or hands with steel fingers could ever be.

O'Brien and Lovejoy also turn in credible performances, creating characters who, like Talman's Myers, are real. Watching them, you believe that Collins is, indeed, an auto mechanic, and Bowen a draftsman; two friends off together to do some fishing.

The supporting cast includes Jose Torvay (Captain Alvarado); Jean Del Val (Inspector General); Clark Howat (Government Agent); and Natividad Vacio (Jose). The 71 minute running time is perfect for this film; rather than resort to superfluous filler, Lupino stays on task without ever straying, and in the end makes "The Hitch-Hiker" a ride that will leave you wondering what you would do in a like situation, and hoping that you'll never have to find out. It's the magic of the movies.

Out of RKO Radio Pictures, The Hitch-Hiker is directed by Ida Lupino and jointly adapted to the screen by Lupino, Collier Young and Daniel Mainwaring. It stars Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy & William Talman. Nicholas Musuraca photographs the film and Leith Stevens scores the music.

"This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours, or that young couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual".

The above opening salvo from the film is not without merit, tho due to the Hays Office requirements Lupino had to tone down her initial plans for the film. The story is based on the true story of murderer Billy Cook, who in 1950 posed as a hitch-hiker and murdered a family of five and a travelling salesman. The film picks up with the aftermath of that, where Cook then kidnapped two friends out hunting and forced them at gunpoint to drive him across the border into Mexico. Lupino researched her subject well, even interviewing the principals in the kidnapping.

Something of a cult favourite these days, The Hitch-Hiker is a brisk, lean and tight film showing how to get the maximum amount of suspense out of the simplest of set-ups. Practically a three character piece, the film thrives on claustrophobia and an impending sense of dread. Even when the characters come out of the confines of the car, we still feel stifled during the sequences that feature the men out in the desert. There's a sense of desolation in the landscape that marries up with the emotional state of our two kidnapped men. It's fine work by Lupino, who never lets the mood slip. She in turn is aided considerably by her writers and Musuraca's photography. The former cleverly only lets the kidnapped men's personalities unfold once they are seized by Talman's psychopath, the latter brings film noir agoraphobia to the Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, location: A place that was often shown to be gorgeous in many a fine Western in the 50s.

All three lead actors do good work under Lupino's direction, with Talman particularly menacing, all lazy eye and snarly grins. While Stevens' music sits nicely with the tone of the story. Credit Lupino, too, for not letting her male driven movie contain any machismo posturing, or heaven forbid, testosterone fuelled bravado. Where the film does fall down is with its rather anti-climatic finale. For although the real life finale involving Billy Cook was genuinely mundane, the film's ending is also a bit of a damp squib. It's one of those cases where some poetic licence wouldn't have gone amiss. Still, it's far from a deal breaker, the film remains a taut and moodily enjoyable experience. 7.5/10

William Talman once mentioned this film in a personal interview. He was driving in Los Angeles in an open convertible and stopped at a stop light. A fellow in another convertible looked over at him and asked, "You're the hitch hiker, aren't you?" Talman shook his head indicating that he was. The other driver then left his car and went over and slapped Talman in the face. Talman, when relating this story, said, "You know, I never won an academy award but I guess that was about as close as I ever will come to one."

Ida Lupino's "The Hitch-Hiker" is like a B-movie bullet coming at the audience. No fat. No melodrama. Nobody trying to get home in time to save the crippled kid. Just a lean and mean treat – as the police-style narration promises us, 70 minutes of "true" crime suspense.

The plot is as straight and narrow as they come. Two war buddies (Frank Lovejoy and Edmund O'Brien) decide to detour south to the Mexican border to make their vacation more interesting (possibly a nudie show or two) and get far more action than they bargained for when they pick up a psychotic prison escapee (William Talman) who holds them hostage. The film's big gimmick is the fact that the hitch-hiker has one paralyzed eye, so that the two hostages can't tell when he's sleeping or awake to make a break for freedom. Considering how cheap this device sounds it actually works extremely well under the direction of Lupino and Talman's performance. As he tries to make his way to freedom across the Mexican deserts, the hitch-hiker drags these two All-American types with him and engages in sadistic games for his own amusement like having one of them hold a tin can while the other shoots it out of his hand with a rifle. After trying to escape together several times the hitch-hiker makes the film's most profound statement by taunting the 2 friends "you could have escaped if you didn't worry about each other" (or words to that effect).

Apparently there is some controversy over whether this film should be called a "film noir". It's been in the public domain for many years and has been included on a lot of "film noir" collections sold at bargain prices, and presumably some viewers have been disappointed by this film's lack of the usual things you see in a "film noir". Now first of all their complaints should be directed at the people who labeled the DVD instead of the people who made the movie 20 years before the term "film noir" even existed. Now is this just a semantic question? Yes and no. Ultimately it doesn't matter what we call the film. It's a suspense film, basically. In other words a film with a more or less set outcome where the audience spends the whole time worrying about "how" and not "what". There seems to be a disturbing trend with this film and some others, that I've gathered over the years reading comments, to hold these movies to some kind of extrinsic standard, a set of values totally alien to the film itself. The film does not have a "femme fatale". OK, it doesn't have any women period. It has no dark semi-Gothic melodrama. Perhaps most noticeably it does not take place in the dimly lit alleyways of urban America. Hence some "film noir fans" have chosen to deride the movie for its perceived deficiencies and to declare it lacking based on a strange confluence of out-of-control marketing (the chronic use of the word "noir" to sell videos) and narrow genre rules for a "genre" that never actually existed. Still others seem to stray in the opposite direction, considering any film "noir" that employs expressionistic photographic devices that were in common usage far back in the silent era. Instead of all this we should look at the film for what it is and only consider it in terms of "noir" as far as it helps us to understand the piece in relation to contemporary films of the 40s and 50s.

The most unusual aspect of the film in my opinion is its total lack of dramatic pretense aka melodrama. The meat of the film is in the 2 men's relationship and the way that the criminal interloper throws that friendship into relief. Superficially speaking they are "innocent" while he is "guilty". But what's interesting in the film is the way that the mere presence of this evil person brings out the weakness and corruption of the 2 friends. The hitch-hiker's comment about how the 2 men could have escaped separately but were held back by their friendship implies, as do many of his off-hand insulting comments, that the 2 men are soft and corrupted by civilization and that the hitch-hiker himself is a stronger man because he does anything he wants to do. However when one of them asks him "have you ever had a gun pointed at you" it's a subtle reminder that both of these men are war veterans and that they might have a much greater understanding of power and fear than the criminal could ever possess. In this way the film addresses broader issues of the post-war American man in terms of how he sees himself and how others in society may see him. It digs into the insecurity that the domestication and suburbanization of the post-war culture brought to many veterans. And as far as I'm concerned this is prime film noir territory.

So if you're strictly interested in traditional tough guys like Mike Hammer and Philip Marlowe, or if you insist on the standard "good girl vs. bad girl" melodrama (aka "femme fatale") then you probably won't get what you're looking for from this movie. But if you're interested in the broader themes of the corruptive influence of civilization that many "noir" films explore then this film is a novel way to see these themes expressed. It's a very well-made film – although not hugely ambitious, when taken on its own terms the film does have something to say about modern life.