Thumbing a Ride to Damnation

The Hitch-hiker is a lean, mean proto-noir filmed when the genre was just starting its initial artistic downswing. It’s a progenitor to such later (and inferior) exploitation fare as The Sadist (1963) and The Hitcher (1986). Director Ida Lupino, widely renowned today as one of the only female filmmakers of her era, tells what is today an archetypal B-movie tale, but invests it with traits that transcend its modest means. The film dates from 1953, but its grainy, low-budget stock place it nearly a decade earlier in terms of look and feel. The cast is minimal with most of the action involving only three principal characters. A preamble placard redundantly proclaims the facts as actual, its words inscribed above a backdrop of broken asphalt. Exposition is accomplished swiftly and the 70-minute film never mires in trivialities.

Two married Average Joes on a fishing trip decide to detour across the border into Mexico for some booze and perhaps a little more. Through skillfully hinted at back-story, it’s an impromptu mission to relive some Glory Days. A sociopathic highway killer, one Emmett Myers, is simultaneously in the midst of a cross-country murder spree. Their paths cross and the pair become his captives at gunpoint. The construct effectively presages the horror morality dynamic that would inform countless of its successors: even the intent of indulgence in vice leads to dire consequences. The obligatory law enforcement side of the equation plays a distant second fiddle to the tense test of wills that plays out between the three men.

Frank Lovejoy plays the more grounded and stolid of the pair, his stubble-stippled jaw clenched in a stern scowl for much of the film. Edmund O’Brien is more openly headstrong and angry, but also less equipped to handle the demoralizing stress doled out by William Talman’s Myers. Lupino takes pains to the illustrate harrowing effects on both men, their features haggard, their clothes caked in grime and desert dust. Far from stalwart heroes, the good guys are flawed and their fear and frustration is palpable. Near the film’s end, they each look nearly as feral and disheveled as their assailant does.

As solid as Lovejoy and O’Brien are, Talman steals the show. The turgid lid of his lazy eye coupled with a set of cauliflower ears give him a countenance worthy of a grotesque Dick Tracy villain. He plays to the tropes of a sociopath without overplaying them, easily rivaling the reigning champion Richard Widmark in the unhinged reprobate department. Lacking in book learning and invested with a sadistic streak, he is still very careful, almost methodical, in the manner in which he commands his captives. That underlying confidence, however fragile in the end, only amplifies his threat. Any slivers of sympathy harbored toward his prisoners are fleeting. The notion of a rosy or even just outcome to the story isn’t a certainty as it is with so many Hollywood “true crime” films of the era. Myers is destined for death, but the question of whom he takes with him remains open for much of the film.

Lupino keeps things moving at a brisk pace without compromising clever details, and she fills the film with all manner of inventive visuals. From light and shadow car interiors to long distance tracking shots of the car’s winding journey across dusty rural roads. The lighting and capture of Talman’s face is particularly effective, giving him the appearance of pallid, cackling ghoul on more than one occasion and reflecting the bullying depravity in his actions. One scene involves an ad hoc game of target practice in a roadside gulch that conveys just how devoid of scruples his Myers truly is. Another gives menace to one of his deformities, eroding his captives’ chances of escape and keeping them perpetually on edge. The reasoning behind Myers decision to keep his the men alive becomes progressively far-fetched and the film’s dénouement is pretty standard, but not without some subtle twists that further degrade the mental stamina of the erstwhile good guys. Even with a typically bombastic “crime jazz” soundtrack and cardboard cutout supporting characters, including several Hispanic ones that border on caricature, the film’s strengths far outweigh its foibles. As a hardboiled melodrama stacked with one of the most malicious, if lesser known, miscreants of Fifties cinema, Lupino’s labor of love hits on nearly every cylinder.

~ Derek Taylor