Episode 7: The Hitch-Hiker

One of the only female directors of Hollywood's Golden Age, no one could coax more from actors or tell a story with greater economy than Ida Lupino. Her 1953 gem the Hitch-Hiker hooks you with the opening still and leaves you breathless and running scared for seventy perfectly polished minutes. Lupino rubs the sheen off violence to create a quasi-documentary vision of criminality striking at random the most remote corners of society. A profoundly unsettling film, it works above all on the male psyche, blowing wide open the post-war crisis of masculinity in a culture "up to its neck in IOU's." This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir" at outofthepast.libsyn.com/