Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

The Hitch-Hiker Blu-ray Movie Review

Hijacked in Old Mexico

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater October 18, 2013

The history of female directors in pre-1960s Hollywood is slim. From the late 1920s to the early '40s, the only woman helming films in town was Dorothy Arzner, who made her name directing Clara Bow in her first talkie, The Wild Party, an all-girls-school drama with sapphic undertones. After Arzner stopped directing in 1943, it would be seven years before another woman got behind the camera of a mainstream movie. (Though there were certainly others, like Maya Deren, working in underground, independent cinema.) Suspended by Columbia Pictures for turning down a role, English actress Ida Lupino—who had appeared in over forty films since 1931, including High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart—formed a production company with her husband and turned to directing, initially making low-budget films about women's social issues, like the unwed-mother melodrama Not Wanted and Outrage, which controversially explored the emotional aftereffects of rape. Her most celebrated effort is 1953's The Hitch-Hiker, which is generally cited as the first film noir by a woman. While it's not a conventional noir, per se, in that it lacks many of the genre's visual/thematic touchstones—no femme fatale, for instance—it does crackle with suspense, following a deranged psychopath hitchhiking on a cross-country killing spree.

The Hitch-Hiker

The film was released in the same year that Flannery O'Connor wrote her short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," about a roaming "Misfit" who murders a family traveling to Florida. O'Connor may have been inspired by the true story of Billy Cook, a hitchhiker who, two years prior, killed six people en route from Missouri to California. In any case, Lupino and her husband/co-writer Collier Young definitely patterned the antagonist of The Hitch-Hiker after Cook, down to the infamous criminal's droopy right eyelid, which he was unable to ever fully close.

Actor William Talman—who would later be known for playing district attorney Hamilton Burger for many years on Perry Mason—stars as this deranged Cook-clone, Emmett Meyers, who has slain a series of friendly drivers across the American Southwest. The unlucky guys who pick him up next are Roy Collins (Edmund O'Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy), a pair of middle-aged war buddies who have planned to escape their families for the weekend to do some fishing in Mexico and maybe catch a nudie show or two. As soon as Meyers gets in the back seat—his face menacingly obscured in shadows—he pulls a pistol, tells them who he is, and lets them know exactly what he'll do to them if they don't do exactly as he says.

Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl," but Lupino proves in The Hitch-Hiker that all you really need is a gun. This is a lean, stripped-down thriller, free of all excess melodrama. There's no romance here, no convoluted backstories—beyond the implication that Meyers had a troubled childhood—and no subplots or tangents. This is a simple story of a man with a revolver, the lone source of authority for an otherwise powerless, broken human being. Considering our current national debate over gun control, the film is somewhat prescient in its examination of the sort of power that firearms offer those who feel—or chose to be—ostracized by society. With this small metal object, Meyers is able to completely commandeer the lives of the two men who were kind enough to offer him a ride, taking them down and across the Baja peninsula on an aimless journey filled with psychological tortures.

In one scene, Meyers forces Bowen at gunpoint to shoot a tin can out of Collins' hand, a William Tell-like challenge that could've been disastrous. Later, as they camp out in the countryside, Meyers dares them to try to run off, reminding them that he quite literally sleeps with one eye open. It may sound hokey, but this is-he-or-isn't-he-awake question fuels two of the film's tensest scenes, turning Meyers into a kind of monster, a dozing but inescapable cyclops. William Talman is legitimately terrifying in the role—seedy and raw and unpredictable—and his work here overshadows the comparatively low- key performances of his co-stars, whose characters have much less dramatic meat on their bones.

The Hitch-Hiker succeeds as a potboiler—it is entertaining, carried along purely by suspense—but there's not much to it in terms of subtext or characterization. Collins and Bowens, for instance, are barely developed and really only serve as stand-ins for the "what would I do in this situation?" fears of the audience. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's a fact that keeps the movie out of the top-tier canon of true noir classics. Still, both the movie and Ida Lupino have their place in cinema history, and between that and William Talman's pressure cooker of a performance, there are more than enough reasons to give The Hitch-Hiker a ride.

The Hitch-Hiker Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I hate to keep repeating myself, but Kino-Lorber really has settled into a routine way of treating these Kino Classics titles—and their Redemption Films releases—procuring the best prints available, scanning them in high definition, doing some minor color corrections, and then presenting them essentially as-is, without extensive digital cleanup or filtering. Print damage is occasionally visible, then—and in The Hitch-Hiker it amounts to some brief scratches and white specks—but on the plus side, the image looks absolutely filmic, with natural grain structure intact. There's no digital noise reduction here, no obvious edge enhancement or other unnecessary forms of boosting, and no compression issues either. Though you may not get the wow-factor that comes with, say, a lot of Criterion Collection releases—which have been digitally cleaned up without being de-noised—Kino's titles do look true to source. The Hitch-Hiker's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer is consistent, and the picture reveals a lot of fine detail that would simply be undistinguishable in standard definition. Likewise, the black and white grading is balanced and never problematic. (No overblown whites or crushed-to- oblivion blacks.) If you can accept Kino's methodology, there are really no complaints to be made here.

The Hitch-Hiker Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Hitch-Hiker features an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 mono track that's fairly typical for a low-budget B-movie from this era. There are some age-related crackles and the occasional low hiss, but nothing distracting or harsh. The one oddity is that there are a few quick moments when William Talman's voice sounds really obviously dubbed-in after the fact, lower and more muffled than the surrounding dialogue. Otherwise, the on-edge conversations between the three characters are always clear and easy to understand. (Once again, though, Kino-Lorber has neglected to include any subtitles for those who need or want them.) Leith Stevens' tense and brassy score sounds great too, with no high end brashness or peaking.

The Hitch-Hiker Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Gallery (HD): A user directed gallery with sixteen stills, posters, and promo images.
• Trailers (HD): Includes trailers for White Zombie, The Stranger, and Night Tide.

The Hitch-Hiker Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Hitch-Hiker may not have enough going on beneath the surface to make it one of the all-time noir greats, but it is a fast, lean thriller with one hell of a bad guy in William Talman's Emmet Meyers, a stone-cold psychopath who's cruel and heartless and out of control. The film also holds the distinction of being the first mainstream noir directed by a woman—the talented Ida Lupino—and this is reason enough for fans of the genre to search it out. Thankfully, though, it's more than just a historical curiosity; The Hitch-Hiker genuinely holds up well for a potboiler. It also looks great in high definition thanks to Kino-Lorber's new 1080p presentation. Though slim in the bonus features department—some sort of retrospective of Lupino's career would've been nice—this is an all-around solid release. Recommended.