The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Directed by Ida Lupino, this tension filled suspense movie is absolutely outstanding. Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy and William Talman star in a story about two companions, O'Brien and Lovejoy, heading out for a hunting trip only to be side tracked by a sadistic killer. Bill Talman's performance is especially effective as the bad guy in this film. Good luck trying to find it in video or on television. I have not seen it since the early 1950's. It was tied up in legal problems for many years and may still be.

Fmovies: Roy and Gilbert are heading to Mexico on a fishing trip together when they stop to pick up a hitchhiker. Too late they realise that the man has not really run out of petrol but is actually criminal Emmett Myers, who has killed his way across several states and is now using them to continue his getaway from the authorities. With Emmett holding the two friends at gun point, he forces them to drive deeper into Mexico – all the time making it very clear that they are only alive while he needs them alive and not any longer.

The opening caption informs us that this is based on a true story and also tries to engage the audience by pointing out how the couple in the car could have been you (or the people across the aisle). Really though it needn't have bothered with either because the caption doesn't add a great deal. It may be based on a true story but it didn't seem like it was interested in this beyond using the facts as a frame for the story and personally I didn't think it needed to try and put me into the car because Ida Lupino did that well enough by herself. The story is simple and it is to the director's credit that she holds it together so well. Yes it is short by modern standards but she should not lessen how well she has brought out a constant sense of tension whether it be in the tight confines of the car or in the desperate bleak openness of the desert.

She is helped by a strong trio of performances from actors who appear to be punching above their weights. Although they haven't a huge amount of depth in their characters they do convince in the realms of tension and fear. The friendship between O'Brien and Lovejoy is solid and helps to support the slightly weak element of the script which is that they never seem to even considering leaving the other for even a second. Talman is memorable in the title role, easily building a screen of menace before allowing the cracks to show.

A pretty good film then. It trades on atmosphere and tension, both of which Ida Lupino works with really well. The actors maybe don't have depth to trade on but they respond well to the tone of delivery and give suitably good performances.

Two old army buddies (Edmund O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy) take off on a fishing trip from California to the Mexican coast. At the same time, a fugitive serial killer (William Tallman) is hitch-hiking and killing his way across the country. They intersect in the desert, just before the Mexican border. He hijacks and holds them hostage on an odyssey into hell. We follow them deeper and deeper into the beautiful, but hostile desert as Tallman seems to outwit the authorities time and again. They become more and more terrified as he becomes more and more psycho. He displays a kind of pure malice and cruelty that makes your skin crawl. Example: He forces one of the buddies to shoot the glass out of the other's hand. His evil character has a drooping right eye. While preparing to sleep around a campfire, he dares the captives to guess whether he is awake or asleep. They guess wrong - he kills them. The viewer takes this trip across the desert with them, all the way to their final destination, and the climax of this exciting film. It is easy to see why Ida Lupino, was considered one of the premier film noir directors. Her concept of the fishing buddies, courageous, proud, but terrified reaches right down into our guts. But it is her balanced vision of the evil, intelligent, unpredictable killer that defines the film. This is a keeper. If you like it - and how could you not - try Split Second. There is a curious coincidence between these two films. Both were directed by famous and respected actors. This by Ida Lupino and the other by Dick Powell.

The Hitch-Hiker fmovies. While traveling in a fishing trip to San Felipe, the draftsman Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and his friend, the garage owner Roy Collins (Edmond O'Brien) give a ride to a stranger. Sooner they learn that the man is the psychopath serial-killer Emmett Myers (William Talman), who has escaped from prison and wants to reach Santa Rosalia in Mexico. The sadistic criminal also tells them that he will kill them in the end of the line.

"The Hitch-Hiker" is a thriller that discloses the tense true story of a man and a gun and a car with two friends that intend to spend a couple of days together fishing. Ida Lupino is the sole female director in Hollywood in this genre and "The Hitch-Hiker" is the one of the seven classic film-noirs produced by a minor studio ("The Filmmakers") that have been chosen by the National Film Registry that is the United States National Film Preservation Board for preservation in the Library of the US Congress. William Talman is very impressive in the role of a criminal that never closes his right eye. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "O Mundo Odeia-me" ("The World Hate Me")

...THE HITCH-HIKER is the original, '50s-made hitchhiking nightmare film. It's a straightforward three-hander in which a couple of buddies (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) are accosted by a manic serial killer (William Talman), who forces them to drive him to Mexico in order for him to escape the authorities.

This is a low budget, black and white suspense thriller that has more tension in it than a dozen recent movies. The low budget works in its favour, with tight camera angles making for a claustrophobic viewing experience. Actress Ida Lupino certainly knows what she's doing behind the camera as she rarely puts a foot wrong here: the pacing is exact and the performances are excellent.

While O'Brien and Lovejoy ground the movie playing the two protagonists, but in reality this is Talman's turn. He gives a pitch perfect turn as the creepy villain, one that would pave the way for later screen psychos like Robert Mitchum's character in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. Talman's acting is the stuff of brilliance, and he alone makes the film worth watching. The rest of it is the icing on the cake.

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