Editor’s Note: “Oh those ultra-gory horror movies with their icky-realistic CGI effects! Nothing can beat them!” Balderdash, says Freeline Media critic Mike Fried. If you want fear and suspense, Mike says, revisit an exceptionally dark film from the 1950s. Read on!
By Mike Fried
THE HITCH-HIKER
5/5
“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.”
It’s a simple premise and it’s a short, low-budget B-movie that gets down to it right away.
Two guys on a fishing trip stop to help a stranded motorist; but little do they know that the stranded motorist is a serial killer who has already killed the passengers of three other cars. The two guys, Collins and Bowen, comply with the hitch-hiker, Myers, because they have no choice.
This is the movie that turned me on to Ida Lupino as a director. Sure, I tuned into this movie to see Eddie O’Brien, one of my favorite actors; but this movie opened my eyes. Up until that point, noirs were exclusively the domain of male directors. And boy does she deliver.
Lupino was the only female member of the director’s guild at the time of this film’s release. This film (and the following year’s The Bigamist) were bonafide hits upon release. In fact, this was a male-centric movie in front of and behind the camera. Lupino was the only female working on the film.
This movie didn’t fare so well back in 1954 but it is now considered a classic film noir — and rightly so.
The plot is threadbare but effective. Lupino, who co-wrote the script with her husband, based it on the real life hitchhiker killings committed by Billy Cook in 1950. She interviewed not only two survivors of the kidnapping but Cook himself and they all signed releases so that she could integrate their stories into the script, which is nothing more than a psychological thriller combined with a race against time. The cops know that Collins and Bowen are with Myers and roadblocks are set up along the way in an attempt to track them with the aid of the Mexican police.
The film was shot by now-legendary cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who lensed 1947’s Out of the Past. The Hitch-Hiker’s stark black and white photography and haunting score by composer Leith Stevens — who had a fantastic run in the 1950s with such classics as The War of the Worlds and When Worlds Collide — combine to add atmosphere.
But it’s the acting that makes this a pure joy to watch. Edmond O’Brien had the most illustrious career and is top billed and really chews the scenery but still gives a lot of great lines to his co-star Frank Lovejoy, who plays the role of Bowen in a nicely understated manner.
But it’s William Tallman who steals the movie as the crazed Myers. He plays the killer as a man who can’t close one eye which comes in handy when the two captives try a night escape. He is straight out of central casting but he makes it work so well. Tallman, who had a big career as DA Hamilton Burger, the man who lost all but two cases to Perry Mason, tells a story that he was stopped at a red light when the guy in the car next to him said “You’re the hitchhiker, right?” and when Tallman said he was, the other motorist got out of his car and slapped Tallman. He always joked that this moment might be as close as he would get to winning an Academy Award.
And it’s because of Tallman’s mercurial performance that the film maintains its suspense. We know he has a hair trigger and is not reluctant to kill — the opening scenes show this quite clearly — but we don’t know what his breaking point will be.
It’s not just a great B-picture. It’s a great film directed by a great director.
WATCH IT!
5/5
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@gmail.com
