How Ida Lupino went from Hollywood star to pioneering director

When Glasgow Film Festival initially mooted an Ida Lupino retrospective for this year's edition, it was to mark her centenary – she was born in London 100 years ago this month. It’s as fine a reason as any to mount a reappraisal of an important but still-underappreciated artist. But over the past few months the choice of Lupino has started to feel essential. In this moment of #MeToo, #TimesUp and the continued gender pay gap outrage in the movie business, the opportunity to revisit the work of one of cinema’s pioneering female filmmakers couldn't feel more vital.

Lupino is a familiar face to any fan of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Her career began at age 13; by 15 she was on contract with Paramount, although she quickly tired of her roles there. “She got stuck playing ingénues,” explains GFF co-director Allan Hunter, who programmed the retrospective. “She told Paramount I don’t want to be a glamour girl and walked out on a pretty lucrative contract so that she could get better parts.”

It was a daring move in a career that would be defined by bold maneuvers, but it paid off. In the 40s she began to specialised in tough, hard-boiled broads. She went toe-to-toe with Humphrey Bogart, Jean Gabin and Edward G Robertson, and work with great directors like Fritz Lang, Raoul Walsh and Nicholas Ray. 

Outrage

Her fierce performances in films like Lang’s While the City Sleeps and Walsh’s High Sierra (which screens at GFF) are well remembered, but it’s as a director that Lupino really broke ground. She spoke about her ambition to work behind the camera in 1945, two years after Dorothy Arzner – the only female director working in Hollywood – had retired. “I see myself, in the years ahead, directing or producing or both,” said Lupino. “I see myself developing new talent, which would be furiously interesting for me. I'm more genuinely interested in the talent of others than I am in my own.”

Just four years later she wrote and produced Not Wanted, a low-budget melodrama dealing with the spiky subjects of teen sex and unwanted pregnancy. The film also proved to be her baptism of fire as a director when Not Wanted’s credited helmer, silent-era veteran Elmer Clifton, suffered a heart attack days before shooting was to begin. Lupino pulled up her sleeves and took over the picture, and the result, according to vociferous Lupino champion Richard Brody of The New Yorker, was a “startling blend of compassion and invention”.

One of the reasons Lupino could slip into the director's chair so easily was that she'd been paying attention on-set. “You hear lots of stories that she used to hang out on other directors’ sets when she was working as an actor, just to see how they did it,” Hunter tells us. “Raoul Walsh used to let her sit in on the editing room when he was cutting some of his films just to ask the odd question of, you know, why did you choose that shot and how did you get that effect, so she really did know the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, and I think that’s maybe where she was happiest.”

Not Wanted was the first film of fledgling independent production house The Filmakers [sic], set up by Lupino and her producer husband Collier Young. They would produce seven other pictures by 1953, and Lupino would direct five of them. Martin Scorsese calls her run of indie films “remarkable chamber pieces that deal with challenging subjects in a clear, almost documentary fashion, and they represent a singular achievement in American cinema.”

The Hitch-Hiker

As a director, Lupino’s style is both terse and expressionistic, performance-orientated but also cinematic. And all her films tackle thorny subjects. Her first feature credited as director, Never Fear, told the story of a dancer crippled by polio, inspired by her own battle with the then-devastating disease.

Her masterpiece might be Outrage, a profoundly moving study of rape culture in 50s America. It was deeply controversial on its release, with Variety claiming Lupino had taken on “one topic which would better have been left unfilmed.” Watched today, it’s still powerful. The rape scene is elided (the word itself is never uttered, an instead the assault is euphemistically described throughout as an “attack”), but it’s preceded by a gut-wrenching chase through an abandoned warehouse district. Free from dialogue, Lupino uses discombobulating shifts in point of view and oblique camera angles to create a five minute sequence of pure panic and menace.

Similarly well-crafted was The Hitch-Hiker, a sinewy thriller based on a pulled-from-the-headlines story of two average Joes who get carjacked on a trip to Mexico by a serial killer with a sadistic temper. At 71 minutes, it’s a fat-free nailbiter.

The Bigamist

Lupino’s final film with the Filmakers was the excellent The Bigamist, a surprisingly sympathetic study following Edmond O’Brien’s sad-sack salesman who finds himself in two marriages thanks to crippling loneliness. Lupino herself plays one of the wives, making this another landmark: the first woman to direct herself in a major American feature.

If we haven’t made it abundantly clear, Lupino was an all-round talent. She was writing the films, co-producing, directing, and in the case of The Bigamist acting too. Beyond the mad genius of Orson Welles, who else was doing that in 50s Hollywood? Hunter sums up the hypocrisy: “If Warren Beatty does that it’s the most amazing thing in the world. Lupino was doing that 20, 30 years earlier, and people don’t seem to give her the same degree of credit.”

Unlike Beatty, Lupino never went in for self-aggrandising. “She would often say that in acting she was a poor man’s Bette Davis and in directing she turned out to be a poor man’s Don Segal,” Hunter notes. With this GFF retrospective, it’s your chance to shout her name from the rooftops.

Ida Lupino: On Dangerous Ground
The Bigamist: Fri 2 Mar, GFT, 1pm
High Sierra: Mon 26 Feb, GFT, 1pm
The Hitch-Hiker: Thu 1 Mar, GFT, 1pm
Moontide: Thu 27 Feb, GFT, 1.15pm
Outrage: Web 28 Feb, GFT, 1pm

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Read more about Glasgow Film Festival in The CineSkinny – in print at Glasgow Film Theatre and the CCA, and online at theskinny.co.uk/film/cineskinny