page_title: The Hitch-Hiker
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: The Hitch-Hiker / Reception / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: English: Screen-shot of film: The Hitch-Hiker (1953). Actors: Frank Lovejoy, William Talman, and Edmond O'Brien. The Hitch-Hiker at the Internet Archive
context_page_description: The Hitch-Hiker is a 1953 film noir directed by Ida Lupino, about two fishing buddies who pick up a mysterious hitchhiker during a trip to Mexico. Inspired by the crime spree of the psychopathic murderer Billy Cook, the screenplay was written by Robert L. Joseph, Lupino, and her former husband Collier Young, based on a story by Daniel Mainwaring, who did not receive a screen credit due to him then being on the Hollywood blacklist.
  The Hitch-Hiker is regarded as the first American mainstream film noir directed by a woman and was selected in 1998 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."
  The film is in the public domain.
context_section_description: A. H. Weiler, the film critic for The New York Times, gave The Hitch-Hiker a mixed review on its initial release. The acting, direction, and use of locations were praised, but the plot was deemed to be predictable.
  
  Critic John Krewson lauded the work of Ida Lupino, and wrote, 
  As a screenwriter and director, Lupino had an eye for the emotional truth hidden within the taboo or mundane, making a series of B-styled pictures which featured sympathetic, honest portrayals of such controversial subjects as unmarried mothers, bigamy, and rape ... in The Hitch-Hiker, arguably Lupino's best film and the only true noir directed by a woman, two utterly average middle-class American men are held at gunpoint and slowly psychologically broken by a serial killer. In addition to her critical but compassionate sensibility, Lupino had a great filmmaker's eye, using the starkly beautiful street scenes in Not Wanted and the gorgeous, ever-present loneliness of empty highways in The Hitch-Hiker to set her characters apart.
  Time Out Film Guide wrote of the film, 
  Absolutely assured in her creation of the bleak, noir atmosphere – whether in the claustrophobic confines of the car, or lost in the arid expanses of the desert – Lupino never relaxes the tension for one moment. Yet her emotional sensitivity is also upfront: charting the changes in the menaced men's relationship as they bicker about how to deal with their captor, stressing that only through friendship can they survive. Taut, tough, and entirely without macho-glorification, it's a gem, with first-class performances from its three protagonists, deftly characterised without resort to cliché.
  In January 2014, a restored 35mm print was premiered by the Film Noir Foundation at Noir City 12 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. On April 6, 2014 The Hitch-Hiker was shown again at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Mary Ann Anderson author of The Making of The Hitch-Hiker appeared at this event.
caption: Frank Lovejoy, William Talman and Edmond O'Brien
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