The Hitch-Hiker

The Hitch-Hiker is a 1953 American independent film noir thriller directed by Ida Lupino, who co-wrote it with her former husband Collier Young, and starring Edmond O'Brien, William Talman and Frank Lovejoy. Based on the 1950 killing spree of Billy Cook, the film follows two friends who are taken hostage by a murderous hitchhiker during an automobile trip to Mexico.
The Hitch-Hiker was the first American mainstream film noir directed by a woman. It was selected in 1998 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."
In the early 1950s, a hitchhiker robs and kills motorists who offer him rides. A suspect, Emmett Myers (Talman), is publicized in newspaper headlines.
In California, two friends, Roy Collins (O'Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Lovejoy), are driving to a planned fishing trip in San Felipe, Baja California, Mexico. In Calexico, California, they pick up Myers, who pulls a gun and takes them hostage. Myers forces the pair to drive him to Santa Rosalía, Baja California Sur, where he plans to escape a police manhunt by taking a ferry across the Gulf of California to Guaymas. To avoid law enforcement, he orders them to stay off main roads and instead try to drive through the Baja California desert.
Collins and Bowen comply, hoping they will be identified and stopped at the Mexico–United States border at Mexicali, but to their dismay they are let through. In Mexico, Myers sadistically terrorizes the pair—at one point forcing Bowen to shoot a tin can out of Collins' hand from a long distance—and revels in the ineffective attempts by Mexican law enforcement to catch him using checkpoints. After a tense moment while stopping to get food, they stop for the night. Collins and Bowen discuss their plans to escape, and agree that they must act at the right time or they will be killed.
The next morning, the car radio fails, and Myers berates Collins for breaking it, so Bowen must drive. Meanwhile, police investigators learn the three are together and deduce where Myers is planning to go. At a gas station, Myers kills a dog, while Bowen leaves his wedding ring for the police to find. Overnight, Collins and Bowen attempt to escape, but Collins injures his ankle, and the pair are recaptured. As the police investigation proceeds, investigators release false information to trick Myers, which seems to work. Later, when the car is damaged, Myers forces the group to continue on foot at gunpoint, and taunts them for missing opportunities to escape even if it would mean the other would be killed.
Collins, Bowen, and Myers reach Santa Rosalía and head to a bar, where Myers tries to conceal his identity and find an English speaker. Learning the regular ferry to Guaymas has burned, Myers pays a fishing boat to take him there instead. However, as he prepares to leave with Collins and Bowen, a local resident recognizes Myers and alerts the authorities, who prepare to catch him at the pier. After a shootout and a scuffle, Myers is arrested and Collins and Bowen are freed unharmed.
The Hitch-Hiker was based on the 1950 killing spree of Billy Cook who, posing as a hitchhiker, murdered a family of five, kidnapped a Riverside County Sheriff's Department deputy and abandoned him in a desert (the deputy survived), and killed a traveling salesman, before attempting to flee to Mexico by taking two men on a hunting trip hostage and forcing them to drive him to Santa Rosalía. There, Cook was identified and apprehended by local police without incident. As Mexico then lacked a formal extradition treaty with the United States, Mexican authorities "extradited" him back to the U.S. by physically pushing him over the border, where he was taken into custody by waiting American law enforcement. Cook was tried, convicted, and received the death penalty. On December 12, 1952, Cook was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison in California.
The film was written by Lupino and her former husband Collier Young, based on a story by Daniel Mainwaring which was adapted by Robert L. Joseph. Mainwaring did not receive a screen credit due to his then being on the Hollywood blacklist.
The Hitch-Hiker went into production on June 24, 1952, and wrapped in late July. The director of photography was RKO Pictures regular Nicholas Musuraca. Location shooting took place in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine and Big Pine, California. Working titles for the film were "The Difference" and "The Persuader".
Lupino was a noted actress who began directing when Elmer Clifton got sick and couldn't finish the film he was directing for Filmakers Inc., the production company founded by Lupino and her husband Collier Young to make low-budget, issue-oriented movies. Lupino stepped in to finish the film and went on to direct her own projects. The Hitch-Hiker was her first hard-paced, fast-moving picture after four "women's" films about social issues.
Lupino interviewed the two prospectors whom Billy Cook had held hostage, and got releases from them and from Cook as well, so that she could integrate parts of Cook's life into the script. To appease the censors at the Hays Office, however, she reduced the number of deaths to three. The Hitch-Hiker premiered in Boston on March 20, 1953, to little fanfare and immediately went into general release. The film was marketed with the tagline: "When was the last time you invited death into your car?"
The film is in the public domain.
The Philadelphia Inquirer said that "with nothing more than three able actors, a lot of rugged scenery and their own impressive talents as producers, authors and director, Collier Young and Ida Lupino have brewed a grim little chiller". The Inquirer critic praised the performances and said the film was "directed with masculine strength by the amazing Miss Lupino".
The New York Daily News gave the film three and a half of four stars, saying Lupino made "good and exciting use" of the real-life incident.
The New York Times called the film an "unrelenting but superficial study of abnormal psychology coupled with standard chase melodrama". Critic A. H. Weiler complimented the performances and Lupino's "brisk direction", but criticized the plot as excessively predictable.
The Detroit Free Press said that the film performed a public service by warning motorists about the dangers of picking up hitchhikers.
The film has been widely praised in the years since its release, and holds a 93% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 43 reviews.
Critic John Krewson lauded the work of Ida Lupino, and wrote,
Time Out Film Guide wrote of the film,
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.
While most films noir were filmed in claustrophobic cities, The Hitch-Hiker was filmed in the desert southwestern United States (territory similar to that of Baja California, where most of the story takes place), mostly in wilderness and small villages. Critics Bob Porfiero and Alain Silver, in a review and analysis of the film, praised Lupino's use of shooting locations. They wrote, "The Hitch-Hiker's desert locale, although not so graphically dark as a cityscape at night, isolates the protagonists in a milieu as uninviting and potentially deadly as any in film noir."