I Watch Films: The Hitch-Hiker

 

The Hitch-Hiker

Directed (and co-written) by Ida Lupino, this has been billed as the first American Film Noir directed by a woman. Emmett Myers, a criminal on the run, has been hitching lifts, then killing and robbing the people who stop for him. He gets picked up by two men on a fishing trip and they head down Baja California.

There follows about an hour of him holding the men hostage. There are various weird gimmicky bits, he has an injured eye that doesn’t shut when he sleeps so it’s impossible to tell if he’s watching at night (presumably he doesn’t snore – though of course he might be faking that). Whenever they stop Myers insists that they not speak “Mexican” as he doesn’t understand.

Meanwhile the authorities, American and Mexican, try to track him, slowly coming to the conclusion that he’s listening to the radio broadcasts about his exploits. Myers mistake, one of several in fact, is that Baja California is a peninsula, and for various reasons he doesn’t want to turn back, so eventually, even sticking to back roads, he will run out of room to run. The film ends in a tense and slightly complex trap, Myers caught, but can they rescue the hostages?

Watch This: A short, pacey, tense thriller, equal parts claustrophobic in the car and put into insignificance by the hill and desert settings
Don’t Watch This: It’s mostly one guy holding a gun on two other guys and saying how smart he is for holding the gun