IDA LUPINO : FORGOTTEN AUTEUR : FROM FILM NOIR TO THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR

By Alexandra Seros

University of Texas Press. 240 pages. £36. ISBN 978-1-4773-3065-4

Reviewed By Jim Burns

During my cinema-going days in the early-1950s I sometimes saw films like Road House and The Man I Love which featured Ida Lupino. It may have been her portrayals of street-wise singers at home in the shady world of night-clubs and cabarets, and always ready with a quick response (“Does it ever enter a man’s head that a woman can do without him?”) as various men tried to cut through their seemingly-tough exteriors, that caught my attention. The jazz sounds and popular songs of that period were always my favourite musical forms. I still remember the lyrics of “Again”, which Lupino sang in Road House.  But there were other films that showed her in a different light, such as On Dangerous Ground, where she sensitively played a lonely blind girl, and the rather curious Ladies in Retirement, a period melodrama in which she was tasked with looking after her two problematic sisters. Whatever it was that attracted me has lasted a lifetime and I can always watch a Lupino film with pleasure.

What I wasn’t properly aware of until much later were her talents, in addition to those as an actress, as a writer, producer, and director. I didn’t come to The Bigamist and The Hitch Hiker until the 1960s when both, though especially the latter, were beginning to take on the definition of cult classics. Alexandra Seros’s Ida Lupino : Forgotten Auteur looks in detail at Lupino’s activities in all three categories but essentially focuses on her role as a director.

I should stress that Seros hasn’t written a biography of Lupino. However, some basic information may be useful.  She was born in Brixton, London, in 1918 : “She came from an English theatrical dynasty that included comedians, dancers, and singers. Her parents were silent screen comedian Stanley Lupino and musical comedy performer Connie Emerald”. Seros also mentions Lupino Lane, “Stanley Lupino’s cousin, one of the best acrobatic comedians in the history of film, second only to Buster Keaton, and even more famous as a silent screen comedian than was Lupino’s father”.  Lupino was educated at a prep school in Hove and studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). Her first professional theatrical performance was in Bernard Shaw’s play, Heartbreak House, in the early-1930s, and her first appearance on film came in 1932 in Her First Affaire. She moved to the United States shortly after.

I’m following Seros in jumping ahead to the late-1940s, when Lupino began to become more involved in writing, producing, and direction. The 1940s had been a productive period for her as an actress, with many starring roles in films like The Hard Way, The Sea Wolf, They Drive By Night, High Sierra, and Deep Valley.   The thing to note, however, is that she wasn’t content to simply be an actress. As she said, “I never was one who woke up in the morning saying, ‘God, it’s so great to be an actress’. I was always looking for ways to be less bored on the set, so I hung around the director and the cameraman, asking them questions and watching what they did”. The result was that later she would impress someone like the veteran cameraman Archie Stout (Academy Award winner for his work on John Ford’s The Quiet Man) when he was employed on some of the films she directed. He remarked, “Ida has more knowledge of camera angles and lenses than almost any director I’ve ever worked with”. 

In 1948 Lupino, together with her second husband, Collier Young, and the writer Marvin Wald, launched an independent company, the Filmakers. It lasted until 1955, and produced six films, with Lupino involved in all of them, in one way or another, in terms of the screenplays, production, and directing, She did direct another film, The Trouble WIth Angels, but that was for Columbia. Seros explains the background to the Filmakers activities : “These six films were made with small budgets, mostly unknown actors, and – apart from some negotiated concessions to the censors at the Production Code Administration – complete creative freedom”.

The ”negotiated concessions” were necessary in the atmosphere of tight control of content that applied in Hollywood at the time. Lupino’s films dealt with controversial subjects. Outrage (1950) told the story of a young woman who is raped by a stranger on the eve of her marriage, and the effect it has on her and the people who know her. Not Wanted (1949) dealt with the problems of a teenage unmarried mother and what happens when she gives up her baby for adoption. Never Fear (1949) touched on something that was very much in the news in the late-Forties and early-Fifties, the threat of polio, and the struggles of a young, would-be dancer trying to face up to the fact of her disability. Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951) was about an ambitious mother (played by Claire Trevor) pushing her daughter to succeed in the competitive world of tennis. It not only focused on questions of class, but also the  corruption that creeps into the supposedly non-commercial world of the amateur. The Bigamist (1953) did have some established actors in Edmund O’Brien, Joan Fontaine and Lupino herself. It seems to have bothered a few people. Howard Hughes, whose company distributed several of the Filmaker films, wouldn’t handle The Bigamist. And there was The Hitchhiker, which again had O’Brien, along with Frank Lovejoy, and is probably the best-remembered of Lupino’s films. Based on an actual incident, it described how picking up a hitchhiker can be dangerous when the man concerned turns out to be a serial killer.

Seros points out that “Lupino brought her signature style to each one, using elements of film noir, film gris, plus neo-realism, which gives these films a documentary tone. These were B movies, produced quickly on limited budgets”. In an interview with Francine Parker, Lupino was asked how she managed to complete such good work when operating with a restricted budget and on a limited time-scale. She replied, “You just do it”. And Martin Scorsese, placing Lupino alongside Michael Curtis and Samuel Fuller when it came to producing films quickly, asserted that she was “a real pro” and a “most extraordinary artist”.   

The reference by Seros to the “documentary tone” of Lupino’s films is accurate, I think, and she is of the opinion that they were most likely influenced by the work of the Italian director, Roberto Rossellini : “As a director, she was inspired by the brutal candidness of Roberto Rossellini’s neorealistic filmmaking, creating movies that brought to life women’s disappointment in the post-World War 2 American dream”.  It might be interesting to note, when debating the question of how disappointed women allegedly were (all of them?), that, in 1943, in the film The Hard Way, Lupino had played the part of a woman who, for reasons of her own, pushes her younger sister into becoming a star performer in musical stage shows. And, on the question of people being pushed into roles they are never sure they want to fill, were Lupino’s own experiences relevant?. She’s on record as saying that she didn’t want to go to RADA and would have preferred to have been a writer, but her father persuaded her to train as an actress. Her Wikipedia entry says that “She felt that she was pushed into the profession due to her family history”. 

She continued in films as an actress into the 1950s, appearing in Private Hell 36, Beware My Lovely, The Big Knife and Jennifer, among others. But she was increasingly drawn into the rapidly expanding world of television in which there were opportunities for writers, actors and directors who could work quickly with limited resources and to the strict restrictions on time determined by the TV schedules. In the 1950s there were several popular shows, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Four Star Playhouse, Ford Television Theatre, and Screen Directors Playhouse, where a thirty or sixty minute slot could contain the equivalent of a short story or even a novella on film. Lupino proved adept at functioning efficiently, whether as actor, writer or director in these circumstances, as a quick trawl through YouTube will show. Some of Lupino’s contributions to Have Gun – Will Travel, Bonanza, and The Untouchables can also be found there. There was even a sitcom, Mr Adams and Eve, with Lupino and her third husband, Howard Duff, in the roles of a Hollywood couple. Interestingly, Lupino doesn’t try to portray Eve as really not a star, but at heart just as domesticated as everyone else. As Seros has it : “Eve Adams escapes the domestic space, and her successes rather than her failures are emphasised in the show. She is allowed to fail as a housewife because she is too busy being creative and making movies”. This went against the grain of a lot of advertising, for example, which at the time tended to emphasise the supposed joys of the stay-at-home wife whose life revolved around the new refrigerator, washing machine, furnishings, and looking after her husband’s needs

Mentioning Howard Duff brings me to a curious fact. He had worked in radio, as well as films, and between 1945 and 1950 was the voice of Sam Spade in the series, The Adventures of Sam Spade, based on Dashiell Hammett’s stories about a private detective. But he was named as a communist in the notorious anti-communist publication, Red Channels. Despite having to quit the radio programme he seems to have managed to keep working in films and television in the 1950s. Seros makes no mention of any of this – to be fair, it isn’t relevant to her book – and it was just something that aroused my curiosity. I doubt that Duff ever was a communist, and his Wikipedia entry describes him as, like Lupino, “a staunch Democrat”.  

Seros is of the opinion that Lupino’s “six independent films…..were executed in a taut, spare, and refined style. Socially realistic and relevant, these were the narratives that she yearned to produce”. I think it’s possible to argue that some were better than others, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that some were more “interesting” than others, depending on where one’s sympathies are placed. But they stand together as expressing the convictions of a director determined to make films that could both entertain and instruct without preaching. Lupino knew that if she wanted to reach a wide audience she had to work within certain Hollywood conventions. It’s noticeable that, with the exceptions of The Hitch-Hiker and The Bigamist, the right man eventually comes along to rescue the woman from whatever problem she has. Some latter-day feminists would condemn Lupino for this. On the whole, though, I would tend to agree with what Martin Scorsese said about Lupino : “She was a true pioneer; the six films she directed between 1949 and 1953 are remarkable chamber pieces that deal with challenging subjects in a clear almost documentary fashion, and are a singular achievement in American cinema”.

Alexandra Seros has written a fascinating and original book about Ida Lupino by concentrating on her activities as writer, producer, and director in the worlds of cinema and television. Worlds that were then largely dominated by men.  As such, it should appeal to not only Lupino enthusiasts but also those with a general interest in the history of Hollywood. There are thirty pages of notes, a substantial bibliography, and some relevant illustrations.