On The Hitch-Hiker

The Hitch-Hiker is a story of three men – one with a gun and the others reluctantly at his whim – struggling to survive.  Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen, two friends supposedly on a “fishing trip,” find themselves face-to-face with the hitch-hiking, serial killing Emmett Myers.  Myers holds the two friends at gunpoint throughout the film, coaxing them into disastrous situations.  The film ends almost anti-climatically, as Myers is recognized and caught by the Mexican police.    

While many classic noir films portray women in a negative light – glamorous, but dodgy and dangerous – Ida Lupino challenged such notions with film’s like The Hitch-Hiker.   Not only is Ida Lupino considered to be the first female noir director, her crafty character choice in also of significance.  Unlike most film noirs, The Hitch-Hiker had a predominantly – almost entirely – male cast.  Instead of the femme fatale commonly associated with film noir, William Talman leads the film as the uneasy and villainous Emmett Myers.  The film’s lead characters, as well as those only placed in a few scenes, are men.  During a time when cinema was riddled with narratives that attempted to reinforce stereotypical norms, and noir films were aimed at portraying women as the villain, Lupino’s Hitch-Hiker did the opposite.

Also unlike many classic noir films, Lupino’s Hitch-Hiker has some very spacious cinematic elements.  Though there is some sense of claustrophobia during scenes shot inside the car, a good portion of the film depicts vast desert terrain and “lonely” highways instead of jam-packed cities.  This vastness is another opposition to classic noir films, but Lupino makes it work brilliantly. 

While The Hitch-Hiker employs many components that establish it as a true noir film, the elements that are outside the realm of noir are interesting to dissect.