Saturday Night Cinema
The Hitch-Hiker

Tonight’s feature film is “The Hitch-Hiker.”

This is the first film noir directed by a woman, the talented and enormously Ida Lupino. The film is based on the true story of Billy Cook, a psychopathic murderer.

In 1998, The Hitch-Hiker was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Hardly sentimental and sharp edged thriller with very modern filming. The paralysed “eyelid” thing is very clever too.

Lupino interviewed the two prospectors that 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.[2]
The Hitch-Hiker premiered in Boston on 20 March 1953 and immediately went into general release.[3] It was marketed with the tagline: When was the last time you invited death into your car? (more)

More on the singular Lupino here:

The Hitch-Hiker was reportedly Lupino’s favourite of all
her films. Based on the case of one William Cook, who murdered six
innocent people during a hitchhiking “thrill kill” spree, The Hitch-Hiker
is a mere 71 minutes long and was shot for the most part on location in
the California desert. Once again, Lupino was tackling a controversial
theme, although the film did have a harrowing precedent in Felix
Feist’s 1947 film, The Devil Thumbs A Ride, in which Lawrence
Tierney played a psychopath who goes on a similar rampage. As a woman
directing in Hollywood, Lupino was still something of a curiosity to
the press, and UPI sent a reporter and photographer to the Baja desert
to photograph Lupino in action.

Stills taken during this visit reveal the Spartan working conditions
endured by Lupino, her cast and crew. Lupino is dressed in dungarees,
sneakers and a check flannel shirt topped with a baseball cap, her hair
tied back in a bun. The crew, entirely male, look on with professional
detachment as Lupino explains a typically complex shot to stars Edmond
O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy. There are a few reflectors (to enhance the
use of natural daylight in the film), but the camera equipment used is
modest, outdated (a 35mm Mitchell camera) and somewhat bulky

Lupino was beginning to feel that her role as a social critic was
somewhat limiting, and later declared that during the making of The Hitch-Hiker
she realized that suspense was her niche. As the psychopathic killer
who terrorizes Roy Collins (O’Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Lovejoy),
William Talman is remarkable as Emmett Myers, an escaped convict with a
paralyzed right eye, which remains open whether Myers is asleep or
awake. The Hitch-Hiker is certainly Lupino’s most purely
visual film and also her most intimate. Once again working with an
essentially triangular situation (Myers’ terrorizing of Roy and Gilbert
echoes the conflict between Fletcher, Florence and Millie in Hard, Fast and Beautiful), Lupino stages The Hitch-Hiker
in a series of starkly-lit close-ups, wide-shots that emphasize the
inhospitality of the desert terrain, and lighting strategies that
favour shafts of light in the darkness of the desert night, or else
slightly overexposed shots to convey the heart of the desert during the
daytime.

It is also worth noting that The Hitch-Hiker was made by
Lupino and the Filmakers Company after her divorce from Collier Young,
and represents a return to the director’s chair after a two-year
hiatus. Though filming of The Hitch-Hiker went smoothly, and
all seemed well on the surface (Collier Young even appeared in a cameo
within the film as a sleeping “Mexican peon”), there is an atmosphere
of real violence in the film – not only in the subject matter, but also
in Lupino’s relentless pacing, hyperkinetic camera set-ups, and her
intense use of oppressive close-ups to heighten the film’s suspense.