Ida Lupino: Iconic director of film and television

Ida Lupino: Director

"Where there is human courage, there is drama...

When everyday people fight for life and love, you have the very essence of heroism.

The back of her director’s chair read, “Mother of Us All….” A nom de plume that Ida Lupino solicited, encouraged, and used fully to her own subversive advantage. It was armor against a time when women needed to be sexless to be effective in the industry. It was an attitude that for a while proved ingenious.

Taking into account her feature films and her later television work, Ida Lupino holds the crown as the most prolific American women director in history. Between 1949 and 1954, Lupino wrote and directed six features directed by others. Later, for television, her filmography catalogues work for over thirty serials, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, Have Gun Will Travel, and the fugitive. Her biographer, William Donati, says he can safely estimate at least 100 episodes directed in her career; Lupino’s claim is that she directed hundreds.

Ever since she was a kid, Lupino wanted to be a writer. Instead, she did what she thought would make her father proud of her. “I had no desire to crash a man’s world,” she said in 1975, “I knew it would break his heart if I didn’t go into the business.”

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Ida Lupino

Film & Television Director

I tried to capture this in every film I directed.”

It was her experience of powerlessness as an actress that drove her to want to control her own career, and hence to directing. “For about eighteen months in the mid-forties, I could not get a job [as an actress] in pictures. I was on suspension. When you turned down something you were suspended. I had to do something to fill up my time.” She was bored to tears with standing around the set while “someone else seemed to he doing all the interesting work.” So she turned to writing and directing. She teamed up with then-husband Collier Young, and formed her own production company, The Filmmakers.

Like pioneer Lois Weber, who directed in Hollywood thirty years before her, Lupino chose controversial, socially conscious issues for the these of her movie: rape, bigamy, polio, unwed motherhood. Like Weber, she handled these topics at a time when they would, say the least, elicit controversy.

Her films, like life, posed problems. But rarely did they have pat resolutions. Something unexpectedly would interrupt the flow of her character’s day, and their whole lives were suddenly changed; a book-keeper walking home gets raped, a hitchhiker whom someone innocently picks up turns out to be a psychopath. People whose actions we can’t possibly predict bring into question the whole moral fiber of our world, just as in real life. There are no easy answers. Lupino was wise enough as a filmmaker not to give any.

According to film scholar Richard Koszarski, “Her films display the obsessions and consistencies of a true auteur…What is most interesting about her films are not her stories of unwed motherhood or the tribulations of career woman, but the way in which she uses male actors: particularly in The Bigamist and The Hitch-Hiker (both 1953), Lupino was able to reduce the male to the same sort of dangerous, irrational force that women represented in most male-directed examples of Hollywood film noir.”

By the forties she was known as the darling of the Tough Guy school of directing—along with some of her favorites: Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang, William Wellmann. In fact, she became so adept at directing tough “action” pictures, that she had a hard time convincing studio heads she could do a love story.

After the demise of her company in 1954, Lupino was suddenly in great demand for the budding medium of television. Norman Macdonnel, longtime producer of Gunsmoke, said of Lupino, “you used Ida when you had a story about a women with dimension, and you really wanted it hard-hitting.” Richard Boone, who also liked his direction hard-boiled, wanted Lupino for a script by Harry Fink, “famed for his graphic descriptions of physical violence, which included rape, murder and sandstorms.”

Her mark on film history is as indelible as it is iconoclastic. “You could say that Ida Lupino’s career foreshadowed a world where sexism is no longer an issue,” said Barbara Scharres of the Art Institute of Chicago. “For she directed films as if it weren’t. Her women are just as likely to outsmart and outthink their men as the men are likely to be passive and indecisive. Women are as likely to be villains as heroines. The use everything they’ve got, including their sexuality, to maneuver in the world, just as a man would…Yet, she regarded her own directorial career as an unconventional choice for a woman, and remarked in an interview that she’s rather be cooking her man’s dinner. However, the content and the technical virtuosity of her work belies this statement and point to a very wily director who knew the uses of conventionality as a tool.”

Necessity saw to it that, on the set, Ida Lupino felt herself to be “one of the boys.” How lucky for film history she wasn’t.

"Reprinted from Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present, by Ally Acker

See: http://www.reelwomen.com

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