The Hitch-Hiker

Ida Lupino is the first woman to direct a film noir in Hollywood — and one of only a handful of women directing studio features at all in the 1950s. She also co-wrote the screenplay (with her then-husband Collier Young) and produced through The Filmakers, the independent shingle she ran with Young. The picture was nominated to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1998.

The story is loosely based on the 1950 spree of Billy Cook, who hitchhiked his way through six murders across the American Southwest. Lupino interviewed Cook's surviving victims as research, and the production travelled into Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills to shoot for raw, sun-bleached desert texture rather than studio backlot.

Edmond O'Brien (D.O.A., White Heat) and Frank Lovejoy (House of Wax) play the trapped fishermen; William Talman, later D.A. Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason, is the killer Emmett Myers. Talman's lazy left eye, which never closes when he sleeps, is real and used to chilling effect — the film's central tension is that the prisoners can never tell whether he's awake.