“Events in crisis are laid out like cards on a table at the opening of a Lupino film. A cup pushed by the hand of the rapist slides down the factory lunch counter in Outrage; a suburban garage door receives the determined whacks of a girl's tennis ball while her mother is inside pinning a dress on a mannequin in Hard, Fast and Beautiful. Straight out opening hands. How the game is played is the plot” (Action). Here, the game is the mother-daughter love match, played out on the tennis court (with exciting tournament
footage) where young Florence (Sally Forrest) pushes herself to the limit to fulfill her mother's dream. Claire Trevor as the mother follows in the screen tradition of Mildred Pierce and other mothers who unwittingly sacrifice their daughters to upward mobility, but Lupino's focus is a more contemporary, feminist one, in the sense that it falls mostly on the complexities of the relationship between the two women, and of both to the world. Her depiction of the middle-class family is as tireless as Sirk's (parents living vicariously through their children, children flitting between conformation and confrontation and finally giving it back double to their hapless elders); as nuanced as Nick Ray's (the passivity of the all-American father is, as it turns out, at least as damaging as the aggressiveness of the all-suburban mother). Making her film in 1951, Lupino joins Sirk and Ray in ushering in the frigid Fifties. (JB)

(See Women Directors series)