Many, including Ida Lupino herself, consider The Hitch-Hiker to be her best film, and it is her only classic noir, a tour-de-force thriller in which agony is externalized in striking camerawork by Nicholas Musuraca and on-pulse editing by Douglas Stewart. Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy are two Americans on a Mexican fishing trip. When they pick up a hitchhiker, their car and lives are suddenly commandeered by a psychopathic gunman with one eye that never closes, even in sleep. In the pitiless no-man's-land of the Mexican desert, they attempt to outwit the unpredictability of evil in their jumpy, sadistic jailer. Based on a story by Daniel Mainwaring, who later wrote the script for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Hitch-Hiker transcends a paranoid cautionary tale about the menace of strangers to focus on the existential crisis of Americans after they have glimpsed the other side.