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Saturday, Jun 7, 2025
4:30 PM (71 mins)
BAMPFA
The Hitch-Hiker
35mm Archival Print
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Introduction and Post-Screening Discussion
Imogen Sara Smith is a film critic and historian based in New York City and the author of two books, In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. She writes for Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cineaste, Reverse Shot, and many other publications, and serves as editor in chief of NOIR CITY magazine.
Edmond O’Brien, Frank Lovejoy, William Talman, Jose Torvay,
Many, including Ida Lupino herself, have called The Hitch-Hiker her best film. It is her only classic noir, a tour-de-force thriller in which agony is externalized in striking camerawork and on-pulse editing. Two Americans on a Mexican fishing trip pick up a hitchhiker, and 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. 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.
FILM DETAILS
Screenwriter
- Ida Lupino
- Collier Young
Cinematographer
- Nicholas Musuraca
Print Info
- B&W
- 35mm
- 71 mins
Source
- Library of Congress
Event Accessibility
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