The first film directed by Ida Lupino, and the first produced by Filmakers, the independent company Lupino founded with her husband, Collier Young, Not Wanted is a low-suds treatment of a popular soap subject, teenage pregnancy. Using an unknown actress and location shooting (financial decisions), the film keeps a remarkably candid, near-documentary focus on its central subject. Sally Forrest is a waitress in a small-town cafe, already bored with her own projected future. Her romantic dreams come true when she pins them on a real-life pianist passing through town. Dream over, Sally is pregnant. Her family is as economically and emotionally helpless as she, and she is forced to give up her child for adoption. Not Wanted begins in a jail cell where Sally has landed after attempting to kidnap a child, and tells her story in flashback. The films directed by Ida Lupino treat women whose experience runs counter to that of the typically tough-tender characters Lupino played in the films of others: they are small-town or suburban girls who work for a living, not for adventure, and who haven't the breadth of character to attain the tenderness Raoul Walsh and others allowed Lupino. Her heroines suffer their introduction into womanhood each in a different way, but each trading small-town expectation for a larger, foreign reality, a nightmare of alienation from which there is no clean escape. In this way, Lupino's films are about real post-War America - and about real post-War women. As is often pointed out, the films are all about passive women, but Ronnie Scheib sheds light on this in an excellent article in Film Comment: "(C)ertainly most of Lupino's films are about women and all are about passivity. Lupino makes films about the inability to act.,... This in contrast to Joan Crawford or Bette Davis vehicles, (which) disguise passivity, naturalize it.... Lupino's films denaturalize passivity; it is unwanted, restless, anxious, impotent.... Lupino's characters do not know how to act...." The problem, Scheib suggests, in these "problem films" (about pregnancies, rapes, marital infidelity, etc.) is "the shallowness of the mainstream and the void it projects around (the characters) - the essential passivity of ready-made lives...." (JB)