Making her first film in 1949, Ida Lupino joined Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray in ushering in the frigid fifties. Lupino wrote and directed six features for The Filmmakers, the production company she founded along with her husband, Collier Young. They were "problem" films of a uniquely hard-edged variety, dealing with such subjects as rape, bigamy, and unwed motherhood, and shot on location with low budgets and a telegraphic film language that put every penny to work. Lupino heroes and heroines work for a living, not for adventure, and haven't the breadth of character to attain the tough-tender quality directors such as Raoul Walsh allowed Lupino. There is initially a victimy quality to their everyday passivity. In Not Wanted, Lupino look-alike Sally Forrest is a waitress who is left pregnant by her dream lover, and forced by her family to give up the kid for adoption. Like all Lupino protagonists, she will trade small-town expectation for a nightmare of alienation from which there is no clean escape. But what is fascinating are the choices the Lupino victim-heroine makes to survive. Sally's story is recounted in flashback from her jail cell.