The Hitch-Hiker

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.