A women pioneer achieving in a male-dominated world

Rape wasn’t the only touchy topic tackled by Lupino and her then-husband, film producer and screenwriter Collier Young, who together set up the independent production house The Filmakers Inc. (spelt thus) in 1948 to “produce, direct and write low-budget, issue-oriented films”. For starters, they began crafting scripts on illegitimacy, disease and bigamy. This, when the thin-skinned Production Code Administration was quick to use its power of veto.

Between 1949 and 1953 Lupino directed six films for The Filmakers, becoming one of the first women to gain a name for herself in Hollywood as more than just an actress. Beginning in 1931 and up to 1947 she had acted in more than 40 films, such as the notable “They Drive By Night” in 1940, “High Sierra”  in 1941 and “Road House” in 1948. Thus, as Alexandra Seros encapsulates in her book’s subtitle, going “From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair”.

Seros says she knew of Lupino as an actress, but it was only some time ago that she saw a poster for “Outrage” and was surprised to realise Lupino had been the director. As a student, Seros was defending her dissertation prospectus in 2017 on the very day that the book “Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition” by Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman was published, and this had decided her to refocus her thoughts on the silencing of Lupino’s talent and skill, which Seros says was largely the reason for the director’s anomalous position in the Hollywood film industry.

Seros decided it was vital to find as many original documents as she could, and thus she set out to search for clues in archival collections housed around the world, to understand Lupino’s historical record. This “yielded a deeper level of understanding of how the concerns of class, gender, and post-World War II culture have influenced the critical reception of Lupino’s underexamined work and life”. The book was written over a two-year period.

Also, “Much of that time was spent… searching for photographs and documents that contain information about the aspect of Lupino’s life and work that most intrigued me: the intersection of the transitional moment of the 1950s and Lupino’s provocative and sometimes transgressive character”.

Though Lupino’s acting career was well known, until very recently she had been either unknown or overlooked as an influential director, Seros contends. In fact, the six films for The Filmakers mostly told of women without power in society and engaging with highly controversial topics despite Hollywood’s strict production code.

Lupino’s first directorial project was the unwed-mother drama “Not Wanted” in 1949, which she produced and co-scripted. Elmer Clifton began as director but fell ill after three days, so Lupino stepped in. Clifton kept the credit because Lupino wasn’t a member of the Directors Guild of America until 1950. Her official debut as a director was with “Never Fear” (aka “The Young Lovers”), about a young dancer stricken with polio. Lupino was only the second woman admitted to the Directors Guild, following the retirement of Dorothy Arzner in 1943.

The Filmakers continued to look at socially conscious themes with the trauma of rape in “Outrage”. The taboo word was never spoken in the film and the violation was referred to throughout as a “vicious crime”, or similar. Neither was the act itself shown; that would have been a step too far. The tense build-up and the traumatic aftermath sufficed; audiences were not allowed, and did not need, more. Mala Powers played the girl.

In 1951 Lupino produced and directed “Hard, Fast and Beautiful” about the anger and frustration of a teenage girl, played by Sally Forrest who had starred in “Never Fear”and “Not Wanted”, forced into a tennis career by her avaricious, scheming mother (Claire Trevor). Naturally, the girl both broke free and won her man, while Mum got her come-uppance.

“The Hitch-Hiker” and “The Bigamist”, both in 1953, rounded out Lupino’s six films before The Filmakers shut down in 1955 and she moved into television. Seros notes that “The Hitch-Hiker”, which Lupino co-wrote and directed, represented a break from her other films in that there are no women in credited roles. A scary true story was brought to life without melodrama or frills. The economy of the compact narrative reflected Lupino’s directorial principles and foreshadowed the aesthetic of the live television dramas that were to come.

Seros takes lengthy looks at three of those six – “Not Wanted”, “Never Fear” and “The Hitch-Hiker”. “Never Fear” concerned isolation and had an element of autobiography, because Lupino herself had contracted poliomyelitis in 1934 when she was a young adult and before vaccines were available, leaving her right hand slightly impaired.

This book, then, is born of an academic background and doesn’t set out to be a full biography, briskly recounting how Lupino was born on February 4, 1918 in Brixton, south London, under a table during a zeppelin raid. Her immediate forebears included comedians, dancers and singers, and she went to London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Her first film appearance was in “The Love Race” in 1931 and she had uncredited or background roles in seven British films before moving to the United States in 1933. There she found fame in some 38 films before leaving Warner Bros. in 1947 to establish The Filmakers.

Seros notes two career transitions by Lupino in Hollywood, from acting to directing in film and then from acting to directing in television. Between 1932 and 1977 Lupino starred or costarred in about 60 films, starred or costarred in 105 television episodes and TV movies, and directed seven films and about 68 television movies or episodes.

She was 30 years old when she co-founded The Filmakers in 1948 and its films had small budgets, mostly unknown actors and, apart from some negotiated concessions to the Production Code Association, also complete creative freedom. Lupino chose the name The Filmakers to connote youth, independence and collaboration. It was like a family, with many of the same actors, writers and crews working together.

Next, television suited Lupino because she insisted that as a wife and mother she could not leave the state or country to direct without a great sacrifice to family life. Finding a balance between career and home was extremely challenging for women in the 1950s and 1960s, Working in television was Lupino’s answer, and it paid the bills at the same time.

Seros says Lupino’s commitment to independent filmmaking sent her down a path filled with obstacles, but her skills and professionalism helped achieve her ends. “The more I studied Lupino… the more I felt that I had to intervene in the limited, and often faulty, historiography that had been constructed for her, to redress the distortion and even erasure in the record… I challenge the notion that [she] was – or should remain – a marginalized, illegible figure.”

Seros isn’t so concerned with Lupino’s adolescence or the pre-1947 fame, for which the actress’ notability is already assured. And The Budapest Times pleads innocent, Your Honour, to any charge of not giving due recognition to the directorial achievements with The Filmakers and the six films of 1949-1955. Where the book is especially revelatory for us is with the TV years of the mid-1950s on. There is a wealth of tremendous material here.