Alexandra Seros, Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair. Texas University Press, 2024. 227 pages. $45.00.
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Most readers of this journal recognize Ida Lupino as a glamorous, self-actualized actor who starred alongside Humphry Bogart, Robert Ryan, and Richard Widmark; as the only woman in the Screen Directors Guild of America in the 1950s; and as the only woman to direct a classic film noir (The Hitch-Hiker 1953). In Bright Lights, David Greven offered a wide-ranging exploration of masculinity in the latter film in 2014; Dan Callahan surveyed Lupino’s career in the journal in 2023. Readers may know she started a production company in the late 1940s; directed six movies in five years while working as an actor, writer, and producer; and transitioned effectively into a prolific director of television. Alexandra Seros’s Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair fills in Lupino’s vitae and thereby documents her rightful place as auteur among her laudable contemporary directors in film and television, including Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Alfred Hitchcock, and Sam Fuller. Seros, a screenwriter and PhD in cinema and media studies, brings together what she calls fragments and snapshots from archival sources. She offers close readings of a select number of Lupino’s films, and direct comparisons of her film and television direction with that of Ray, Aldrich, and Hitchcock. Seros provides detailed discussions of Lupino’s singular visual language, her ambiguous endings, and her skillful, efficient directing style. In the process, the author uncovers gratifying bits of evidence, builds connections among Lupino and her cohort of creative workers, and considers thought-provoking notions about why the filmmaker remains both valued and underappreciated as a director. As an adjunct to and promotion for the book, Seros created a website, Idalupino.com. The site both overlaps and expands on the chapters. It includes film posters, archival photographs, clips from television appearances, charts of Lupino’s career, and a host of other visual and biographical snippets.
The first section of the book discusses Lupino’s early career and makes the point that she connected and often collaborated with both women and men in the industry. Some links Seros suggests here and elsewhere remain unsubstantiated—there is potential slippage from speculation to fact—but I found the links mostly productive. For example, Seros associates Lupino with a number of international women who also moved from acting to directing after World War II. She suggests that Japanese director Kinuyo Tanaka “may have been influenced by Lupino’s rise to legitimate director” (36). Seros may be correct. Certainly, placing Lupino into a global group of women filmmakers provides context for her career beyond the well-known idea of her as the only woman directing in Hollywood in the 1950s. The middle section of the book covers three of Lupino’s independent films in depth: Not Wanted (1949) about a pregnant, unmarried teen; Never Fear (1949), about a dancer who, like Lupino, contracts polio; and The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Lupino’s favorite of her films. The third and final section of the book explores Lupino’s television work and covers her early acting and directing. It includes assessments of her direction and that of her more lauded male contemporaries. Here, Seros discusses how Lupino directed Peter Lorre in “No. 5 Checked Out” (1955), an episode of the prestigious Screen Directors Playhouse on NBC. She likens the show to Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1953) starring Lupino and Ryan as well as suggesting parallels between “No. 5 Checked Out” and the Aldrich-directed television episode “The Bad Streak” (1954).
Half-sheet poster
Each of the book’s three sections is prefaced by a “Snapshots” introduction – a photograph of Lupino and a page of text that allows Seros to include, for example, a quote from Cecil B. DeMille lauding Lupino and her family. The author speculates constructively about Lupino’s “authenticity” and “mystery” (19). Another “Snapshot” provides a dynamic picture of Lupino coaching a stuntwoman for a brawl. The athleticism of Lupino and the stunt double make clear the director’s energetic engagement with her craft. Seros uses the image to discuss how Clint Eastwood observed Lupino directing Have Gun, Will Travel, pointing out that Eastwood found her inspirational on his own path to directing.
Tidbits like these, many unknown to me despite my own work on Lupino, make Ida Lupino: Forgotten Auteur an entertaining and surprising read. Seros points to the relationship between Lupino and Gena Rowlands as she directed Rowlands in a television episode, and Rowlands appeared in a documentary about Lupino after the latter’s death. These women respected one another. Both were so quietly skilled, or “pixilated” according to Seros, that their impact remained illegible to critics and scholars. Seros also notes that Orson Welles was the only other creative professional who, like Lupino, moved from acting in and directing film to acting and directing in television. I would have enjoyed seeing comparisons of their work. On Idalupino.com, the author does provide a set of wheel-shaped charts documenting the publicity for Lupino and Welles, who Seros calls the ur-auteur. The charts show 216 entries for Lupino and 1,052 for Welles, although the date range is unclear. Seros points out that Lupino’s publicity emphasizes wedding plans, fashion, and cooking, while Welles’s highlights his role as an industry professional. In another example of cultural blindness to Lupino’s abilities, Seros shows that while her male cohort gained reputations as auteurs, Lupino, who worked as effectively at the same time in similar mediums, was ignored. Yet Seros documents the fact that Lupino “was not ignored by Ray, Aldrich, or Hitchcock” all of whom collaborated with her and valued her expertise (127-28).
Original script for The Hitch-Hiker by Collier Young and Ida Lupino, working title: The Cook Story
Seros makes a case for a redefinition of auteurship grounded in collaboration and coherency based on C. Paul Sellors’s Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths (2010). I wish Seros had more completely advanced her revised definition of auteurship, central to her project, and allowed that definition to structure the book more overtly. Auteurship certainly requires coherent thematic, narrative, and visual qualities across a director’s output. I agree with Seros that men developed and promoted the concept of auteurship, and these same men disparaged or ignored Lupino during her most active years. Collaboration, while not emphasized in early auteur scholarship, remains a crucial and well-documented aspect of filmmaking and a useful addition to considering auteurship. Seros coins the tricky-to-pronounce term “Lupinan” to characterize Lupino’s brand. She places Lupino’s texts in direct conversation with those of her admiring contemporaries, as well as with male film critics and early feminists who maligned her output. Other writers have made a case for Lupino as auteur; Seros does a stellar job of making a case for the director as equal to, and in some cases better than, her well-recognized and widely praised fellow auteurs, in part by making these intriguing comparisons.
As other scholars have done, Seros charges early feminists with misreading Lupino. Feminists disparaged the filmmaker’s clever insistence on the title Mother on her director’s chair, on her visible and publicized adherence to her role as dutiful (and glamorous) wife to her husband and mother to her daughter, despite the fact of her abundant work as director, actor, and producer. Seros sees Lupino’s public persona as a strategy for accomplishing her ambitions. These same critics also mischaracterized Lupino’s filmic narratives as anti-feminist, since she dealt with topics such as unmarried pregnancy, rape, fraught mother/daughter relationships, and female ambition. Lupino considered women’s and men’s post-World War II lives through a neorealist, semidocumentary noir lens. She eschewed typical Hollywood endings in favor of paradox and ambiguity. And Lupino inspired future filmmakers. Seros, and others, see Kathryn Bigelow as a direct descendant and beneficiary of Lupino’s independent vision. I agree and liken the representation of dissatisfied postwar masculinity and the risks of escaping domesticity in Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) to The Hitch-Hiker. As I noted in 2014, Lupino deserves continued attention and reevaluation (Wager, 2014). Recent works including those by Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman and an essay collection edited by Phillip Sipiora revitalize Lupino’s reputation. Alexadra Seros’s book offers a fascinating, well-researched, and productively speculative addition to newer works that recognize and value Lupino’s unique genius.
Works Cited
Callahan, Dan. “Ida Lupino: Demon Mother Night.” Bright Lights Film Journal. Feb. 4, 2023. https://brightlightsfilm.com/ida-lupino-demon-mother-night/
Greven, David. “Ida Lupino’s American Psycho: The Hitch-Hiker (1953).” Bright Lights Film Journal. Feb. 27, 2014. https://brightlightsfilm.com/ida-lupinos-american-psycho-hitch-hiker-1953/
Grisham, Theresa, and Julie Grossman. Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition. Rutgers UP, 2017.
Seros, Alexandra. Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair. Texas UP, 2025.
Sipiora, Phillip, ed. Ida Lupino, Filmmaker. Bloomsbury, 2021.
Wager, Jans. “Ida Lupino.” Oxford Bibliographies in “Cinema and Media Studies.” Ed. Krin Gabbard, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0215
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All images from editor’s collection.
