Ida Lupino, best known for playing tough-talkers in ’40s film noirs and celebrated as a pioneering woman director back when there were far fewer women allowed to make movies than there are now (and there still aren’t anywhere near enough), would’ve turned 100 this year. This weekend, Baltimore low-key celebrates her work with screenings of three of the spare and scrappy thrillers she directed.
1953’s “The Hitch-Hiker” (screening Dec. 15 at 11:30 a.m. at the Charles), Lupino’s all-men crime dirge about a wall-eyed killer who kidnaps two fishermen in Mexico, is a bit like John Carpenter’s “The Thing” in that it is contained and the abundance of testosterone, and the chaos it creates and cannot stop, is the whole entire point. Realize how rare it is for a ’50s crime movie to not feature any women at all, because that also means it cannot pin the entire plot and the characters’ undoing on those women as film noir was apt to do.
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