Directed by Ida Lupino
TCM, beginning at 8 p.m.
English American actress Ida Lupino was not only a prolific star in films, on television (where she received three Emmy nominations) and on radio, but she was a very accomplished movie and TV director, as well. Much of Lupino’s directorial work was for television during the late 1950s and ’60s, when she helmed episodes of Gilligan’s Island, The Fugitive, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone (the famous 1964 episode “The Masks”) and more. She also directed eight feature films, primarily during the ’50s, and was the most prominent female filmmaker of that time. In 1948, Lupino and her thenhusband, Collier Young, formed an independent company called The Filmmakers Inc. to create low-budget, issue-oriented films. That company made 12 movies, six of which she directed or codirected. One of those titles kicks off this evening’s three-film lineup of Lupino-helmed films on Turner Classic Movies: Never Fear (1950). Marking Lupino’s first credited directorial effort, this drama, which she and Young cowrote, is about a promising young dancer crippled by polio. Following that is what is probably Lupino’s most well-known film as a director: The Hitch-Hiker (1953), a film noir led by Edmond O’Brien
and the only title from that genre’s classic period directed by a woman. The night concludes with the first episode of television that Lupino directed, a 1956 installment of the anthology series Screen Directors Playhouse called “No. 5 Checked Out.” She also came up with the story, about a young deaf woman (Teresa Wright) who confronts desperate crooks who are using one of her remote resort cabins for a hideout. Peter Lorre costars. –