Ida Lupino, Filmmaker

Phillip Sipiora, Phillip Sipiora

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501352096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

Ida Lupino, Filmmaker begins with an exploration of biographical studies and analytical treatments of Lupino's film and television work as director, moving forward to assess Lupino's career in film and television with particular attention given to Lupino's singular, pioneering achievements and her role(s) within the cultural milieu(s) of her time, particularly the representation of women in cinema. Each chapter includes a close analysis of the film or television work with insights drawn from film history and cultural/gender studies to demonstrate that Lupino was a significant directorial figure in the development of film, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s-and in television extending well into the 1960s. Lupino left her imprint on filmmaking and her canon of film and television work continue to influence Hollywood movie making. The contributors to this volume assess Lupino's main strengths as a filmmaker-her treatment of narrative movement, plotting, dialogue, gender roles, and uses of tradition representations of men and women in frames of parody and satire. The book collectively examines the successes (and failures) of Lupino's directorial career, including focusing on the reasons why she initially proved to be so strategic to the progress of women behind the camera.

1

Introduction

All Sides of the Camera

Phillip Sipiora

Ida Lupino is an extremely talented maverick—a situation which has frustrated stereotype-demanding Hollywood.¹

Impact, Reception, and Reputation

This volume has been a nourishing source of inspiration for me, providing insight into Ida Lupino and the film, stage, and television media that she participated in for nearly five decades, and now is an important time to participate in the renaissance of interest in the life and work of Ida Lupino.²

Indeed, Lupino breathed life into every art form that she touched, as the chapters in this collection suggest. Ida Lupino never lost her passion and dedication to artistic performance, beginning when she was entering her teen years in London, the proud daughter of veteran theater and film professionals, Stanley Lupino and Connie Emerald. Ida Lupino was born for cinema, both through the nurturing professional guidance of her parents and for the creative and performative passion that characterized the fiber of her being, bursting forth at a very young age. In 1936, Ida graced the May cover of True Story when she was only eighteen years old, yet could reasonably be taken for someone twice her age. This international exposure was a harbinger of things to come (Figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1 Teen idol at eighteen.

Lupino’s first film experience, in a very minor way, was in The Love Race (1932), starring her father (Stanley Lupino) and directed by her uncle (Lupino Lane). Her first serious film acting was in Her First Affaire (1932) when, amazingly, she was given the role that her mother had auditioned for. This twist of fate was a foreshadowing of the frenzied life that Lupino would lead for so long and in so many ways. In 1934, at the age of sixteen, Lupino made her first American film appearance in Search for Beauty. In spite of her early success as an actor, the drive to direct was present from early on, and she reveals her enthusiasm for directing while, still in her twenties, she was quoted in a 1945 fan magazine interview: “I see myself, in the years ahead, directing or producing or both. I see myself developing new talent, which would be furiously interesting for me. For I love talent. Love to watch it. Love to help it. Am more genuinely interested in the talent of others than I am in my own.”³ Her subsequent career directing film and television bore out her youthful prediction. Yes, Lupino clearly led a tumultuous, eclectic life, as this volume suggests. There is no question that Lupino could be difficult to work with, as husband Collier Young has noted: “Things aren’t normal unless Ida resigns three times on every picture—once before it starts and twice during production.”⁴ Ida, like many other celebrated directors, could clearly be bossy and unrelenting at times, yet her enthusiasm and dedication to her work, whichever form it took, surely overshadows her idiosyncrasies of personality.

The chapters in this volume are arranged thematically, and, necessarily, there are overlaps and interconnections among the analyses. The first section, Impact: Reception/Reputation, provides historical and evaluative context to the career of Ida Lupino, flowing from Martin Scorsese and his moving eulogy of Ida Lupino upon her death in 1995. This tribute, “Behind the Camera: A Feminist,” calls attention to Lupino’s pioneering work as a director, and Scorsese identifies her directorial production as a “singular achievement in American Cinema.”⁵ He recounts her cinematic narratives as “intimate, always set within a precise social milieu,”⁶ a synoptic, poignant précis encapsulating of the power of her art. She never forgot the importance of “poor bewildered people,”⁷ with whom she intimately identified. Further, Scorsese recounts that Lupino never fails to movingly capture the “psyche of the victim”⁸ in her special concern for “women trying to wrestle with despair and reclaim their lives.”⁹ The spirit of the eulogy reminds us that Ida Lupino lived her life explicitly revealing an empathetic tenor, especially in her directorial work, which is the informative architecture for so many of the chapters in this volume.

Karen McNally details, with precision and sentience, Lupino’s interest and experience in performance—and the business of show, particularly the importance of supervising the business end of things. This interest is especially apparent in the ways in which Lupino manages Filmakers, the production company that she formed with husband Collier Young. They deliberatively made the decision to aim for independence as they self-distributed The Bigamist, resulting in the collapse of their arrangement with Howard Hughes. Two films in Lupino’s career take the challenging dynamic of business and performance as a central theme, articulating its oppositions and crossovers within the settings of American popular theater and amateur tennis. Directed by Lupino, Hard, Fast and Beautiful is a Filmakers production that explores the encroachment of commercialization on the amateur game of tennis and considers the development of star players through a variation on the stage mother Hollywood narrative. In The Hard Way (1943), directed by Vincent Sherman, Lupino plays an ambitious older sister who crafts her sibling’s career on the musical stage and, in the process, destruction, death, and career suicide follow. The significance of Lupino’s intervention as both director and producer is emphatically clear in a number of ways that articulate the business/creative dynamic that Lupino continually negotiates as a filmmaker. Ida Lupino’s mercurial career demonstrates an explicit intent to promote creative over economic priorities in an often-controlling industry.

William T. Ross offers a probing discussion of the critical moments and stages in Lupino’s career in his detailed analysis of the formative changes that took place over half a century. Ross deftly examines issues of family legacy, Hollywood context, gender, and strategic career challenges, including a strong streak of independence and he articulates, with careful precision, Lupino’s original contributions that expanded the boundaries of cinema, as so often illustrated by her ability to personally negotiate artistic limits. Ross chronicles Lupino’s transition to television directing and her history of success in a medium that was experiencing growing pains in the 1950s and 1960s. Ross crystalizes her complex life with simplicity: Ida Lupino of Hollywood led a life worthy of respect, admiration, and study.

Courtney Ruffner Grieneisen chronicles the qualities that made Ida Lupino essential in film history as she fervidly followed her own set of rules, especially character transcendence, tenderness of subject matter, and equity of gender. Lupino’s intimate, precise use of the camera, seductively drew viewers into her films, often becoming emotionally and morally invested, particularly in films like On Dangerous Ground. Characters like Jim Wilson are softened by his preoccupation with inhumanity and his genuine care for others. Further, Lupino shapes the way that the characters of Jim and Mary stand equal to one another as gender representations. In short, the use of the handheld camera, employing medium and close-up shots, and the equality of gender with sexualized scenes are only a few of Lupino’s masterful touches that help to create a place in the story line where the viewer is seamlessly able to escape reality and become one with the character(s) (Figure 1.2).

FIGURE 1.2 Ida as early performer.

Culture and Gender, Aging, Acting, Performance

Julie Grossman introduces readers to a diverse series of readings of Lupino’s artistry that reframe her work within a contemporary context by focusing on the ways in which Lupino captures the brutality of social conformity and the alienation of those who stand apart from mainstream culture. In particular, these motifs are revealed through Lupino’s analysis of gender trauma and the failed institution of family, both symptoms of the breakdown of social roles in postwar America. One film, in particular, addresses the social context of repression: In Not Wanted, Lupino establishes what would throughout her career be her authorial stamp: a thoroughgoing critique of imprisoning social and familial roles and a noir representation of the bleak prospects for happiness for men and women in modern America. The American dream is not what it promises to be in the works of Lupino and gender and family roles are presciently portrayed as distortions of conventional ideals. (It should be noted Julie Grossman and Therese Grisham have coauthored a superb volume that examines Lupino’s directorial work: Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition, Rutgers UP, 2017.)

Marlisa Santos explores the challenges and complications facing Lupino as she addresses issues of gender in an increasingly complex world. More specifically, Santos analyzes how Lupino interrogates complex narratives in which characters are caught in various traps of contemporary gender ideology: male husband as provider, female wife as homemaker and mother, and female mistress as seductive siren. In The Bigamist, for example, the weaknesses and foibles of bigamist Harry are also the deficiencies of Eve and Phyllis, as all of them are culpable in the eventual multi-marriage mess in which they find themselves. Santos sees Lupino as a humanist, rather than solely a feminist, and her films affirm her efforts to reveal the foibles and challenges of characters in a changing world, regardless of gender. In her treatment of Outrage, Santos explores the uncanny display of the familiar becoming the unfamiliar as it gains force with the actual sexual assault of Ann Walton, victim and main character, resulting in a damaged psyche that remains unhealed. Lupino’s desire to show the complexity of human emotion is never oversimplified in this complex film. Santos continues to explore these intertwined representations of gender and conflict in several television episodes directed by Lupino (Figure 1.3).

FIGURE 1.3 Lupino directing The Hitch-Hiker.

Michael Shuman keenly examines The Bigamist, as a legacy of film noir, in arguing that Lupino, as actor and director, complicates the noir landscape further by introducing a distinctively feminine perspective into a genre of film otherwise universally dominated by a masculine creative vision. The Bigamist is a film about gender identity, loneliness, and infidelity, which immediately follows The Hitch-Hiker, an exemplary representative of Hollywood film noir. Lupino, while adopting oblique camera angles, brooding sensibility, and a persistent feeling of impending tragedy in The Bigamist, imports the style and conventions of film noir into a different context, thus illuminating her “softer” social concerns through techniques already familiar to the moviegoing audience. Barriers of space and characters, Lupino suggest, are never secure, whether physical, psychological, or emotional, and the sanctity of personal space is a fabrication we enjoy in an attempt to protect our individuality. Lupino’s refusal to provide thematic and narrative closure both emphasize the moral uncertainties of The Bigamist’s plot and further define her status as an outlying filmmaker in a Hollywood predicated on niche markets, proven narrative formulas, and powerful advertising rhetoric.

Ashley M. Donnelly argues that The Bigamist is not a conventional film. This film, influenced heavily by both noir and neorealism, is an intricate, subtle, and well-crafted work of art that exemplifies Lupino’s stylistic integrity as a director and her unique way of presenting moral subjects. The Bigamist, Donnelly suggests, is heavily influenced by Italian neorealism and is not representative of American noir. Lupino’s vision and distinct visual style are two critical reasons for this assessment. Although the tone of The Bigamist is dark, the film itself is not. There is significantly more natural and produced lighting in it than in standard film noir. The excessive use of shadow is avoided, and, notably, there is no femme fatale (as is the case in The Hitch-Hiker). There are several distinctive characteristics of Lupino’s directorial and acting skills: her use of crossed lines and/or patterned backgrounds, her linear narration and linear character motion, and her careful control of actors’ proxemics and body language. The entire film is a linear story of the past until the very end, when the audience watches Harry face the grim consequences of his double life. Mirroring the linear style of the script, Lupino shoots the film in a linear manner. Reminiscent of Italian neorealism, which depends on location shooting, natural lighting, long shots, use of nonprofessional actors, and scenes emphasizing the uglier side of Italy’s glamor after the Second World War, The Bigamist, while employing professionals and light kits, does employ long shots to emphasize atmosphere and place. The Bigamist is arguably a beautiful, touching movie. Her treatment of both men and women in the film brings forth a world that seems so real, so normal, and so humane that condemnation is lost within the narrative she shoots, and human concern flourishes instead. Lupino’s cinemagraphic emphasis on broken lines, obscured blocks, and disrupted parallels is also evident throughout The Trouble with Angels, which raises such questions as the following: How can women change the world working within undeniable patriarchy? How can they “fix” things without abandoning tradition? These questions are, once again, large, difficult to answer, and are ultimately left to the resolution of the audience.

Valerie Barnes Lipscomb sentiently probes the issue of age stereotypes in her analysis. In films such as Outrage, The Hitch-Hiker, The Bigamist, and Hard, Fast and Beautiful, Lupino does not challenge stereotypical portrayals of a...