Ida Lupino’s last song
Pioneering director’s legacy resonates more than 20 years after her death.
It has not been long since I met Ida Lupino. That first encounter had nothing special: I came across her name briefly mentioned in conversations, digital encyclopedias and pages dedicated to the cinema history. Thus said the summarized descriptions: actress, producer, screenwriter and pioneering director in Hollywood. Curious as I am, I started to chase after her films. And in them I found out unseen faces of the world. Since then, Ida Lupino is to me like the wise friend with whom we sit to sigh for teenage loves, to choose the best dress, and eventually to conspire on the crimes of the next street. More than two decades after her death, we begin to remember her. And all those titles — actress, producer, screenwriter, director — do not seem enough to describe her many facets in the universe of motion pictures.
Ida Lupino’s legacy relies on the confront to the traditional institutions: born in London, in 1918, Lupino earned recognition in the 1940s as a successful product of British exportation in Hollywood, acting opposite great stars of that age, such as Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn. An actress praised by the specialized critics, she became known for her particular fondness of playing villains and femme fatales, and refused to take roles that did not match her dramatic skills, which kept her from being a celebrity and led to the suspension of her contract with Warner Bros. studios. Suspended, the actress began to observe with great enthusiasm the filmmaking process behind the cameras, and founded, along with her husband, screenwriter Collier Young, the independent company The Filmakers.
Her first opportunity came in 1949 when Elmer Clifton, a veteran director since the silent era, got ill, and delegated to Ida the completion of his last film, Not Wanted. Even though she had directed most part of the film, Ida, in respect to Clifton, preferred not to have her name credited. In this melodrama that discusses the stigma of the solo maternity, Ida Lupino introduces the trademark of her cinema: psychological exploration in themes of relevancy to contemporary societies. Thereafter, she was responsible for six movies that defied the conservative Hollywood conduct.
Some say her films lack a unique style. Indeed, her productions could never be completely apart from the B aesthetic (or the so-called “poverty row”), often bringing non-famous actors and taking advantage of natural light, discarded costumes and pieces of scenarios from other sets. However, one must acknowledge Lupino’s genius relies on the “miracles” accomplished from a low budget, with brilliantly constructed scripts and a selected cast which, despite of being often composed of actors who were not known by the great public, was carefully chosen, making her works holder of qualities that can be appreciated even today.
Another unmistakable trademark of hers is certainly the voice never conquered by a woman in Hollywood before, and the dare to confront taboos. Ida Lupino, throughout her trajectory as a director, poked the wounds of the social body in controversial issues: young love and the reality of patients on the early days of treatment against polio in the U.S. (Never Fear, 1949); the consequences of rape and the blaming on the victim (Outrage, 1950); the mother-and-daughter relationship (Hard, Fast and Beautiful, 1951); the patologic genesis of the American psycho (The Hitch-Hiker, 1953); bigamy and pregnancy out of marriage (The Bigamist, 1953); the challenges of growing up as a woman under the rigid catholic morality (The Trouble With Angels, 1966).
“While I’ve encountered no resentment from the male of the species for intruding into their world, I give them no opportunity to think I’ve strayed where I don’t belong”, she said. Apart from stereotypes, Lupino turned the limitations imposed by the star system into weapons against the star system itself: her movies deal with reality with no cuts or prosaic idealizations. In them we see the crude exposure of men’s fragilities — working class, urban middleman, serial killer — without glorifications to masculinity; we see women in their true condition of victim of the patriarchal society that suppresses and languishes. Martin Scorsese considers her as an author of “remarkable chamber pieces that deal with challenging subjects in a clear, almost documentary fashion, and they represent a singular achievement in American cinema.”
Besides cinema, Lupino was the only woman to ever direct episodes of the celebrated series Twilight Zone (1959–1964), in which she also starred. Still on TV, she directed and acted in more than 30 shows, from westerns to comedies, among them, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–1965), Daniel Boone (1964–1970), Bewitched (1964–1972), Batman (1966–1968) and Charlie’s Angels (1976–1981). The pioneer told her wish: “I’d love to see more women working as directors and producers!”
Ida Lupino had many other ways of telling stories: according to a New York Times article published by the time of her death in 1995, her hobbies included writing children’s stories and composing songs. It has been said that one of her compositions, named Aladdin’s Suite, was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in the late 1930s. The tone of that song, once there are no registers of it, we will never know. However, the legacy of the Hollywood pioneer inspires artists such as the jazzist Carla Bley, whose piece Ida Lupino takes us back to the noir, decadent, melancholic atmosphere of the dark streets of the big cities. An atmosphere that is, according to Bley, “smooth and lyrical, dominated by a simple repetitive melody, tonal or modal harmonies, slower tempos, and a calm demeanor.” In that song, as in life, the cinema is the ghetto through which Ida Lupino guides her audiences, humanizing them with her crude, sensitive look, which does not forsake gangsters, ingenuous lovers and marginalized folks.
References and further reading:
Malone, Alicia. The Female Gaze: essential movies made by women. Mango, 2018. Accessed on July 27th, 2019. Available here.
A short history of… “Ida Lupino” (Carla Bley, 1964). JAZZIZ. September 19th, 2017. Accessed on July 27th, 2019. Available here.
Ida Lupino, film actress and director, is dead at 77. New York Times. August 5th, 1995. Accessed on July 27th, 2019. Available here.
