The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953)

Mary Murphy and Marlon Brando in The Wild One

Cast: Marlon Brando, Mary Murphy, Robert Keith, Lee Marvin, Jay C. Flippen, Peggy Maley, Hugh Sanders, Ray Teal, John Brown, Will Wright, Robert Osterloh, William Vedder, Yvonne Doughty. Screenplay: John Paxton, based on a story by Frank Rooney. Cinematography: Hal Mohr. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Al Clark. Music: Leith Stevens.

The best performance in The Wild One isn't Marlon Brando's, it's Lee Marvin as Chino, the head of a rival motorcycle gang. Marvin brings a looseness and wit to the role that is lacking in Brando's performance, though the role itself calls on Brando to do little but act sullen. He also looks a little porky in his jeans and leather jacket, and his somewhat high-pitched voice gives an epicene quality to Johnny Strabler, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. Brando does, however, get the film's most familiar line: When Johnny is asked what he's rebelling against, he's drumming to the beat of the music on the jukebox and retorts, "What've you got?" But it's a measure of the general mediocrity of The Wild One that this exchange is immediately reprised by someone telling others about Johnny's retort, essentially stepping on the line. There are a few good moments in the film, mostly contributed by Marvin and by some effective choreography of the motorcycle riders, as in the scene in which good girl Kathie Bleeker (Mary Murphy) is menaced by the gang and then rescued by Johnny. But censorship sapped the life out of the film: The motorcycle gangs are scarcely more intimidating than fraternity boys on a spree. There's an attempt to spice things up with a scene between Johnny and Britches (Yvonne Doughty), a female hanger-on with the rival gang, suggesting that they once had something going on, but the bit goes nowhere and seems mainly designed to allow the actress to display her perky breasts in a tight sweater. As with any of the countless biker movies that capitalized on the box office success of The Wild One, there's a queer subtext to be explicated in all this male bonding, but it doesn't add much to a movie that now seems as dated as the flaming youth films of the 1920s.

When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951)

Richard Derr and Barbara Rush in When Worlds Collide

Cast: Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, Peter Hansen, John Hoyt, Larry Keating, Rachel Ames, Stephen Chase, Frank Cady, Hayden Rorke, Sandro Giglio. Screenplay: Sidney Boehm, based on a novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. Cinematography: W. Howard Greene, John F. Seitz. Art direction: Albert Nozaki, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Arthur P. Schmidt. Music: Leith Stevens.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a bunch of white folks rocketing off to another planet that looks like it was painted by Chesley Bonestell. Well, that's the way it ended in 1951. Today, one hopes that the survivors would be a good deal more diverse and the preparations for their flight a good deal better organized. (Actually, today it looks like it will end with a lot of coughing and political posturing.) When Worlds Collide is very much of its era, sacrificing plausibility for sentiment (small boys and puppies) and romance (tinged with much self-sacrifice). It's a movie that can't be taken seriously for a minute, which is part of its enduring charm for many people. I find that, after many years of serious science fiction, the charm has worn thin. I hunger for some serious treatment of science and for some semblance of actual human behavior. Even though I was 11 years old in 1951, I can't believe that we were dumb enough to swallow what the movie gives us.

The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy, William Talman, José Torvay, Sam Hayes, Wendell Niles, Jean Del Val, Clark Howat, Natividad Vacío. Screenplay: Collier Young, Ida Lupino, Robert L. Joseph, Daniel Mainwaring. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Douglas Stewart. Music: Leith Stevens.

The thing I admire most about The Hitch-Hiker is its economy. It doesn't waste time giving us, for example, the backstory of Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen, the two guys played by Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy. Lesser films would have given us scenes in which they bid farewell to their wives and children, trying to establish them as good guys in the hands of a psychopath -- we catch on to that fast enough without sentimental ties back home. Ida Lupino doesn't need to mess around with unnecessary sympathy for them. In fact, we're aware that they're not entirely paragons of virtue: They bicker, for example, about where they're going to spend their little time away from their wives, and there's a suggestion that they're glad to get away from home and family -- it looks like they want a little more action than just fishing. Later, after they've been trapped by Emmett Myers (a wonderfully scary performance by William Talman that makes me regret he got forever stuck as Hamilton Burger, the loser D.A. on the Perry Mason TV series), they quarrel about how they might escape from his clutches -- at one point Bowen even slugs Collins, who is on the verge of hysterics. There are some flaws: It's never really clear why Myers doesn't just shoot at least one of them -- he doesn't really need both to complete his journey to Santa Rosalía. And I do think the film falls a little flat at the end when Myers is so easily captured, but not enough to mar the gritty whole of the movie. Lupino and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca use the desert landscape to great effect: It provides both isolation and exposure. The Hitch-Hiker deserves its reputation well beyond its historical distinction as a film noir with an all-male cast directed by a (gasp!) woman.

The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)

The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmund Gwenn, Kenneth Tobey, Jane Darwell, Peggy Maley, Lilian Fontaine, Matt Dennis, John Maxwell. Screenplay: Lawrence B. Marcus, Lou Schor, Collier Young. Cinematography: George E. Diskant. Art direction: James W. Sullivan. Film editing: Stanford Tischler. Music: Leith Stevens.

There are some curiously "meta" moments in The Bigamist: At one point, Eve Graham (Joan Fontaine) says that the man who is helping arrange their adoption of a child reminds her of Santa Claus. We smile because the man is being played by Edmund Gwenn, who won an Oscar as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947). And just in case we missed it, a little later in the film we are on a bus touring the homes of the stars in Beverly Hills and the driver announces that the house they're passing is the residence of "a little man who was Santa Claus to the whole world -- Edmund Gwenn." But then there's something meta about the whole movie: It was produced and its screenplay written by Collier Young, who was married to Fontaine after divorcing the film's other major female star, as well as its director, Ida Lupino. I suppose if you don't believe in divorce you might say that Young is the bigamist of the film's title. But that, of course, is Harry Graham, played by Edmond O'Brien, a character actor who never failed to give a subtle and insightful performance when it was called for. Here he's a weak man, the supposed head of the Graham household, who has found himself taking a back seat in the business to his wife, Eve, whom he refers to at one point as "a career woman" -- a pejorative of sorts in the 1950s. The thing of it is, when we see Eve she's always pleasant and loving -- we sense that she doesn't want to be emasculating Harry, but she's got too much intelligence not to do so. While he's on the road for their company, he gets more and more depressed about playing second fiddle to his wife, so he takes up with Phyllis Martin (Lupino), who's a little depressed herself about her failure to make her mark in the world. One thing leads to another and they get married because she's pregnant. Harry is really a nice guy at heart, but somehow he can't help himself. Finally, he spills the beans to Mr. Jordan (Gwenn), who stumbles onto Harry's double life while investigating the Grahams' fitness to adopt a child. Jordan speaks for the viewer when he says, "I can't figure out my feelings toward you. I despise you and I pity you. I don't even want to shake your hand, and yet I almost wish you luck." There are no villains to be found in The Bigamist, only flawed people getting themselves ensnared in situations they can't resolve. Fortunately, the film doesn't resolve things for us either. It ends with Harry in court where he receives a scolding from the judge, who says he will pronounce sentence a week later. Wisely, the film leaves it up to us to deliver that sentence.

Not Wanted (Elmer Clifton, Ida Lupino, 1949)

Not Wanted (Elmer Clifton, Ida Lupino, 1949)

Cast: Sally Forrest, Keefe Brasselle, Leo Penn, Dorothy Adams, Wheaton Chambers, Ruth Clifford, Ruthelma Stevens, Lawrence Dobkin, Patrick White, Rita Lupino, Audrey Farr, Carole Dunn. Screenplay: Paul Jarrico, Ida Lupino, Malvin Wald. Cinematography: Henry Freulich. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: William H. Ziegler. Music: Leith Stevens.

Not Wanted, Ida Lupino's first feature as director, begins well (after a gratuitous assertion of the film's moral intentions in a title card), with Sally Kelton (Sally Forrest) trudging uphill toward the camera, a glazed look in her eyes, until she reaches the top, where an infant has been left in a carriage outside a shop. It gurgles and coos at her and Sally can't resist: She picks up the baby and walks away with it, only to be accosted by the mother who calls the cops and has her arrested. In jail, where Sally is thrown in with some tough-looking dames (there's a rather clichéd touch of predatory lesbianism here), she looks at the camera and begins to ponder what brought her to this moment. Cue flashback. The sequence is handled deftly, and we can only assume that it was directed by Lupino instead of the credited Elmer Clifton, who suffered a heart attack three days into shooting the film. Lupino, who was the producer, took over for the rest, but declined credit because she wasn't yet a member of the Directors Guild. The movie also ends well, with an exciting chase sequence in which a guilt-ridden Sally runs from the man who loves her, Drew Baxter (Keefe Brasselle), climbing steps to a bridge that crosses the railroad tracks and at one point threatening to leap onto the tracks below. Only when Drew collapses -- he's a World War II veteran with a prosthetic leg and has struggled to follow her -- does Sally turn and go to him for the inevitable happy ending. What comes between these scenes is often less impressive: a tear-drenched story about a young woman who falls for the wrong man (a musician, of course), gets pregnant, has the baby and gives it up for adoption, and suffers from self-loathing and remorse. To appreciate it we have to remember what was deemed possible for American filmmakers under the Production Code, as well as what was deemed possible for American women of the era. Even within the confines of the "problem picture" compromises, Lupino provides some interesting touches, such as the giddy, speeded-up carousel in the background when when Sally faints -- a sure indication for anyone familiar with movie pregnancy clichés that she's going to have a baby -- and the subjective camera that takes over during Sally's Demerol-numbed labor and delivery. Lupino's ability to think originally even when the material lacks originality is one of her strengths as a director.