Ida Lupino

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Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino pictured in 1979
(photograph by Alan Light)
Born February 4, 1918
Camberwell, London, England
Died August 3, 1995
Los Angeles, California, USA

Ida Lupino (February 4, 1918 – August 3, 1995) was a film actress, director, and a pioneer in the field of women filmmakers.

Contents

[edit] Early life

She was born in Camberwell, London, England, (allegedly under a table during a World War I zeppelin raid), the daughter of actress Connie O'Shea (aka: Connie Emerald) and music hall entertainer, Stanley Lupino, one of the Lupino family.

[edit] Career rise

Encouraged to enter show business by both her parents and an uncle, Lupino Lane, Ida Lupino made her first film appearance in 1931, in The Love Race and worked for several years playing unsubstantial roles.

It was after her appearance in The Light That Failed in 1939 that she was taken seriously as a dramatic actress.

Her parts improved during the 1940s and she began to describe herself as "the poor man's Bette Davis". While working for Warner Brothers, she would also refuse parts that Davis had rejected, and earned herself suspensions.

During this period she became known for her hard boiled roles and appeared in such films as They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941). She acted regularly and was in demand throughout the '40s without becoming a major star.

In 1947, Lupino left Warner Brothers to become a freelance actress. Notable films around that time include Road House and On Dangerous Ground.

[edit] Directing

It was during a suspension in the late 1940s that she began studying the processes behind the camera. Her first directing job came when Elmer Clifton became ill during Not Wanted, a 1949 movie which she co-wrote.

Lupino often joked that if she had been the "poor man's Bette Davis" as an actress, then she had become the "poor man's Don Siegel" as a director. From the early '50s she began directing films, mostly melodramas and was one of the few women of her era to achieve success in this field.

She directed Outrage in 1950, and tackled the extremely controversial subject (at that time) of rape. In addition to acting in many films noir, she also directed The Hitch-Hiker (1953). The film was the first film noir directed by a woman.

She continued acting throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and her directing efforts during these years were almost exclusively television productions such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, The Donna Reed Show, Gilligan's Island, 77 Sunset Strip, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Rifleman, Bonanza, The Untouchables, The Fugitive, and Bewitched.

After guest starring in popular TV shows, she retired after making her final film appearance in 1978.

[edit] Lupino as Film Author

Ida Lupino’s texts can be analyzed as connected through a core of formal, thematic , and ideological meaning as pioneered by the critics of the film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, as well as Peter Wollen and John Caughie.

Structuralist theorist Peter Wollen distinguishes between two main schools of thought within the broader framework of the original Auteur criticism: the revelation of a core of meanings and the emphases on the formal qualities of mise en scene and style. Wollen describes the work of an auteur as the process of repetition and variation, the definition of an auteur must be understood through terms of shifting relations, both in singularity as well as uniformity. It is the relation of the variants within the text within the body of a director’s work from which meaning can be derived from an individual work.1

Connections, redundancies and variants between Lupino's works can be established looking first at her performances in They Drive by Night and High Sierra. In They Drive By Night, Lupino stars as Lana Carlsen, the manipulative, materialistic wife of trucking executive Ed Carlsen. As the film progresses, Lana murders Ed via carbon monoxide poisoning and attempts to seduce the film’s protagonist, Joe Fabrini, ultimately breaking down in a court of law and confessing to the murder, the viewer is left to infer that she does this out of fear of automatic doors. In the early film noir, High Sierra, Lupino stars as a runaway young woman, Marie, in love with both Humphrey Bogart’s character, Big Mac as well as a Cairn terrier, Pard. The idea of “crashing out”, freeing yourself or breaking away, is repeated throughout the film by both Big Mac and Marie, and it serves as the films overarching metaphor for the characters. Lupino’s performance as Lana expresses the same sentiment of constriction and futility, after the murder of her husband and her rejection by Joe, Lana occupies increasingly restricted and marginalized space, the empty mansion and later prison. Both films are connected through the metaphor of crashing out, but ultimately freedom comes in form of tragedy, Big Mac is killed after a stand off with the police and Lana suffers a mental breakdown.

An examination of Lupino's directed works Not Wanted, Outrage, The Hitch-Hiker, and Hard, Fast, and Beautiful shows them to be connected not by a single, unified idea, but as a progression of developing gender oriented themes. Not Wanted tells the story of Sally Forest, a naive young girl who wants only the things she cannot have and subsequently becomes pregnant. After giving the child up for adoption she begins to lose her sanity and steals a baby, gets arrested, and attempts to jump off a bridge. Outrage addresses the issue of rape in time when the word rape was hardly even defined. The film follows Ann Walton's personal trauma, flight from society, and eventual reintegration through the aid of the character Pastor Bruce Ferguson. Within both these texts, unrepresented societal issues concerning women are addressed. In the case of Not Wanted, Lupino confronts the issues surrounding undesired pregnancies and the societal pressures of single-motherhood. Outrage functions as a progressive feminist text in breaking the taboo surround the discussion of rape by showing the trauma that is inflicted on the victim, on the screen. Intertextually these films are also linked through the representation of the main male characters as displaying the crisis of masculinity in post-war American culture. Bruce Ferrguson, an injured war veteran, is represented as smoking an empty pipe which highlights his lack of threatening sexuality, reflecting his figurative impotence. The same motif can be carried over into Not Wanted through the representation of the male character Drew Baxtor as a maimed war veteran, whose relationship with Sally is more infantile than sexual. This is shown directly by his attempts to court her by first taking her for a ride on a merry-go-round, then trying to impress her with his train set. His lack of threatening sexuality is also highlighted by his prosthetic leg.

Later Lupino films, The Hitch-Hiker and Hard, Fast, and Beautiful, continue to address these same themes of oppression by the patriarchal hierarchy of American society. The key difference between Lupino's earlier and later directed work is the transposition of gender roles onto atypical characters. In The Hitch-Hiker, Lupino presents the ways in which male characters are put into victimized positions by the overbearing masculinity of the criminal Emmitt Meyers' gun. Gender roles are similarly transposed in Hard, Fast, and Beautiful when the maternal figure becomes the controlling, oppressive force in the narrative. The thematic and ideological examples previously mentioned, aided through the criticism of Peter Wollen and the writers of Cahiers du Cinema construct Lupino's importance as a author of film.

[edit] Awards

The second woman to be admitted to the Director's Guild (following Dorothy Arzner), Ida Lupino has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the fields of television and motion pictures. They are located at 1724 Vine Street and 6821 Hollywood Boulevard.

[edit] Personal life

Ida Lupino was born in 1918 (and not 1914 as other biographies have it) as per her birth reference (see below).

She married and divorced three times:

Lupino was never a public figure, and kept her private affairs separate from her work.

Ida Lupino died from a stroke while undergoing treatment for colon cancer in Los Angeles, California. She is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

The face currently featured on the Columbia Pictures Statue of Liberty logo at the beginning of each of their movies for the past several years looks exactly like Lupino's, although the studio insists that it's a composite of several actresses. A model named Jenny Joseph posed for the body but a different face was substituted.

[edit] References

  • General Register Office, Register of Births - Lupino, Ida: JAN-MAR Qtr 1918 1d 1019 CAMBERWELL, mother's maiden name = O'Shea
  • 1Wollen, Peter. "The Auteur Theory." In Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, Berkeley; University of California Press 1976

[edit] External links

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