Film review: The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

The Criterion Channel has a series of films directed by Ida Lupino, of which this is one.  And a right little corker it is, too.  It begins with a shadowy figure (you just see his legs) being picked up by a young couple, followed by him shooting them dead shortly thereafter.  He then does the same thing to a single traveling salesman.  Then we meet our protagonists, a pair of men escaping to Mexico (one from his wife, the other from wife and kids) for a fishing trip.  As one might've predicted, they soon pick up the hitch-hiker, but he has decided he needs them to make his escape, partly because he has to cross the border and knows if he's driving he'll get caught, and partly because he doesn't speak Spanish (or "Mexican," as he insists on calling it).  And then the rest of the movie is the drive down to Santa Rosalia, a small town on the Eastern side of Baja California.  As everything is resting on three actors, it's lucky that they're so good, particularly Edmond O'Brien (of D.O.A. and White Heat fame), who is good at stoic good guys, and even more so, William Talman, as the egregious Emmet Myers, a Kansas desperado based on the real-life low-life Billy Cook.  He truly is effectively loathsome, with a droopy eyelid that effectively means that they can't tell when he's really asleep, and can't escape during the nights.  One of the first things we see him do is force one of the two friends to shoot a can out of the hand of the other.  Even though the film is only 71 minutes long, it's still surprising what effective suspense is made out of such slender plot.  It's very tense, and there are excellent set-pieces (like when they stop for supplies in a tiny Mexican town, or the two try to escape because they think Emmet is about to run out of use for them, but it turns out he really wasn't asleep.  Meanwhile, the American police are cooperating with the Mexican police and they agree to broadcast misleading things on the radio so Emmet won't know they're closing in on him and be motivated to ditch his hostages. One oddity for a Hollywood film of this vintage is how sympathetically every Mexican character is treated: not just respectfully (the Mexican police turn out to be the real heroes) but also they speak Spanish (rather than English for the viewers in Speedy Gonzalez accents) and no effort is made to translate it for us.  This is what B-Movies are supposed to be like (although the extensive location work in what genuinely looks like deserty parts of the Southwest might make this more expensive than the ones that just use recycled sets from other movies) - taut, suspenseful, and over before you can pause for breath.