Film Forum

U.S., 1953
Directed by Ida Lupino
Starring Joan Fontaine, Edmond O’Brien, Ida Lupino, Edmund Gwenn
Screenplay by Collier Young
Approx. 80 min.

Wanted by two women... Childless couple Joan Fontaine and Edmond O’Brien want to adopt, but an investigator turns up something interesting about O’Brien: his second wife, the tough-talking working woman Lupino. Too hot for the original distributor RKO, Lupino and company self-distributed.

Laughingly self-described as the “poor man’s Bette Davis,” London-born Ida Lupino (1918-1995) descended from a long line of entertainers, sailed just below super-stardom despite memorably tough roles at Warner Bros.—but then reinvented herself as a pioneer indie director, writer, and producer, the first woman of the sound era to do so and the only woman director in Hollywood for decades, tackling once-taboo subject matter, under her company banner The Filmakers.

Reviews

“Remarkably complex... The highlight of [Lupino's filmography]... The film in which she appeared on both sides of the camera, becoming the first woman in the post-silent era to direct herself.”
– Melissa Anderson, 4 Columns

“[A] glossy yet granular melodrama about the stresses and deceptions of marriage, work, and romance.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Lupino’s movies are rite-of-passage films—passage into womanhood, into nightmare, into lack of control.”
– Ronnie Scheib

“A TRUE MAVERICK... She made movies with the same steely determination and emotional sensitivity that characterized her work as an actor.”
– J. Hoberman

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