Ida Lupino, Director shines a long-awaited spotlight on one of our greatest filmmakers, one whose movies depicted the plights of postwar women and exposed the dark underside of American society. The authors show Lupino as a trailblazing feminist auteur who created a distinctive style in film and television that was both highly expressionistic and grittily realistic.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Quotations
Part I. Introducing Ida Lupino, Director and Feminist Author
A Rejection of Hollywood
Lupino Directs
Director Lupino and Colleagues
The Filmakers’ Films
Lupino and the Censors
Lupino as Feminist Auteur
Postwar Hollywood, American Society and Culture
Close-up on Outrage
Empathy and a Cinema of Engagement
Italian Neorealism or American Realisms?
Looking Backward? Outrage and M
Part II. Lupino’s Ingenious Genres: Early Films and The Trouble with Angels (1966)
The Social Problem Film and Film Noir
Home Noir
Home Is Where the Noir Is
Doubled Dreams in Hard, Fast and Beautiful
Doubled Domesticity in The Bigamist
Doubled Trauma: Outrage
A Mighty Girl: Lupino and The Trouble with Angels
Part III: Lupino Moves to Television
Industrial Contexts: Film to Television
Directing for Television
“No. 5 Checked Out”
Ida Lupino, Television Director
On Close Readings of 1950s and 1960s Television
“The Return”: Norma Desmond and Ida Lupino Haunt the Small Screen
Mr. Adams and Eve
Directed Episodes, 1956–1968
Comedies
Action, Thrillers, Mysteries
Westerns
Notes
Works Cited
Index