ABOUT THIS BOOK

The updated edition of Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition, an in-depth exploration of Lupino’s film and television directing work, provides close readings of the films and TV episodes Lupino directed and accounts for the history of Lupino’s reception, continuing into the mid 2020s, in media and film scholarship. The book gives readers a fuller understanding of Lupino’s major contribution to the history of American cinema and media. The revisions update this book, the first on Lupino’s directing, to address recent scholarship on Lupino’s work and reinforce her abiding relevance for cinephiles and film scholars. It incorporates scholarly and popular culture references to Lupino in the last seven years. Updates include a foreword by writer and film critic Imogen Sara Smith, whose work in film scholarship and the public arena has drawn attention to Lupino and the importance of gender to film noir. Authors Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman have added a complete list of the TV episodes Lupino directed in the 1950s and 60s, as well as an updated epilogue.

This new edition addresses how our views of Lupino’s innovative cinema and her prodigious contributions to classic television have been taken up by others, proving that Lupino, whose reputation has waxed and waned since the middle of the 20th century, is here to stay as a major figure in the history of American media.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

THERESE GRISHAM taught in the film and media studies program and in the departments of humanities and philosophy at Oakton College in Des Plaines, Illinois.

JULIE GROSSMAN is a professor of English and communication at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. Her publications include Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster and The Femme Fatale (Rutgers University Press).

REVIEWS

"Exactly the serious study Ida Lupino deserves, this superb book sketches her directing career against larger developments in postwar Hollywood, demonstrating her feminist impact on a changing industry."

— Shelley Stamp, author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood

"Groundbreaking and judiciously comprehensive."

— South Atlantic Review

"Lupino’s work has never received its full due. Grisham and Grossman’s sensitive study, informed by thorough research and new paradigms, provides a welcome corrective."

— Sarah Kozloff, author of Overhearing Film Dialogue

"A detailed and readable account of Lupino as a filmmaker whose work and contributions deserve greater attention in an industry still overly dominated by the male gaze. This volume should encourage further scholarship on the life and work of a pioneering filmmaker."

— The Journal of American Culture

"One of Hollywood’s few female directors, Ida Lupino was a true maverick, making movies with the same steely determination and emotional sensitivity that characterized her work as an actor. Grisham and Grossman’s thoughtful study sheds a welcome light on an oeuvre that has been too long obscured."

— J. Hoberman, author of Film After Film: Or, What Became Of 21st Century Cinema?

"An urgently needed and long overdue reclamation of the directorial work of Ida Lupino, one of the most significant auteurs of the twentieth century. Cineastes will be delighted by this dazzling, well written, and comprehensive book."

— Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, coauthor of A Short History of Film

"[A] landmark study of this underrecognized director. . . . Grisham and Grossman do not consider their subject narrowly as a woman filmmaker. They present Lupino broadly as a pioneer independent moviemaker and director."

— Film Quarterly

“Recommended.”

— Choice

"An intelligent, thorough, and engaging book that expands our understanding of Ida Lupino’s career as a director, from a frequently simplistic view of her as 'a woman in a man’s profession' to her as a unique artist in her own right. Lupino’s socially conscious themes (which often required tricky dealings with the Breen Office) and savvy grasp of Hollywood economics are given due credit. Grisham and Grossman examine Lupino’s directing within the context of classic Hollywood, of feminism, and of auteurism, showing her vital importance to all of them."

— Farran Smith Nehme, film critic and historian

"Ida Lupino, Director fulfils a grand job in keeping her achievements in the public eye."

— Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword to the Second Edition by Imogen Sara Smith vii
Preface xi
Note on Quotations xv
PART ONE
Introducing Ida Lupino, Director and Feminist Auteur 1
A Rejection of Hollywood 3
Lupino Directs 6
Director Lupino and Colleagues 11
The Filmakers’ Films 13
Lupino and the Censors 20
Lupino as Feminist Auteur 30
Postwar Hollywood, American Society and Culture 41
Close-up
on Outrage 46
Empathy and a Cinema of Engagement 58
Italian Neorealism or American Realisms? 61
Looking Backward? Outrage and M 64
PART TWO
Lupino’s Ingenious Genres: Early Films and The Trouble
with Angels (1966) 73
The Social Problem Film and Film Noir 75
Home Noir 94

Home Is Where the Noir Is 98
Doubled Dreams in Hard, Fast and Beautiful 102
Doubled Domesticity in The Bigamist 109
Doubled Trauma: Outrage 113
A Mighty Girl: Lupino and The Trouble with Angels 123
PART THREE
Lupino Moves to Television 133
Industrial Contexts: Film to Television 133
Directing for Television 137
“No. 5 Checked Out” 140
Ida Lupino, Television Director 148
On Close Readings of 1950s and 1960s Television 150
“The Return”: Norma Desmond and Ida Lupino Haunt
the Small Screen 153
Mr. Adams and Eve 163
Directed Episodes, 1956–1968
176
Comedies 181
Action, Thrillers, Mysteries 189
Westerns 206
Epilogue 215
Acknowledgments 221
Appendix: TV Episodes Directed by Ida Lupino 223
Notes 233
Works Cited 249
Index 263