It’s a pretty straight-forward plot: Two men headed to Mexico for a fishing trip pick up a passenger who turns out to be a serial killer on the run. A simple premise, but it gets complicated. It’s a tense question of if (and how) they’ll survive and escape as the murderer keeps working to break their spirits and get him out of the reach of the law.
But let’s talk about writer/director Ida Lupino.
She was a force of nature.
In school I took a class about actors as directors, focusing on the work of Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, and Ida Lupino. I already knew a lot about Welles, had heard a little about Cassavetes, but Lupino? She was news to me.
And she very quickly became The Good News that I wanted to tell everybody about.
She started as an actress, but made the move to the other side of the camera to make a series of B pictures with challenging subject matter. That B movie status allowed her more room to maneuver, and allowed for some empathetic portraits of people in crisis, like the single mother of Not Wanted, or the three people who didn’t all know they were in a love triangle in The Bigamist.
And don’t even get me started about the layered Tennis melodrama with the amazing title, Hard, Fast, and Beautiful.
If you’re not familiar with the Lupino-verse, consider this a nudge to go and change that.
This Builds Character 
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