Starring Ida Lupino

She didn’t see herself as “the girl” in one light entertainment after another. Lupino wanted to show what she could do in serious drama, and her ambitions didn’t include standing around as an underdressed servant girl in Cleopatra (1934) with Claudette Colbert. She turned that one down flat, asking Paramount instead for a small but pivotal role in the tragic romance Peter Ibbetson (1935). As Agnes, the flirtatious girl who tries and fails to reel in the hero, she was noticed with approval by the critics.

Paramount, however, never seemed to know what it had in this stubborn young Englishwoman. Toward the end of 1937, a fed-up Lupino did the unthinkable; she refused to renew her contract and stayed home. In the meantime, she dieted away every trace of the “baby fat” the studio had nagged her about (later admitting that she hadn’t been healthy about it). She let her hair go back to its natural brown, and with her self-makeover complete, Ida waited for the phone to ring. Mostly, it didn’t. She decided, as she would many times, to take matters into her own hands.

Director William A. Wellman was busy in the spring of 1939—his first child was born on March 31, he was in postproduction on Beau Geste, and he was already in preproduction on his next film, The Light That Failed, based on Rudyard Kipling’s novel. Paramount cast Ronald Colman as the painter Dick Heldar, who is gradually losing his sight. Unfortunately, Colman and Wellman already disliked each other. The actor further annoyed the fiery Wellman by campaigning nonstop for a British newcomer—Vivien Leigh—to play Bessie Broke, the bitter and amoral Cockney street girl who becomes Dick’s model. When Colman even tried to go over Wellman’s head to the studio brass, Wellman lost his temper and swore he’d hire the next actress that walked through his office door.

He didn’t do that, obviously, but word got around fast, as it does in Hollywood. And when it reached Ida Lupino, she was ready.

“That crazy little English girl . . . tore into my office unannounced and demanded that I watch her play Bessie Broke in the big scene,” Wellman recalled later. “This is my part,” Lupino told him. “You have got to give me a chance. I know it right now. I know the whole script, because I stole it!”

Some directors might have recoiled from that level of assertiveness in an actress. Not Wellman. He told her to go ahead, and he’d read Colman’s part (which must have been quite a sight). Lupino, despite her scene partner’s limitations, was superb. She got the part.

And so Ida Lupino, previously quite good in some films but never given a chance to shine, hit screens in 1939 with an authentic accent and a temperament straight from hell. “A little ingenue suddenly bursts forth as a great actress,” said the New York Times, truthfully if somewhat patronizingly. Modern Screen was closer to the mark when it said of Lupino’s Bessie, “You hate her, but you understand her.” Bessie is, arguably, even more spiteful than the decade’s other star-making Cockney harridan, Bette Davis’s Mildred in Of Human Bondage from 1934. The similarity wasn’t lost on anyone; Screenland titled its big 1940 feature on Ida, “Watch Out, Bette Davis!” Ida herself would sometimes joke that she was “the poor man’s Bette Davis.”

Publicity is easy, acting is hard, and the Davis comparisons would never have continued if Lupino hadn’t come through again. She did, brilliantly, in 1940’s They Drive by Night—another bad girl, but a more complex and compelling one, with the great Raoul Walsh directing. Lupino plays Lana, married to rich-but-boring Ed (Alan Hale), owner of his own trucking firm, but obsessed with poor-but-honest trucker Joe (George Raft). Lana starts as just snide and expands her nastiness into scheming, then murder. When Walsh himself wrote in his memoir that Lupino “walked off with the picture,” maybe he was thinking of how he filmed her walking toward the camera at a moment of evil triumph, until Ida’s beautiful face blacks out the scene. It was a star moment if ever there was one.

Having signed for the moment with Warner Bros., where Lupino would find many of her best parts, she followed They Drive by Night with another all-timer for Walsh, High Sierra (1941), opposite Humphrey Bogart. Bogart plays Roy “Mad Dog” Earle, a romanticized take on John Dillinger, and Lupino is Marie, who’s been working at a dance hall (classic Hollywood’s favorite euphemism for sex work). It would be wrong to say Marie has a heart of gold; hers is too beat-up to qualify. But Lupino was able to give things to the camera that the script didn’t spell out—in this case, why Marie stays with abusive gangster Babe (Alan Curtis), why she falls in love with Roy despite his dumb crush on Velma (Joan Leslie), why the famous final scenes play out for Marie the way they do.

In a bit of real-life foreshadowing, Walsh said Lupino “used to watch me, how I used the camera and stuff.” She may not have been planning to direct at this point—Lupino always said that came later—but she was one of those actors who would never want to just do their job with no conception of anybody else’s. Always a high-strung person, Lupino kept asking Walsh how he kept his temper on set. “She’d get so excited and irritable,” he said. “I told her to calm down, forget it, put some weight on.”

Lupino was less sympatico with the notoriously tetchy Michael Curtiz on The Sea Wolf (1941), and all but loathed star Edward G. Robinson, but she got along well with rising star John Garfield, who joined her in fighting for changes in the script. (They mostly lost.) Lupino and Garfield were playing fugitives from the law stuck on the ship of the title, where their characters are violently oppressed by Robinson as the brutal captain Wolf Larsen. The film, recently restored and with a plot much altered from Jack London’s novel, is perceived nowadays as an intense concentration-camp allegory, one that brings up questions of fascism and complicity that Hollywood wasn’t keen to address before America’s entry into World War II. Lupino’s role was supporting, but once again her reviews were excellent.

By the end of 1942, Lupino’s drive and stubbornness had already resulted in fights with Warner Bros. She wound up at Twentieth Century-Fox, making Moontide with director Archie Mayo (after Fritz Lang left) and the great French star Jean Gabin, who had come to Hollywood after the fall of France. With a script by novelist and short-story writer John O’Hara, Moontide is a tale of the Los Angeles underworld, with Gabin (whose English wasn’t good) as an alcoholic dockworker and Lupino as a down-on-her-luck waitress. Lupino was no Method follower; she once said, “The only method I have goes, ‘Dear God, I hope I make it today.’” But like almost all serious actors she believed in research, and she proceeded to take Gabin on a tour of the seediest parts of the city, through skid row bars and parks full of destitute, alcohol-addicted people with nowhere to go. At one point Lupino found herself drenched by a bottle of cheap perfume, tossed by a woman who clocked Ida and Gabin as outsiders. The resulting movie is often beautiful and surprisingly authentic for 1942, a rare example of an American attempt at something like French poetic realism. Lupino won praise for her work as a downtrodden woman finding new reasons to live, but at the time, the film puzzled audiences and had tepid box office.

Back at Warner Bros., Lupino made The Hard Way (1943) for Vincent Sherman. That title seemed to become a curse, since making the film was one of the hardest slogs of Ida’s life. The Hard Way follows Helen Chernen as she drives her talented baby sister Katie (Joan Leslie) into a stage career, wrecking lives in the process, including her own. Early in the filming Lupino was hospitalized for exhaustion. Once she returned, she argued endlessly with Sherman over whether to play Helen as “a bitch” (Lupino’s word). She was worried that audiences would dislike everybody in the movie, and Helen most of all. One difficult day, Lupino lost her temper entirely and shouted, “This picture stinks, and I’m going to stink in it!” The personal strain was even worse. Ida’s beloved father, Stanley, died during filming, and around the same time she found out that her family home in London had been destroyed in the Blitz. Ida was allowed one week off to mourn. Then she was back on set, still quarreling with Sherman. The director was proud of the resulting film, but when it was screened for Jack Warner, the mogul deemed it “a flop.”

Warner was wrong. So, for that matter, was Ida. The Hard Way opened to raves, with much praise for her singularly truthful and hard-edged work. Pushed by Sherman into playing Helen at full tilt, Lupino offers a fearlessly unlikable woman. “I thought we were good friends,” laments one of her many casualties, and Helen fires back with “I’m my only good friend, Max, you know that.” Lupino, one of those performers the Oscars are blind to (she was never nominated), won Best Actress from the New York Film Critics Circle. When Sherman phoned Ida to congratulate her, writes Lupino biographer William Donati, she greeted him with “Oh, darling, how are you?” They went on to be friends, all differences forgotten.

She had always liked working with Raoul Walsh, so when the director himself asked her to do The Man I Love, Ida accepted, though the novel (Night Shift by Maritta Wolff) was already proving troublesome to adapt. The film concerns Petey, a club singer who has tired of New York and decides to travel to the West Coast for Christmas with her siblings. There she finds herself sorting out the family’s troubles, being romanced by a gangster (Robert Alda), and falling in love with a piano player (Bruce Bennett) who’s still in love with his first wife. Lupino was in poor health during filming; it didn’t help that this winter-set movie, with its heavy costumes and fur coats, was being made during a fiery Los Angeles summer. Lupino fainted at one point, and only Alda’s fast catch kept her from hitting the floor.

Petey, for this writer’s money the most lovable woman Ida Lupino ever played, is tartly honest; she sums up one two-faced gal with “She wouldn’t give you the time of day if she had two watches.” Working with Walsh on a woman’s picture—an infrequent and therefore fresh genre for him—Lupino creates a character with a caretaker personality who can still take care of herself, a dame who would never cheat at solitaire or anything else.

The final film in the series is Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, made at RKO in 1951. Lupino had always been an exceptional presence in film noir. She does great work as Mary, the blind girl who offers refuge to Jim (Robert Ryan), a city cop whose brutality has gotten him reassigned to the isolated mountain where she lives. Lupino, so often asked to play someone roughed up or hardened by experience, is finally cast as a woman with redemptive faith in humanity. Lupino’s work is delicate, her lines delivered with a kind of bluntness that avoids sentimentality; J. Hoberman called her performance “worthy of a D. W. Griffith silent star.” When Jim tells Mary that police work makes it impossible to trust anybody, she responds simply, “You’re lucky. You don’t have to trust anyone. I do. I have to trust everybody.”

Ray’s film, made after she’d directed three movies, shows that Lupino’s acting prowess hadn’t diminished at all. She simply was shifting her ambitions toward another field that she found fresh and exciting. Many years later, when McGilligan asked Ida Lupino if the directors she worked with had influenced her, she acknowledged that “certain directors, like Wellman . . . Walsh or Michael Curtiz, couldn’t help but rub off.” But, she made clear, “I had to find my own style, my own way of doing things.” That style had been formed and polished by her many years of being one of the best actresses in Hollywood.