My posts this week have been about a personal experience. Years ago my brother’s best friend and I picked up a hitchhiker — he was a guy we knew but hadn’t seen in a while. When we picked him up we didn’t know that just days later he would be arrested in connection with two murders.

I’ll be wrapping up the series The Devil in Orange County over the next day or so.

Meanwhile, it is Film Noir Friday, and tonight’s feature is THE HITCHHIKER, starring Edmond O’Brien, Frank Lovejoy, William Talman and directed by Ida Lupino. The tagline for the film was great: “There’s death in his upraised thumb!”

From Wikipedia:

Critic John Krewson lauded the work of Ida Lupino, and wrote, “As a screenwriter and director, Lupino had an eye for the emotional truth hidden within the taboo or mundane, making a series of B-styled pictures which featured sympathetic, honest portrayals of such controversial subjects as unmarried mothers, bigamy, and rape…in The Hitch-Hiker, arguably Lupino’s best film and the only true noir directed by a woman, two utterly average middle-class American men are held at gunpoint and slowly psychologically broken by a serial killer. In addition to her critical but compassionate sensibility, Lupino had a great filmmaker’s eye, using the starkly beautiful street scenes in Not Wanted and the gorgeous, ever-present loneliness of empty highways in The Hitch-Hiker to set her characters apart.

ENJOY THE FILM!