DVD of the Week: “The Young Lovers”

It’s bad enough that there weren’t more women directors in classic-era Hollywood (there ought to be more now, for that matter), and all the worse that the one who may well have been the best of them, Ida Lupino, hasn’t been celebrated as the first-rank auteur she was. (I discuss her first feature in this clip.) She was already famous as an actress when she took over for a director taken sick midway through production and then, at thirty-one, made this 1949 film, “The Young Lovers,” a low-budget, intimate, extraordinarily affecting and imaginatively directed melodrama that weaves broader issues of public life into its intimate crises. It’s the first of five features she directed in rapid succession, after which she turned her attention mainly to television (making only one more feature, “The Trouble with Angels,” in later years). First, there needs to be a boxed set—her films aren’t properly transferred or restored, and I’ve heard via Twitter about the merits of some of her television episodes as well. Second, I want to know the story; turns out there’s a biography of her, by William Donati; I’m looking forward to reading it.