I recently wrote about Ida Lupino’s 1950 drama “Outrage,” which is so impressive and moving that I felt impelled to discuss it in detail in this clip. Lupino is best known as an actress, but she became a director in 1949. She started a production company with her husband at the time, Collier Young, and, on their first film, “Not Wanted,” she took over for the director they hired, Elmer Clifton, after he suffered a heart attack early in the shoot. She’s a gifted filmmaker, and it’s shocking that so few of her works are readily available on home video, whether DVD or streaming. I’ve previously discussed her film “The Young Lovers” (the first movie that she directed in its entirety) and noted that most of the subjects she chose to film find characters—mainly women—at the nexus of public policy, social codes, and private pain. Those subjects would suffice to make her a noteworthy filmmaker; it’s her artistry that makes her a great one. Lupino doesn’t relegate the public concerns of her characters and the political implications of her story to the working-out of the plot. Rather, she creates extraordinary images that embody her complex of concerns in a style that’s entirely her own. Wherever there are two people together, Lupiono makes present the imperatives of society and the implications of politics. When Lupino takes on subjects that few other filmmakers dared to address, she does it with cinematic imagination.
Movie of the Week: “Outrage”
