NEW YORK, NY.- "Ida Lupino: Mother Directs", a comprehensive selection of films by actress and filmmaker Ida Lupino (American, b. Great Britain, 1918 -1995) runs August 26 through September 20, 2010, at The Museum of Modern Art, presenting select films from 1949 to 1966, including her directorial debut Never Fear (1950).
The series highlights the filmmaker's brilliantly balanced career both in front of the camera, acting in over 100 productions for film and television, and behind the camera as a pioneering director who pushed the limits of social taboos and become the second woman to be admitted to the Directorís Guild.
The 14 film exhibition is organized by Anne Morra, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.
Savvy collectors of ARTKABINETT social network are aware of her screen performances, but may not know of her significant directing skills. These are highlighted in this particular exhibition.
As a film actress, Ida Lupino was known as the "Queen of the B's" and "the poor man's Bette Davis" because of the tough-dame parts she played.
She was much more than the studios allowed. Lupino wanted creative control to shape her own film projects, this at a time when only a couple of women had ever directed a motion picture and few women were taken seriously at all in the business. She became only the second woman to be admitted to the Director's Guild.
Refusing to play the one-dimensional prostitutes, maids and torch singer roles the studios offered her, Lupino began writing, producing, directing and (sometimes) starring in films for her own production company beginning in 1948. Not Wanted, The Hitch-Hiker, Private Hell 36, Outrage - these noir films are highly-regarded today, with thematic underpinnings the Hollywood studios wouldn't touch - like unwed mothers and rape victims.
In 1951, Ida Lupino married her co-star (from 1949's Woman in Hiding) Howard Duff. The next year she embarked on a new career in the fledgeling television industry, first as an actress on dramatic anthology programs like Four Star Theater.
By the mid-fifties, Lupino was building a sterling reputation as one of the top TV directors around, on programs like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, General Electric Theater, Have Gun-Will Travel and others.
In 1957, Lupino gave up making movies and teamed with her husband Howard Duff to star in a novel sitcom, Mr. Adams and Eve, the everyday story of a movie star couple living in Beverly Hills. Lupino wanted the show to have a ring of truth to it, exagerated slightly for comic effect; the result was a hilarious and stylish sitcom, a wonderful send-up of Hollywood in the Fifties - that golden time when women were are dolled up even when there was no place to go.
Ida Lupino was branded the English Jean Harlow when she arrived in Hollywood in 1932, but as part of a distinguished British theatrical dynasty, she aspired to be more than just an ingénue or femme fatale. A box-office-proven actress with a lucrative contract at Warner Bros., Lupino starred in such films as High Sierra (1941) and Woman in Hiding (1949).
She conscientiously studied the work of the directors for whom she acted, and before long found her way behind the camera.
Her career as a feature film director (albeit an uncredited one) began in 1949, when she stepped in for the ailing Elmer Clifton on the set of Not Wanted.
Soon thereafter, Lupino established her own production company, The Filmmakers, and from 1949 to 1966 she nurtured a successful dual career as an A-list actress and a filmmaker dedicated to the production of films investigating the social condition of women in contemporary society.
Lupino -- who referred to herself as Mother on set and had a directorís chair with Mother of Us All embroidered on the back -- commenced a directorial career at a time when Hollywood was unaccustomed to women powerbrokers.
The American cinema of the late 1940s was booming with directors like Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, who were attracted to stories about thorny social issues and ordinary folk.
These narratives fascinated Lupino, who later made half a dozen films focusing on topics once considered taboo for the commercial film industryóunwanted pregnancy, polio, bigamy, and women competing in a world of men.
Ida Lupino: Mother Directs, coincides with the publication by MoMA of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art (June 2010), which includes an essay by Anne Morra that examines Lupinoís transition from Hollywood starlet to film director and head of a thriving independent film production company.
Morra also dissects Lupino's directorial debut Never Fear, a film whose subject matter parallels that of the directors own life; the protagonistís struggle to conquer Polio is analogous to Lupinoís own battle with and eventual conquering of the disease.
