There's No Such Thing as a Free Ride

Now Playing: The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Pros: Gritty, suspenseful low-budget masterpiece; Great performances, especially by William Talman
Cons: Requires some suspension of disbelief

You don't see too many hitchhikers on American roads these days. We've heard or read too many horror stories to be picking up strangers on the side of the road, no matter how normal they might look (or on the flip side, hitching a ride with someone you don't know -- "Is that a normal, friendly grin on the driver's face, or is he enjoying the thought of serving me up to his cannibal family?") Even if you could still find some trusting souls out there, a plethora of laws, ordinances and regulations have pretty much done in the practice. Yep, the hitchhiker is a near-extinct species.

It was one thing for dear old Mom to wag her finger and warn about the hazards of hitching, but it took Hollywood to really put the fear of God into hitchhikers and would-be Good Samaritan drivers alike. Ever since the innocent, "carefree" days of the Great Depression and the amusing hitchhiking scene in It Happened One Night (1934), it's all been downhill. Just like going down in the cellar or out in the woods alone, thumbing a ride on the silver screen always ends badly. The protagonists of such varied and sundry films as Detour (1945), The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hitcher (1986) will all tell you: there's no such thing as a free lunch, and often there's a great price to pay for a free ride.

Gil (Frank Lovejoy) and Roy (Edmond O'Brien) should have listened
to dear old Mom when she warned them not to pick up hitchhikers.

And then there's The Hitch-Hiker. If none of those other films put you off hitchhiking, Ida Lupino's grim noir classic might just do the trick. Today marks the 60th anniversary of the movie's premiere in Boston, MA. Shot on a lean budget with just three principal actors, the film has held up remarkably well over the years. It deftly manages to be edgy, suspenseful, and at times gut-wrenching, while managing to show very little actual violence on the screen, and no blood whatsoever. (Note to today's filmmakers and audiences: it may seem counter-intuitive, but excessive violence, blood and gore are not always necessary ingredients for a successful suspense-thriller.)

The Hitch-Hiker is a hard-boiled variation on the archetypal Man vs. Nature story, wherein two men, off on a camping and fishing weekend, unwisely pick up what they think is a stranded motorist, and end up battling the desert heat and a force-of-nature all to himself in the form of an armed sociopath.

The film begins with a title card explaining that what is about to transpire is a "[T]rue story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours -- or that young couple's across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual." (More on the true story a bit later.) Then the main titles display over a montage-like sequence where we see nothing but the hitchhiker's legs and worn-out shoes on the hard asphalt as he tries thumbing down cars. In long shot -- we only momentarily see the back of his head -- he hops into a fancy convertible in broad daylight. Cut to night, where the car rolls to a stop, the hitchhiker (again, only his legs) jumps out, off camera a woman screams, and a white purse falls at the hitcher's feet. He goes through the contents, then nonchalantly walks off into the night. (Even the aftermath of the crime is hidden in night shadows, as the beam from a deputy's flashlight reveals a corner of the dead woman's dress, and just the hand of her male companion on the steering wheel.)

We finally get to the see the maniac's face, but only as a washed-out photograph under a huge newspaper headline: "Ex-Convict Myers Suspect in Hitch-Hike Atrocities." It's a face only a mother could love. Meanwhile, Myers is at it again, climbing into yet another poor soul's car and roaring off toward a desert mountain range. We don't get to meet the sociopath "up close and personal" until the protagonists of the film do -- and it's a hair-raising meeting at that.

Good friends Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and Roy Collins (Edmond O'Brien) are into the first leg of a relaxing fishing weekend when they impulsively decide to head south of the border instead of continuing on to their usual stateside fishing spot. As they drive through Mexicali in Baja California, Roy is ready to hit the honky-tonks, but his friend is asleep, so Roy reluctantly heads out of town toward San Felipe, their alternate destination. Cut to those legs again, standing in the dead of night next to the car of his latest victim. The headlights of Roy's car illuminate Myers' outstretched thumb, and before you know it, the unsuspecting men are picking up what they think is a stranded motorist.

In classic movie monster style, the murderous Emmett
Myers (William Talman) emerges from the shadows.

In a very effective scene, Roy and Gil, lit up by the dashboard like two disembodied heads, try to make small talk with the stranger cloaked in darkness in the backseat. Gil offers the stranger a cigarette, and gets a revolver pointed at him for his troubles. As the two shocked men look at each other, the camera zooms into the blackness of the backseat just as the sociopathic Emmett Myers (William Talman) darts his head forward into the light, his dead eyes sizing up each man in turn as he barks orders at them. It's not unlike a classic horror scene where the monster emerges from the dark of the closet or cellar into the light. 

Gil and Roy should have listened to Mom, but now they're stuck on the wrong end of the gun wielded by a homicidal maniac who is ordering them to drive off into the godforsaken Mexican desert using dirt back roads. The desperate Myers is now improvising, using the two fishing buddies as cover and their car as a taxi to take him to the Baja California town of Santa Rosalia, where, he coldly informs the pair, he intends to dispatch them and catch a ferry across the Gulf of California to freedom. Gil and Roy engage in a deadly game with the sociopath to convince him that they're more valuable to him alive than dead…

While this suspenseful, low-budget noir has never received the accolades of the genre's greats, since its initial mixed critical reception 60 years ago, The Hitch-Hiker has steadily accrued a devoted cult following and belated respect from critics who have reassessed the career of its main author, actress/producer/writer/director Ida Lupino. The Hitch-Hiker is also a significant milestone. According to Judith M. Redding and Victoria Brownworth (Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors, Seal Press, 1997), it was the first mainstream film noir to be directed by a woman. In fact, between the 1930s and the 1960s, only one other woman, Dorothy Arzner, managed to direct films in the Hollywood system.

Ida Lupino was born into a successful English theatrical family, joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts at the age of 13, and shortly after that started steadily appearing in films (she would appear in over 100 films and television shows spanning 5 decades, from the early '30s right up to the late '70s). Although her acting career never quite hit the high mark of a Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, she appeared in some of the great dramas and film-noirs of the '40s and '50s with such leading men as Humphrey Bogart, George Raft, Robert Ryan and Dana Andrews: They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1941), On Dangerous Ground (1952), and While the City Sleeps (1956), among others.

According to Redding and Brownworth, from the get-go Ida was a reluctant actress, preferring music and screenwriting to being in front of the camera. At the point where many actress' careers stalled due to waning youth (or perhaps worse yet, they were cast as mothers of males who were only a few years younger), Ida decided that it wasn't enough being an actress, "sitting around on the set waiting for something to do." (Ibid.) She and her husband, Collier Young, founded the independent company Filmakers to shoot hard-hitting issue-oriented movies that mainstream Hollywood studios wouldn't touch. Finally she was producing, writing and directing, as well as standing in front of the camera.

Ida's first directing gig (uncredited) came when she filled in for an ailing director, Elmer Clifton, on the set of Not Wanted (1949), a pioneering movie about an unwed mother that she also co-produced and wrote. As if daring prudish, self-satisfied America to get its collective head out of the sand, she directed, co-wrote and co-produced Outrage (1951), a film about a young woman dealing with the trauma of rape in the midst of a seemingly uncaring and judgmental society (of course, standards of the time prevented the word from being used at all in the film).

While on the surface The Hitch-Hiker is a straight thriller with no pretensions to social relevance, Lupino still adds touches that further humanize the characters -- even the detestable Emmett Myers. In one touching scene, the kidnapper and his two victims enter a dusty Mexican store to buy food. As Gil and Roy fill a box with provisions, the store owner's little pigtailed daughter decides to make friends with Emmet and introduce him to her doll. As she tugs at his sleeve and he glares down at her, Gil (who we earlier learned is a good family man), rushes over to get the girl away from Myers. He hugs her tightly, as if he's just saved his own daughter's life.

Is he awake or asleep? Only Emmett knows for sure.

A short while later, over a campfire, Myers turns reflective, telling the fishermen exactly what's wrong with their soft, middle-class lifestyles (and suggesting that perhaps murderous maniacs are made, not born):

"You guys are soft. You know what makes you than way? You're up to your necks in IOUs… you're suckers, you're scared to get out on your own. You've always had it good, so you're soft. Well not me. Nobody ever gave me anything, so I don't owe nobody. My folks were tough. When I was born, they took one look at this puss of mine and told me to get lost."

But perhaps the most effective (and chilling) scene is when Myers calmly informs the fishing buddies not to get their hopes up about rushing him when he's asleep:  "You know you make pretty good targets from where I sit. Anyway, you couldn't tell if I was awake or asleep. Got one bum eye -- won't stay closed. Pretty good, huh?" (Sure enough, the men spend the night nervously glancing over at Myers, who's sitting up, gun in hand, one eye trained on them and the other closed. They decide not to chance it.)

The casting of the three principals in The Hitch-Hiker is pure noir nirvana. By the time of this film, both Edmond O'Brien (Ray) and Frank Lovejoy (Gil) were film noir veterans, appearing in such landmark titles as The Killers (O'Brien; 1946), White Heat (O'Brien; 1949), In a Lonely Place (Lovejoy; 1950), The Sound of Fury (Lovejoy; 1950), and D.O.A. (O'Brien; 1950). They are both excellent. But the film really belongs to William Talman as the reptilian Emmett Myers. With his gaunt face, half-paralyzed eyelid, and quiet menace, Talman's Myers is one of the creepiest noir villains ever. It is an acting tour-de-force. (Ironically, Talman would go on to fame portraying a character on the other side of the law: the smarmy, arrogant prosecutor -- and perpetual loser -- Hamilton Burger in the Perry Mason TV series.)

If The Hitch-Hiker has a weakness, it's a plot device that asks the audience to believe that a desperate murderer -- after quickly dispatching his earlier victims and stealing their cars -- suddenly is willing to take the chance of kidnapping two big, strapping men and using them for several days as cover to make his way over to the Mexican port city. It also seems a stretch that he could keep them at bay at night with just a "trick" eyelid. However, the plot is more or less based on the real notorious case of Billy Cook, who went on a murder and kidnapping spree after getting out of prison. He was ultimately captured by Mexican police with two kidnapped hunters in tow. So maybe it's not such a stretch after all!

Director Ida Lupino and Frank Lovejoy discuss a scene.

The Hitch-Hiker was Ida's favorite of the seven films she directed, but unfortunately it was not a triumph for her at the time. In his introduction to VCI's special VHS edition of the film, actor Robert Clarke (who appeared in two Lupino-directed films, Outrage, 1950 and Hard, Fast and Beautiful, 1951) details the director's abiding disappointment with how sloppily and carelessly the distributor, RKO, handled her film's release:

"The Hitch-Hiker was released with little fanfare through RKO Studios, which at that time was a pale shadow of the studio it had been in the glory days of the 1930s and 40s. To make matters worse, the release prints were very badly made, printed on cheap stock to save a few pennies on each foot of film. Visually, they lacked all the subtle tones and mood which Ida and veteran cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca had worked so hard to achieve. Desert scenes shot in daylight were supposed to have been overexposed, giving the audience a feeling of oppression and unbearable heat. Night scenes were to be a velvet black, with pools of light and shadow, trapping the characters in their fate. But instead, everything was printed a dull grey, and the prints were hastily released. The Hitch-Hiker played the bottom half of double bills."

However, time and an appreciative, discerning community of critics and film buffs have resurrected Ida's B masterpiece and restored its reputation. The Hitch-Hiker is 60 years young today. Happy birthday!

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Where to find it:

Kino Lorber (includes the Robert Clarke introduction)

Amazon Instant Video

Sociopath Emmett Myers (William Talman) seems pleased with himself as he listens to a report of his murderous exploits on the car radio:

Net-accessible Noirs for the New Year

Some time ago on this blog I took media content providers and deliverers to task for their all too frequent (and way too public) spats over licensing terms and fees, and how this unending public feuding was ultimately doing a disservice to their customers. Since then, the media licensing wars seem only to have escalated, as the fighting has broken out into new territories, using new means for bashing each other. Just the other day I was mucking around on Facebook and noticed an ad for a page warning the subscribers of some Big Cable company that they'd be losing access to all of FX's great programming soon unless something drastic was done. So not only do we ever-suffering media consumers get to constantly see banners on our favorite channels warning of some coming blackout due to the inability of corporate suits to come to terms, we get to see the fights in all their glory even when we retreat to our favorite social media hangouts. It's not enough that these obese corporations fight tooth and nail for every last crumb, but they have to drag their innocent customers into their ridiculous food fights.

Braveheart looks on with amazement as the Big Media
Corporations ferociously do battle with one another.

Whenever I see a channel banner or Facebook ad urging me to contact my [fill in the blank] provider and demand that they cave in so as to save my cherished programs, I get this picture in my head of an overweight, balding lawyer in an Armani suit, on horseback, his face painted like Braveheart's, riding furiously up and down the assembled ranks of desperate, hungry, media-addicted consumers, crying for them to attack that other fat, evil guy over there in the tailored suit and the stupid war paint. I also imagine the dirty, emaciated consumers with their pitchforks and torches standing there looking at each other, shrugging their shoulders and thinking, "who are these stupid a**holes?" I for one am tempted to throw down my pitchfork, desert the field of battle, cancel my satellite subscription, and go find a good book to read. (Sounds like a New Year's resolution…)

Of course, all the fighting and chaos is really the beginning death knell of the venerable broadcast model that served us so well (?) throughout the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. Older, unimaginative corporate suits are trying to figure out how to generate dependable revenue streams out of the not-unreasonable expectations of teens and twenty-somethings to be able to access the content they want, when they want, wherever they want (and especially on their smartphones, tablets and in the near future, the virtual displays available through their special glasses and contact lenses). Coming soon to a future near you, more of the same, only more convenient for the on-the-go individual. Companies that only a couple years ago seemed so innovative and invincible (Apple, Netflix) will stumble and fall, new companies will rise up, arrogant young hipsters will kick the old men out of their corner offices (as they've always done), and we'll have a ubiquitous cloud-based anytime, anywhere media environment. Like the present, some of it will be pay-per-use, a portion will be subscription-based, and a huge chunk will be supported by ads. Schedules will be a thing of the past, to be replaced by instant notifications of new content available in the great cumulated-nimble-cumulonimbus network cloud covering the entire planet. And fuggedabout popping those fragile, shiny discs into players-- just stream it through your integrated display glasses and listen in on the micro-speakers embedded in your ear canal.

Will this brave new media future lead to even less real-time-and-place, face-to-face human interaction, and more solitary addiction to tiny screens? Probably. I'm tempted to condemn this in an old fart kind of way, but then, as someone who's been addicted to screens (especially TV and movie screens) all his life, I'm maybe not the best person to be telling others how to spend their time. In the meantime, I'll be puttering along, attending the occasional movie at the multiplex, DVRing movies and TV shows, streaming here and there from some online sources, downloading from others, and yes, every now and then popping a shiny disc into an ancient DVD player (for that obscure, old-time content that hasn't been made it into the cloud yet… and may never make it).

In spite of all the big media turmoil, it's not a bad time to be a fan of old movies. There are more options than ever for delving into the old stuff, and a lot of fairly obscure titles are surprisingly making it into some big time commercial streaming services. Take Netflix for example. Much has been written on Netflix' difficulties with content providers, and how much their instant view selection has suffered for it. At the time of this post, the service had amassed almost 50,000 titles in their instant watch catalog, but most of these are older titles -- the low-hanging, cheaply licensed or public domain fruit, so to speak -- and not the recent hit movies that most subscribers are looking to stream (don't throw out that DVD player quite yet-- the DVD by mail catalog is still over twice as large).

Still, one person's junk is another's treasure, and fortunately for B movie fans like me, Netflix' instant watch catalog is replete with low-budget, black and white gems. I discovered this by accident about a year and half ago, when I finally broke down and bought a network-capable Blu-ray player to stream movies on the TV. One of the first titles I streamed was Richard Attenborough's 10 Rillington Place (1971; about a notorious English mass murderer), which at the time was only available on Instant Watch (and subsequently has been yanked from Netflix altogether). Then I stumbled on an obscure horror title from Republic Studios, The Vampire's Ghost (1945) that I had written up earlier on this blog, and thought was only available from one source on DVD-R. I started searching for other B movie titles, found a lot of Instant-only selections, built up a queue, and the rest, as they say, is history. (I have no illusions that these particular titles will keep Netflix thriving and profitable, but I'll continue to enjoy them for as long as Netflix is willing to stream 'em.)

The cold, dark winter months usually put me in the mood for dark, atmospheric movies, so predictably, I spent a good deal of time over holidays watching supernatural horror, thrillers, and film noir.  Below are three lesser-known film noirs that I enjoyed over the break, and that illustrate the rough gems that noir buffs can dig up from the Netflix Instant Watch database. (All three are also available on Amazon Instant Video.)

Now Playing: Sleep, My Love (1948)

Pros: Great cast; Odd plot and character details give the film an almost dream-like quality
Con: Hoary "Gaslight" plot is telegraphed early on

In Brief: Wealthy New York socialite Alison Courtland (Claudette Colbert) wakes up on a train bound for Boston, not remembering how she got there. A fellow passenger trying to help her discovers a gun in her purse. Back in New York, her husband Richard is talking to a police inspector (Raymond Burr) about his missing wife and a gunshot wound in his arm, which he claims was self-inflicted while cleaning his gun. Once in Boston, Alison calls Richard, who arranges for the Boston police to escort her to the airport for a flight back to NYC. At the airport, Alison bumps into an old Boston friend, Barby (Rita Johnson), who's seeing her friend Bruce Elcott (Robert Cummings) off on the same plane. Bruce offers to accompany the distressed Alison back to New York.

Bruce takes an immediate shine to Alison, asking her out on a date before he realizes she's married. Once back at her palatial townhouse (part of her family's estate), Alison learns from her hubby that she had been sleepwalking in the middle of the night, and when he'd tried to get her back to bed, she shot him. Horrified that she might have killed him, she reluctantly agrees to see a psychiatrist. The doctor, a creepy-looking man with thick horn-rimmed glasses, makes a house call. Alison becomes alarmed when he makes vaguely menacing advances on her, then asks to use the telephone to call her husband with dire news about her mental health. When he abruptly disappears, she faints. When Richard arrives home, he denies that he sent anyone to the house, or received a phone call from the doctor. Alison can't get anyone to believe her story about the weird man.

As Richard keeps insisting that his wife needs help for her sleepwalking and hallucinations, and Alison insists that's she's not going crazy, Bruce, who's still attracted to Alison despite her married status, starts to get suspicious.

Key Player #1: Oscar winner Claudette Colbert was in her mid '40s when this film was made, and her movie career was winding down. Even so, she gives it her all in her new role of "scream queen" -- and she belts out a good one at the beginning of the movie, when she wakes up disoriented and frightened on a speeding train. She made another very underrated film noir a couple of years later, The Secret Fury (1950), wherein a stranger interrupts her wedding ceremony to declare that she's already married. As she tries to clear up the misunderstanding, the other supposed husband dies mysteriously, and she's accused of the crime.

Key Player #2: Husky-voiced, sultry Hazel Brooks makes quite an entrance as Daphne, a femme-fatale who has gotten her hooks into Alison's husband. She saunters down the stairs in the sheerest of nightgowns, and then proceeds to berate hapless, near-sighted Charles Vernay (George Coulouris), sneeringly calling him "four eyes." She has the best line in the movie: "I want what she's got, I want it all: I want her house, her name, her man, and I want them now, tonight."  Brooks made a handful of movies in the '40s and early '50s, and then abruptly retired to become a successful photographer (earlier she had been on the other side of the still camera as a highly successful model).

Now Playing: The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me, 1950)

Pros: Gritty, well-acted drama with a social message; Frank Lovejoy is particularly good as the down-on-his luck everyman who comes to deeply regret his association with a sociopath played by Lloyd Bridges
Cons: The social message becomes a bit too heavy-handed at times; Richard Carlson's newspaper columnist sees the error of his ways a little too quickly and conveniently

In Brief: Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) has moved out to California with his young pregnant wife and little boy to try to find work. His job search is going nowhere when he runs into Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), a flashy braggart who wears expensive suits, knows how to talk up the ladies, and always seems to have huge rolls of cash on him. Jerry takes pity on the shy, down-on-his luck Howard, promising him a job which turns out to be driving Jerry around to knock off liquor stores and gas stations. Howard hesitates, but with the pressure of a baby on the way and no money, he relents. Howard is disturbed when Jerry pistol whips a gas station attendant, and wants out. Jerry browbeats him, then lures him with the promise of one more big job that will put them both on easy street.

Howard, basically a good man, comes to find out to his everlasting regret that slick Jerry is a homicidal sociopath. Meanwhile, well-known columnist Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson), has been convinced by his editor to write sensationalistic, scaremongering stories about the crime wave hitting the sleepy California town. When he starts writing about the horrific consequences of Jerry and Howard's big job, he sets in motion scary forces that no one can control.

Key Player #1: Square-faced, everyman-looking Frank Lovejoy played in a variety of gritty crime and war pictures in the early-mid '50s before being swept up by TV. Other quality film noir roles include In a Lonely Place (1950) with Humphrey Bogart, I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), and Ida Lupino's creepy The Hitch-Hiker (1953). He died way too soon of a heart attack in 1962.

Key Player #2: Katherine Locke turns in a great, understated performance as a lonely manicurist, Hazel, who Jerry introduces to Howard in order to set up an alibi. The interaction between Howard, wracked with guilt, and Hazel, quietly desperate for a good man to share her life with, is one of the best parts of the movie. Katherine gained some fame on Broadway in the '30s before making a handful of movies in the following two decades.

Now Playing: Private Hell 36 (1954)

Pros: Good acting turns by Howard Duff, Steve Cochran and Ida Lupino
Cons: Certain plot elements, like a multi-day stakeout of a racetrack based on the slimmest of clues, strain credulity

In Brief: Tough-guy detectives Jack Farnham (Howard Duff) and Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) are assigned to investigate money from a robbery-homicide in New York suddenly showing up in LA. They trace a $50 dollar bill from the job to an attractive nightclub singer, Lilli Marlowe (Ida Lupino), who received it as a tip. Lilli tells the cops that the big-tipper talked about having a good day at the horse races, so Farnham and Bruner take Lilli to the track to see if she can spot the guy. Bruner falls for Lilli, but starts to realize that his cop's salary is not going to cut it with the ambitious singer.

After days of staking out the track, Lilli finally spots the guy, and Farnham and Bruner give chase. The robbery suspect wrecks his car and dies. As the detectives check on the driver, they see bills flying in the wind, and discover a suitcase full of cash that was ejected from the car. Bruner starts stuffing his coat pockets with the money, while Farnham looks on, speechless. Bruner convinces Farnham against his better judgment that the higher-ups will just assume the robbers spent the money earlier. Bruner arranges to stash the marked money in a trailer he has access to at a remote trailer park (lot 36), to sell on the black market later. While Bruner dreams of running down to Mexico with Lilli, guilt starts to consume his partner. Soon, Chief of Detectives Captain Michaels (Dean Jagger) starts to suspect something's up. To top it off, a blackmailer (a partner in the heist?) with knowledge of the missing dough threatens Bruner. The two tough cops are in deep trouble.

Key player #1: Ida Lupino co-wrote the screenplay in addition to acting in the film. By this time in her career, she had started moving over to the production side as the glamorous roles waned. Between 1949 and 1953 she directed several hard-hitting dramas and film noirs, including Outrage (1950), Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), and The Bigamist (1953). She then directed a wide variety of TV programs into the late 1960s.

Key player #2: Steve Cochran is one of the original bad boys of crime drama and film noir, specializing in slick gangster and tough guy roles (and in this case, a corrupt cop). Cochran appeared in some of the better noirs of the '40s and '50s, including The Chase (1946; see my write-up here), White Heat (1949) with Jimmy Cagney, and The Damned Don't Cry (1950) with Joan Crawford. His off-camera life was almost as exciting and dangerous as his on-screen exploits, as he was constantly cropping up in the news for various assault and battery, reckless driving, and adultery charges. His death was equally bizarre-- he died of an acute lung infection while captaining a yacht with an all-female crew from Acapulco to Costa Rica in 1965. The women had been adrift for 3 days with his body before the boat was towed into a Guatemalan port. (For more on Cochran's incredible life and career, see Karen Burroughs Hannsberry's Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir, McFarland, 2008 [2003].)