The Hitch-Hiker (1953) on Netflix

Approved19531h 11mCrime Drama Film-Noir

Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen are driving into Mexico for a fishing trip when they give a lift to Emmett Myers. He draws a gun and takes the two friends hostage.

Netflix4.1/5
IMDb6.9/1012,077 votes
Rotten Tomatoes94%

Trailer

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Plot summary

In California, Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen set out one evening on a fishing trip to San Felipe, in Baja California, and cross the border at Calexico-Mexicali. Overnight they give a lift to a hitchhiker, Emmett Myers, who draws a gun on them and forces them to keep driving. Myers has already killed three motorists who picked him up. He makes the two friends drive him through the desert toward Santa Rosalía, where he means to board a ferry to Guaymas, across the Gulf of California. To avoid checkpoints, he orders them to travel only at night. Myers taunts the pair and at one point makes Bowen shoot a tin can out of Collins's hand with a rifle. Because one of Myers's eyes never closes, even in sleep, the hostages cannot tell when to run.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker was the first mainstream-released American film of its type to be directed by a woman.
The film is based on the 1950 killing spree of Billy Cook, who posed as a hitchhiker, murdered a family of five, kidnapped and abandoned a Riverside County Sheriff's Department deputy, and killed a traveling salesman.
Billy Cook was identified and arrested by local police in Mexico without incident; because Mexico then lacked a formal extradition treaty with the United States, authorities there "extradited" him by physically pushing him over the border, and he was executed in San Quentin's gas chamber on December 12, 1952.
Ida Lupino interviewed the two prospectors Billy Cook had taken hostage and got releases from them and from Cook himself so she could work parts of his life into the script, but reduced the number of deaths to three to appease censors at the Hays Office.
The film's source story was written by Daniel Mainwaring and adapted by Robert L. Joseph, but Mainwaring received no screen credit because of his Hollywood blacklisting.