Shooting star: Glasgow Film Festival co-director Allan Hunter pays tribute to director Ida Lupino, who blazed a trail for women in Hollywood

There is also a desire to pay tribute to the pioneer women who blazed a trail for those who followed. The Glasgow Film Festival has chosen to salute Ida Lupino, a key figure in Hollywood history who still seems desperately undervalued. Lupino was a notable performer, a champion of independent filmmakers, a creative force who strove to reflect the realities of women’s lives and a woman who smashed through countless barriers, creating a role model for subsequent generations. In the 1950s, she was the only woman director working in Hollywood. Every American actor who has made the move behind the camera from Streisand to Clint Eastwood, Jodie Foster to Angelina Jolie owes her a debt of gratitude.

Lupino was born in London on February 4, 1918 and her centenary year provides a perfect chance to celebrate her talent. The Glasgow Film Festival tribute includes two of her most successful screen roles in High Sierra (1941) with Humphrey Bogart and Moontide (1942) with Jean Gabin, alongside three of the films that she directed: Outrage (1950), The Bigamist (1953) and The Hitchhiker (1953).

Ida Lupino once joked that as an actor she was the “poor man’s Bette Davis”. At Warner Brothers in the 1940s, she was groomed as the first line of defence behind the queen of the studio; a handy reminder to Davis that nobody was indispensable. Lupino went toe-to-toe with Humphrey Bogart, Edward G Robinson and John Garfield and could be just as hard to handle as Davis. She refused inferior scripts, risked suspension, fought for better parts and had previously walked out on a long-term contract. Like the tough, world-weary characters she frequently portrayed, Lupino was nobody’s pushover. She had ambitions of her own and wanted to write, produce and direct. In 1960, she told a journalist: “I have been acting all my life. Let me direct. It's so much more fun. Creating it yourself, not just parading in front of a camera.”

Her family was steeped in show business; her mother Connie Emerald was an actress, her father Stanley Lupino was a West End star and her uncle Lupino Lane was one of the great music hall stars of his day. Lupino made her film debut when she was just 15 and soon left for a Hollywood that didn’t seem to know what to do with her. Cast as vamps and glamour girls, she was too young and too inexperienced for many of her early roles. The struggle to find herself took many years and several reinventions.

“I thought it would be most impressive if I copied the top stars. One week I would try to look like Dietrich by pencilling my eyebrows way up on my forehead and the next I would copy Colbert and cut bangs. Oh, I was all over the place doing things with makeup and changing the colour of my hair," she once recalled. "I finally took Hedda Hopper's advice – stopped doing ridiculous things with myself and concentrated on developing my talent."

The quest for better roles in bigger films led Lupino to walk out on a Paramount contract that was reputedly paying her $1,700 a week in 1937.

“I didn’t regret having given up my contract when I finally discovered I wasn’t going to get anywhere," she revealed. “What I did regret was not having taken advantage of my opportunities when I had them. I had been typed as a glamour girl – and because I didn’t like it, I didn’t pay much attention to acting.”

She subsequently lobbied director William Wellman for the showy part of vindictive Cockney prostitute Bessie in The Light That Failed (1939) and came into her own as a fine dramatic actor during the 1940s. She co-starred with Humphrey Bogart in gangster classic High Sierra (1941), played a murderous housekeeper in Ladies In Retirement (1941) and won the New York Critics Best Actress prize as the “Lady Macbeth of the slums” in show business saga The Hard Way (1943).

Lupino’s best roles were as tough, hardboiled women fighting against the limitations and injustices of having to survive in a man’s world. In life, she was constantly seeking fresh creative challenges. In a 1942 interview her one wish was for “a long vacation to study and write”. At the height of her Hollywood career she set about learning the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. She would ask to spend time in the editing suite watching how little moments of drama were woven together into a feature film. She befriended camera operators to learn about lens, angles and lighting. She also knew directors who would let her visit their sets and observe how they worked.

Lupino’s move into making films came at a moment when seismic changes within Hollywood were creating unprecedented opportunities for independent production companies. The old studio system was beginning to fade as television started to challenge cinema-going as America’s favourite entertainment option. The post-war era also saw a growing appetite for gritty, more naturalistic dramas that reflected real lives and everyday situations rather than the make-believe escapism that had sustained audiences through the war years.

The global influence of Italian neo-realist works like Rome, Open City (1945) and Bicycle Thieves (1949) was felt in Hollywood. Ingrid Bergman wrote to director Roberto Rossellini saying how much she would like to work with him. The time was ripe for the kind of films that Lupino wanted to make. She created films with complex female characters. She sought to challenge gender stereotypes, explore taboos and boldly go where precious few Hollywood films had feared to tread. Film historian David Thomson once wrote: “She was a woman director of real personality; her pictures are as tough and quick as those of Sam Fuller. She was a pioneer for women because she carved out her own territory instead of just waiting to be asked.”

In 1949, Lupino, her then husband Collier Young and writer Malvin Wald announced the formation of their company, The Filmmakers. In February of 1950, they published a Declaration Of Independents expressing their deep admiration for fellow independent producers like Stanley Kramer and Robert Rossen and urging independent producers to “explore new themes, try new ideas, discover new creative talents in all departments”.

The Filmmakers would produce 12 feature films. Lupino directed or co-directed six of them. She wrote or co-wrote five of them, acted in three of them and co-produced one of them.

Their first film Not Wanted (1950) dealt with an unwanted pregnancy. When original director Elmer Clifton suffered a heart attack, Lupino stepped in to direct the film. She completed shooting in two weeks on a budget of $150,000. The film grossed $1million at the box-office. Star Sally Forrest later recalled: “She was so knowledgeable in every area. She was wonderful with actors. She was the best I ever worked with. She was completely understanding and knew exactly what she wanted and how to explain it.”

In Outrage (1950), Lupino addressed the taboo subject of rape, tracing the life of a young woman in the aftermath of an assault that prompts her to run away from home. Tackling the shame felt by the victim and the fear of society’s response to her plight, the film was way ahead of its time.

Lupino’s early work featured the struggles of women at odds with a society seeking to restrict and define their independence. She also strove to prove her versatility. Her best known film as a director is The Hitchhiker (1953), a tense B-movie thriller in which two men are held captive by a merciless serial killer trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities. There isn’t a wasted moment in a trim running time as the duo’s ordeal unfolds in the broiling desert heat with a sense of impending doom shadowing every twist and turn.

Lupino continued to act throughout those years, notably as a blind girl in the critically acclaimed thriller On Dangerous Ground (1951). She acted in and directed The Bigamist (1953), once again bringing a sympathetic eye to another social taboo.

Lupino was only the second woman to join the Director’s Guild Of America. Dorothy Arzner had been the first. She was very much a team player, believing that any member of an ensemble cast or a production unit had something to contribute to the making of a film. On the set, Lupino preferred to be called “mother” and rarely ordered anyone around. “I’d say, ‘Darlings, mother has problem. I’d love to do this. Can you do it? It sounds kooky, but I want to do it. Now can you do it for me?' And they do it – they just do it.” Her director’s chair read: “Mother of all of us.”

In the second half of the 1950s, Lupino became one of the most prolific and trusted directors of American television, making episodes of all the most popular shows of the period from The Virginian to The Fugitive, Bewitched to Gilligan’s Island and The Twilight Zone to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She returned to directing for the cinema with the lightweight Hayley Mills comedy The Trouble With Angels (1966). She never stopped that restless search for new challenges; unsuccessfully trying to raise funds to film Frances Farmer’s memoir Will There Be A Morning in the 1970s.

Lupino continued to act, notably opposite Steve McQueen in Junior Bonner (1972) and less happily in the cheesy horror film The Devil’s Rain (1975), which marked the film debut of the young John Travolta.

Lupino died in 1995, aged 77. She was fondly remembered by co-stars and co-workers and constantly showed her support for other women. She tried to help Claudette Colbert make her directorial debut and once remarked: “Today it's almost impossible to do it unless you are an actress or writer with power ... I wouldn't hesitate right this minute to hire a talented woman if the subject matter were right."

Lupino is very much a lone wolf figure in this period of Hollywood history. She succeeded through sheer determination, ambition and hard work. No male studio executive was ever going to graciously hire her as a director so she formed her own company, developed her own projects and hired herself. She made her own opportunities and it was a long while before anyone sought to emulate her achievements. Lucille Ball became a powerful figure in American television as the co-founder of Desilu Productions, a hugely successful company in the 1960s responsible for landmark series like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. She too is very much a lone figure and it was only the surge in American independent filmmaking from the late 1960s onwards that finally saw the number of women film directors reach double figures and beyond, with work from Barbara Loden, Elaine May, Barbara Kopple and Joan Micklin Silver among others.

Lupino was the one female link between old and new Hollywood. Her legacy is so significant that you are left wondering why she has been undervalued for so long. It may have something to do with the fact that Lupino shunned the limelight. Search the archives and you will struggle to find any chat show appearances. She never seemed interested in public tributes or lifetime achievement ceremonies. There were no American Film Institute or Kennedy Centre honours for her, no glowing words at global film festivals or an honorary Oscar in the autumn of her years. She seems to have preferred to let the work speak for itself and the work was everything. Professionalism was paramount. She once declared: “I was just a director who did my best.”

Ida Lupino: On Dangerous Ground runs at the Glasgow Film Festival from February 26 to March 2 and comprises screenings of High Sierra, Moontide, Outrage, The Hitchhiker and The Bigamist. Further information can be found at www.glasgowfilm.org/festival. Box-Office 0141 332 6535.