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‘Perhaps Ida Lupino’s best-known directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker is noteworthy not just as a masterclass in the art of suspense, but also as the first noir helmed by a female filmmaker. Submerging her audience into the ‘based-on-a-true-story’ nature of the events depicted within the picture’s taut 71 minutes before the title card even hits the screen, Lupino injects true-to-life terror into this fictionalized account of real-life serial killer Billy Cook, whose six-murder rampage spanned 22 days in 1950-51. Renamed Emmett Myers for the screen, William Talman (Perry Mason) plays the psychotic hitcher who interrupts two men (Frank Lovejoy, Edmond O’Brien) on their fishing vacation just south of the California-Mexico border, promising to murder them both when he reaches his destination.’ – UCLA Film & Television Archive