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Tough as a leather purse-strap, hard as nail polish, Ida Lupino broke new ground in mid-century Hollywood. It was no place for a woman.
  In the 1930's, Ida Lupino earned her bread as the innocent girl in a string of mostly forgotten pictures. But the beautiful bottle-blonde was as world-wise as the characters she was destined to play, and soon tired of this rut. She knew what she wanted and she knew how to get it. Minus the bleach and the baby fat, she barged into William Wellman's office armed only with determination and a stolen script. Thus captivated by her audition for The Light That Failed, Wellman cast her as her first prostitute. This is the Ida Lupino we know and love.
  In the '40's, Lupino specialized in hard-luck noir dames in such movies as They Drive by Night, High Sierra, and Road House. A born malcontent, she grew frustrated working in the shadow of the likes of Bette Davis, being offered parts they turned down. Warners suspended her for rejecting these table-scrap roles, and in her free time she studied the workings on the other side of the camera. After her contract was up, she turned freelance, and soon formed a production company with her husband: Filmakers.
 Lupino produced, wrote, and acted, and when the director of Not Wanted took ill three days into shooting, she took up directing as well. Low-budget issue pictures, the savage forebears of today's TV movies, were Filmakers' specialty. They did pure social melodrama (Hard, Fast and Beautiful) and straight noir (Private Hell 36), but most of their output was a volatile mixture of the two, cemented by a woman's touch. In this program, we dive headfirst into these murky waters.
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