Is Hollywood finally waking up to the talents of women? Nah

There is, we all know, only one anniversary that matters this year: 20 March 2014, 50 years since The Twilight Zone episode ‘The Masks’ was first beamed into America’s cathode-ray tubes. Bunting will be stretched from television screen to television screen in celebration. Champagne will be spilt over remote controls. After all, ‘The Masks’ isn’t just a particularly fine episode of a particularly fine show. It is also the only episode — of 156, if we don’t count the two revival series made in later decades — to be directed by a woman. Ida Lupino. Lupino, who died almost 20 years ago, was a Hollywood pioneer — and not just because of The Twilight Zone. After moving to America in the 1930s, from her birthplace of London, she deployed her acting ability and smoky beauty in numerous films, including a great pair with Bogart, They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941). But it was what came next that really marked her out. In 1948, she and her second husband established a production company. Then, starting with Not Wanted (1949), and running through to 1953’s The Hitch-Hiker and The Bigamist, she began to make her own movies from the blank page up. Other women, though not many, had directed before. But Lupino was something that Hollywood had barely even countenanced: a woman who acted, wrote, produced and directed. ‘I didn’t see myself as any advance guard, or feminist,’ said Lupino later. This may seem an odd claim from someone who wasn’t just making films in a man’s industry, but was also making films, such as Outrage (1950), that offered a feminine perspective on the subject of rape — but there is a sad truth to it. An advance guard is, technically, a detachment of troops that treads where the main force will soon follow.