The Hitch-Hiker
1953 · 71 min
The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Ida Lupino's desert noir, the first American film noir directed by a woman. Watch the full movie free, with no account required.
Two friends drive south for a fishing trip, pick a man up off the roadside, and spend the rest of the film at gunpoint in their own car. His right eye does not close, so they can never tell when he is asleep. Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy are the hostages, and William Talman, later the district attorney who lost every week on Perry Mason, is the one holding the gun.
Ida Lupino directed it and wrote it with Collier Young, and it is generally called the first American film noir directed by a woman. She did the reporting herself. It comes from Billy Cook's 1950 killing spree, and she went and interviewed the two men Cook actually took hostage.
The National Film Registry took it in 1998.
This film has an audio description track, written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. There is nothing to switch on — the description is in the film’s own sound, so pressing play is the whole of it.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
Is The Hitch-Hiker public domain? The rights evidence — the copyright registration, the renewal search and the sources we checked, written out in full so you can check them too.
Watch it here
This is our restoration, with the audio description track mixed in. There is nothing to switch on: press play and the description is in the sound. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is counted.
The same film without description, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Every film here that carries audio description — what description is, who it is for, and how ours are made.
How this print was restored
This copy of The Hitch-Hiker was restored here, from a print that had been through a good deal before it reached us. The work finished on 2026-09-23. Every step is listed below, because a re-encode passed off as a restoration is worth nothing and the only way to tell them apart is to say what was done.
- 361 described cues across a 70 minute 53 second runtime, filling 25 minutes 47 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 36.4 percent of the film -- at 163 words per minute.
- Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.
- The original soundtrack was repaired from the Archive copy: rumble filtered below 60 Hz, a tone at 750 Hz and its harmonics notched out, the top end rolled off above 4 kHz, loudness matched in two passes. No picture restoration on this pass.
- Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.
The print we started from is here, so the before and after can be compared.