Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director's Chair. By Alexandra Seros, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2024. 240 pp. $45.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978‐1‐47‐733065‐4

Screenwriter Alexandra Seros faced a big challenge when she defended her dissertation prospectus at UCLA on Ida Lupino as a forgotten auteur, which became the foundation for this book. On the very same day, Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman published Ida Lupino, Director: Art and Resilience in Times of Transition. Thus, Seros changed her focus from writing a standard critical analysis to thinking about “the silencing of Lupino's talent and skills” (xi). This meant a shift in methodology. Seros turned to Italian historian Carlo Ginsburg, whose work in microhistory looked at what was missing in the historical record. Seros claims that “[h]is brand of historiography is the standard for recovering and identifying creative links between artists and their archival fragments” (xii). This approach made all the difference. Very little has been written about Lupino compared to other directors of her stature, so Seros became a detective, connecting bits and pieces of written history, ephemera, and photographs to reveal a more complete and authentic story. She was driven by three questions not usually at the heart of serious studies of film directors: “What does it mean to be female? What does it mean to be a mother? And what does it mean to be creative?” (xiii). In Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur, Seros explores how Lupino balanced her domestic life with her career as an actor, writer, and director and challenges the notion that she “was—or should remain—a marginalized, illegible figure” (xiii). She places Lupino in a class with Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Sam Fuller, and Alfred Hitchcock and argues that she served as a model for collaborative auteurism. Seros is intrigued by “the intersection of the transitional moment of the 1950s and Lupino's provocative and sometimes transgressive character” (xiv). She considers Lupino in the context of the class and gender issues of her time that have contributed to the lack of critical attention to her work. Following a substantive introduction in which she provides an overview of Lupino's life, career, and personal branding, Seros divides her book into three parts, each preceded by a section called Snapshots, in which she presents photos and short narratives showcasing Lupino's personal and professional history. In the first section, she examines Lupino as a developing auteur, showing how she got her start as a sought-after actor, often playing the “tough femme fatale with heart and intelligence” (21). These roles sometimes attracted the ire of feminist critics. A few years later, Lupino's own acting experience would enable her to bring out the best performances in those she directed. The second section looks at Lupino as a director of feature films in the 1940s and 1950s, providing case studies of three of her independent films: Not Wanted (1949), Never Fear (1949), and The Hitch-hiker (1953). These films demonstrate Lupino's ability to engage with difficult subjects—an unwed mother, a polio victim, a serial killer—and treat them with empathy and psychological depth. The final section addresses Lupino's large body of work as a director of television during that medium's classic era. Lupino made the transition to television because she found the work more compatible with family life and childrearing, and developed a reputation for efficiency, finishing projects on time and within budget. She ended up directing episodes of some of the most popular shows of the time in a variety of genres, including Have Gun—Will Travel, Hong Kong, The Untouchables, Gilligan's Island, and The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. Lupino was also the only woman to direct an episode of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, which ranked as the fifth most popular episode of the long-running series. In her conclusion, Seros shares recollections of actors who worked with Lupino, including Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell, and pays tribute to the director, who demonstrated a clear, taut, provocative style, impeccable comic timing, and a willingness to take on controversial topics, telling women's stories from their point of view at a time when men held control. She dubs Lupino, who enjoyed “being called Mother” by the legions of professionals who worked on her film and television sets, as “the face of a new, collaborative auteurism” (178). By making the transition from movie star to film director to television director, Ida Lupino accomplished what few Hollywood luminaries could, making a trajectory like that of Orson Welles. Still, although most film scholars recognize Lupino as one of a handful of female directors in classic Hollywood, few know much about her. Seros, who is working with UCLA to preserve movies and television shows that Lupino wrote and directed, has taken great strides to fill that void. In Ida Lupino Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director's Chair, she shows how Lupino, often criticized by feminists, navigated between her successful professional career and motherhood at a pivotal, transitional time in American history. It is a captivating story, well worth telling.