Guy Lochhead, 02/12/12
English-born American actress and filmmaker. As one of the first female filmmakers in Hollywood, she was very aware of being a woman in a very male-dominated working environment. She used this to her advantage, manipulating and subverting expectations of women in Hollywood without ever getting on the wrong side of the System. She has been described as a feminist filmmaker for her films’ focusing on “issues” and her way of writing male characters. Although more excited about directing (she found acting boring), she took on roles until very late in her career to get money for the features she wanted to make. She died in 1995. I greatly admire Lupino, but I find that her acute awareness of how to play the Studio System of the time, and the contemporaneous nature of the subject matter of her films, has actually prevented her films from being as “timeless” as perhaps they could have been. They’re also very “adult”, and perhaps not particularly suitable here.