Young Lovers By Ida Lupino Epidemic

“Write about what you know”. This advice has been given to thousands who write for a living or those who just simply need to write. The same can be said for film. It is preferred and done best to film, produce, and direct what you know and social problem films succeed in just that. Social problem films are not new and they are certainly not new to female directors. The term in itself could be applied to almost any film old or innovative, however we are most concerned with female directed films that have a strong message to it that deal primarily with movies that talk openly and bluntly about real social problems. Today, the most relevant form of a social problem film however are films that carry a strong message or moral. Conversely, the gender

Young Lovers (Never Fear) by Ida Lupino features Carol, a young female dancer who becomes engaged to her dance counterpart and choreographer, and is about to have a major dancing career break when she suddenly contracts polio. She is taken to a treatment center and must deal with her physical ailment as well as inner demons that tell her to not to drag her fiancée down with her, even though her doctor tells her that she will in fact be able to walk again. The film continues on as the audience gets to watch Carol’s tough journey from terribly ill to the first moments that she walks again. It is a rather triumphant story that ends with Carol’s success in walking on her own once more. Young Lovers did a great justice to those suffering from polio at the time and most definitely gave the subject a better light in the minds of those who feared polio like, well, the plague. Another issue that the film touches on is the evil inner voice that many women hear in their minds everyday and the unrealistic and harsh pressures that society and we put on ourselves then and to this day. Lupino’s film style certainly represents the victim in more ways than one. Martin Scorsese said it best when he said, “What is at stake in Lupino’s films is the psyche of the victim. They addressed the wounded soul and traced the slow,

It is important for a director to film what they know. It adds great detail and credibility to the film. In addition to that it makes expressing and adding to that narrative much easier. The women that direct these films don’t necessarily had to have been completely involved in the social problems that they direct on, as long it is something they are passionate about or at one point or another it affected them or the people around them, for them to be able to create a compelling narrative. In addition to that theory, and quite possibly, the women that directed these films felt the overwhelming need to be different than their male director counterparts. It is well known that men crowd most of the film making group and they appear to largely be concerned with films that entertain versus using their power for good or to bring attention to the worlds most recent problems. According to Johnston in “Women’s Cinema As Counter-Cinema” she stated, “At this point in time, a strategy should be developed which embraces both the notion of films as a political tool and film as entertainment. For too long these have been regarded as two opposing poles with little common ground… Ideas derived from the entertainment film, then, should inform the political film, and the political ideas should inform the entertainment cinema: a two way process.” Due to this, feasibly