Hard

When Ida Lupino was working as an actress under contract to Warner Bros. in the 1940s, she joked that she was “the poor man’s Bette Davis,” partly because she tended to be offered parts that Davis had rejected.

Lupino might have been unhappy with the caliber of many of her roles — she was suspended by studio head Jack Warner after refusing assignments in “King’s Row” and “Juke Girl” — but her sojourn at Warner Bros. yielded a memorable body of work that has aged far better than those of many of Lupino’s contemporaries.

That’s largely thanks to Lupino’s collaborations with two great — and still somewhat underrated — Warner contract directors, Raoul Walsh and Vincent Sherman. Walsh and Sherman both recognized Lupino’s superior intellect and resistance to unearned sentimentality. They figured out how to showcase her edgy sensibility in a series of powerful, uncompromising films: “They Live By Night,” “High Sierra,” and “The Man I Love” for Walsh; “The Hard Way” and “In Our Time” for Sherman.

Taken together, these movies, along with later projects like Nicolas Ray’s “On Dangerous Ground” and Don Siegel’s “Private Hell 36,” make a case for Lupino as the quintessential noir heroine — not necessarily a femme fatale, but a performer whose combination of weary cynicism, razor-sharp intelligence, and deeply buried vulnerability perfectly expressed the contradictions and anxieties of America in a time of war and its aftermath. There was something so bleak and hopeless about Lupino’s onscreen presence that even movies one wouldn’t traditionally classify as film noir became noir simply by virtue of Lupino appearing in them.

“The Hard Way” is a case in point. Its story, in which Lupino plays a kind of stage mother (the actress she’s managing is actually her little sister) who manipulates everyone in her path to get her and her sibling out of their miserable life in a polluted coal mining town, is essentially an old-fashioned show business melodrama. Yet Lupino brings such intensity and anger to her performance that the film’s register shifts into something far darker — so dark, in fact, that a prologue and epilogue Jack Warner insisted be added to make the movie more glamorous focus on a suicide attempt!

Typically, Lupino didn’t want the part (another of Bette Davis’ cast-offs) when it was offered to her, and according to Sherman’s memoir “Studio Affairs,” she never got over her lack of faith in the movie. (“This picture is going to stink, and I’m going to stink in it,” she told the director.) To make matters worse for Sherman, author Irwin Shaw, who wrote the underlying source material, opposed Sherman directing the picture — he wanted William Wyler or Howard Hawks.

Sherman soldiered on — even as Jack Warner told him no one wanted to see a movie about “dirty people in the coal mines” — and directed Lupino to the performance of her career. As Helen Chernen, an unhappily married woman stuck in a miserable town with a husband she hates and a little sister with seemingly unattainable dreams, Lupino oozes resentment, frustration, and smug superiority. Yet without ever downplaying her character’s many off-putting qualities or forcing any kind of sentiment, she subtly conveys the disillusionment and disenfranchisement that led her to go dark — it’s an extraordinarily complex portrayal.

Lupino is aided considerably by Sherman’s expressive visual style, in which Helen’s surroundings seem to be physical manifestations of her neuroses; the early scenes set in the coal mining town are particularly effective and oppressive, with Sherman and cinematographer James Wong Howe smothering the characters in a smoggy haze. Once Helen gets her little sister Katie (Joan Leslie) to Broadway, the visuals become more glamorous and the editing snappier — courtesy of some dazzling montages cut by Lupino’s future “Private Hell 36” director Don Siegel — but the darkness in Lupino and the other characters not only remains, it gets even more scabrous.

The tension between show business glitz and a persistent undercurrent of backstabbing betrayal (nearly everyone in the movie seems to have malicious intentions at one point or another, and even the most “positive” characters work against the interests of people they love out of insecurity) is just one of the many productive oppositions at work throughout the movie, and an example of why Sherman was such a deft Hollywood craftsman.

Throughout “The Hard Way,” Sherman finds ways to serve the demands of his corporate overlords without softening his material; the aforementioned prologue and epilogue are a perfect example. When Warner said it took too long for Lupino to enter her glamorous phase in the narrative, Sherman added a framing device in which a suicidal Lupino narrated the tale from a hospital bed. In a literal sense, the scenes give Warner what he asked for: Lupino in makeup, looking more like a movie star than in her dingy coal mining town scenes. Yet by adding the suicide component, Sherman makes the movie even more grim and cynical than it already was, turning a studio edict into an artistic benefit.

“The Hard Way” is newly available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive, and it’s yet another of that label’s exquisite presentations (they also put out a must-see edition of the Lupino-Walsh classic “The Man I Love”). Aside from providing a chance to see Sherman and Howe’s lustrous images in an immaculate transfer, the disc reminds us what a truly great actress Lupino was.

In recent years she has been exalted for her pioneering work as a director on searing noir classics like “Outrage” (1950) and “The Hitch-hiker” (1953), as she should be — her status as one of the few women directing personal, powerful features during Hollywood’s classical studio era has been correctly recognized by cinephile admirers like Allison Anders and Martin Scorsese as something worth celebrating.

However, Lupino’s elevated status as an auteur has diverted attention away from her equally impressive work in front of the camera — she’s not often thought of as being on the same level as more famous Warner contract actresses, such as Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, and Lauren Bacall. She should be, and “The Hard Way” proves it. Lupino was no “poor man’s Bette Davis.” She was a star whose talents were every bit as formidable as those of her better-known peer.

“The Hard Way” is now available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive.