“I love being called Mother,” said Ida Lupino, the famed Hollywood director and star—and a bulldozer both onscreen and off when she had to be, despite her favored moniker. “I would never shout orders at anyone,” she famously said. “I hate women who order men around, professionally or personally. I wouldn’t dare do that with my old man…and I don’t do it with guys on the set. I say, ‘Darlings, Mother has a problem. I’d love to do this. Can you do it? It sounds kooky but I want to do it.’ And they do it.”

Hard, fast, beautiful: Lupino’s was a career that gave her a clear view of her limited options, and opportunity to act accordingly. Born in London, in 1918, Lupino had starred in more than 60 films by 1975. But the real highlight of that career may be the time she spent behind the camera, directing the six credited (and two uncredited) features that would make her work a cornerstone in the history of American movies—particularly independent ones.

The films she directed between 1949 and 1953, in particular, are essential to that history—and four of them have been newly released on Blu-ray and DVD, in new restorations, by Kino Lorber. The Ida Lupino: Filmmaker Collection set includes Not Wanted (1949), her first uncredited directing job, about an unwed mother in dire straits; Never Fear (1949), about a promising young dancer stricken with a career-ending bout of polio; The Bigamist (1953); and the extraordinary noir The Hitch-Hiker (1953), about a murderous psychopath who takes two guys for a ride. (The set does not include Outrage (1950), a brave, noirish dismantling of culture and society in the wake of a young woman’s sexual assault; Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951); or The Trouble With Angels (1966).)

These were films Lupino made with her production company, the Filmakers, cofounded with then husband Collier Young in the 1940s, before the operation closed up shop in 1955. They’re a sharp, surprising, handsomely drawn quartet of movies—and their release couldn’t come at a better time, as the public becomes more acquainted with a large and growing collection of storied but long-unavailable or unrestored films by women. Thanks to retrospectives and reissues, scores of films have become newly available and ready to be discovered, made by the likes of Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Kathleen Collins (Losing Ground), Barbara Loden (Wanda), Shirley Clarke (The Connection), Elaine May (Mikey and Nicky, A New Leaf), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman), Lizzie Borden (Born in Flames), and the silent-era directors featured in Kino’s Pioneers: First Women Directors, particularly Lois Weber and Alice Guy-Blaché.

These releases make it impossible to keep telling the same stories about Hollywood history, and counterbalance the relative dearth of women behind the camera in studio productions with the long history of women working independently, since the silent era, to make movies on their own terms. Lupino’s career is a high watermark in that story. Gorgeously lean and economical, yet vast in their cumulative power and chock-full of career-best turns by the actors therein, Lupino’s films are a testament to a directorial career that deserves far better regard than it’s received.

Lupino, who was born into a famed family of British performers, kick-started her Hollywood career in the 1930s. Almost as soon as she started she was already being hailed as “the English Jean Harlow,” with eventual roles alongside the likes of Humphrey Bogart in Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941). There were other memorable turns—a sultry, seen-it-all tavern entertainer who brings down the house with a barely-sung rendition of “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” in Jean Negulesco’s Road House (1948), or as the unyielding blind woman Mary, in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952), opposite Robert Ryan.