Joseph H. Lewis

Joseph H. Lewis (April 6, 1907 – August 30, 2000) was an American B-movie film director whose stylish flourishes came to be appreciated by auteur theory-espousing film critics in the years following his retirement in 1966. In a 30-year directorial career, he helmed numerous low-budget westerns, action pictures and thrillers and is remembered for original mysteries My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) and So Dark the Night (1946) as well as his most-highly regarded feature, 1949's Gun Crazy, which spotlighted a desperate young couple (Peggy Cummins and John Dall) who embark on a deadly crime spree.

Life and career

Born in Brooklyn, the son of an optometrist, Joseph H. Lewis attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and when his brother, Ben, moved to Hollywood in 1927, decided to follow with hopes of becoming an actor. Ben found him a job as camera assistant and, subsequently, young Joseph became an assistant film editor just as the film industry was converting to sound. At the dawn of his directorial career (1937–40), while turning out low-budget B-Westerns, he earned the derogatory nickname "Wagon-Wheel Joe" from the studio editors, because of his tendency to use wagon-wheels for constructing interesting visual compositions within the frame.

Although known for having directed horror stars Bela Lugosi (The Invisible Ghost) and Lionel Atwill in early 1940s, he is most appreciated for work in film noir during the 1940s and early 1950s. Gun Crazy, considered the peak of his career, is a dark romance about gun-obsession, notable for its use of location photography and, for film students and buffs, a particularly arresting shot which lasts for ten minutes, as the audience suddenly becomes a passenger in the getaway car following a bank robbery committed by the young leads. His work includes the 1944 musical Minstrel Man, and the musical sequences for The Jolson Story.

Toward the end of Lewis's career, he worked in television, directing mostly westerns: The Rifleman, Bonanza, The Big Valley, Gunsmoke, and the pilot for Branded

Lewis suffered a major heart attack at the age of 46, but continued working until his 59th birthday in April 1966, at the end of the 1965–66 TV season. He later lectured at film schools and fan gatherings as well as at retrospectives such as the Telluride Film Festival, along with European venues in France, Germany and other locations. In 1997 he became the recipient of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

Nearly five months after his 93rd birthday, Lewis died at his home in Los Angeles County's seaside community of Marina del Rey. Active until the end, he made his final public appearance five weeks earlier to introduce a screening of Gun Crazy at the University of California at Los Angeles.^[1]

Films as director include

• Courage of the West (1937)
• The Singing Outlaw (1938)
• Boys of the City (1940)
• That Gang of Mine (1940)
• Pride of the Bowery (1940)
• Invisible Ghost (1941)
• The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942)
• Bombs Over Burma (1943)
• Minstrel Man (1944)
• My Name Is Julia Ross (1945)
• The Falcon in San Francisco (1945)
• So Dark the Night (1946)
• The Jolson Story (1946, musical sequences only)
• The Swordsman (1948)
• The Return of October (1948)
• The Undercover Man (1949)
• Gun Crazy (1949)
• A Lady Without Passport (1950)
• Retreat, Hell! (1952)
• Desperate Search (1952)
• Cry of the Hunted (1953)
• The Big Combo (1955)
• A Lawless Street (1955)
• 7th Cavalry (1956)
• The Halliday Brand (1957)
• Terror in a Texas Town (1958)

References

External links

• Joseph H. Lewis at the Internet Movie Database
• Joseph H. Lewis at AllMovie

Further reading

• Maltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia. A Plume Book, 1995. p. 527–8.
• Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia (fourth edition). New York:HarperResource, 2001, p. 826.
• Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (fourth edition). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, October 2002, pp. 521–2.