1937: Navy Spy (co-director); Courage of the West; Singing Outlaw. 1938: The Spy Ring (International Spy); Border Wolves; Last Stand. 1939: Two Fisted Rangers (Forestalled). 1940: Blazing Six Shooters (Stolen Wealth); The Man from Tumbleweeds; Texas Stagecoach (Two Roads); The Return of Wild Bill (False Evidence); Boys of the City; That Gang of Mine; Pride of the Bowery (Here We Go Again). 1941: Invisible Ghost; Criminals Within; Arizona Cyclone; The Mad Doctor of Market Street. 1942: Bombs Over Burma (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter); The Silver Bullet; Boss of Hangtown Mesa. 1943: Secret of a Co-editor (Silent Witness). 1944: Minstrel Man. 1945: The Falcon in San Francisco; My Name Is Julia Ross. 1946: So Dark the Night. 1947: The Swordsman. 1948: The Return of October (Date with Destiny). 1949: Undercover Man; Gun Crazy (Deadly as the Female). 1950: A Lady without Passport. 1952: Retreat, Hell!; Desperate Search. 1953: Cry of the Hunted. 1954: The Big Combo. 1955: Man on a Bus; A Lawless Street. 1956: 7th Cavalry. 1957: The Halliday Brand. 1958: Terror in a Texas Town.
1934: In Old Santa Fe (Howard) (sup editor). 1935: Behind the Green Lights (Cabanne) (editor); The Miracle Rider (Eason and Shaefer) (editor); One Frightened Night (Cabanne) (editor); The Headline Woman (The Woman in the Case) (Nigh) (editor); Ladies Crave Excitement (Grind?) (editor); The Adventures of Rex and Rinty (Eason and Beebe); Harmony Lane (Santley) (sup editor); Streamline Express (Fields) (editor); Waterfront Lady (Santley) (sup editor); Confidential (Cahn) (sup editor); $1000 a Minute (Scotto) (sup editor). 1936: Hitch Hike Lady (Eventful Journey) (Scotto) (sup editor); The Leavenworth Case (Collins) (sup editor); Darkest Africa (Hidden City) (Eason and Kane) (sup editor); The House of a Thousand Candles (Lubin) (sup editor); Laughing Irish Eyes (Santley) (sup editor); The Harvester (Santley) (sup editor); Undersea Kingdom (Eason and Kane) (sup editor); The Devil on Horseback (Wilbur) (editor). 1946: The Jolson Story (Green) (director production numbers). 1953: The Naked Jungle (Haskin) (begun by Lewis).
Camera boy at MGM, 1926; editor and director of title sequences at Mascot studio (became Republic, 1935), 1930s; director, from 1937; director in charge of second units at Universal and Republic, 1940s; TV director, from late 1950s; subject of retrospective, Edinburgh Film Festival, 1980.
New York, 6 April 1907 (other sources say 1900).
De Witt Clinton High School.
Served in U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1943-44.
Joseph H. Lewis simultaneously supports and confounds the critical methodology of authorship. His forty-one features in twenty-one years provide enough examples of strong visual creativity, originality, and intelligence under the severe budgetary constraints of B film production to warrant bestowing the title ?auteur.? Yet, banal scripts, meager production values, and unaccomplished actors seem to deny him the opportunity to articulate a ?consistent world view,? reducing Lewis to a ?metteur en scene.? This dichotomy between a recognizable (if inconsistent) personal style and a lack of personally revealing (or expressive) thematic content forms the core of the Lewis debate.
Lewis labored for many studios, adapting to many genres, but began his best work while at Columbia after World War II. In 1945 and 1946, he directed My Name Is Julia Ross and So Dark the Night, films noir that precipitated his first important critical recognition. Until 1955, with a few exceptions, he continued surveying film noir, directing Undercover Man, A Lady without Passport, and the noir-influenced Desperate Search and Cry of the Hunted, culminating his fluency in the genre with two ?undisputed masterpieces,? Gun Crazy and The Big Combo. The critical favor awarded these films, and their eventual cult status, pushes Lewis into an intimate association with film noir, even though he directed many more westerns.
His films noir, like his other films, were co-features or B movies slotted for the second half of a double bill. They were typically based on weak scripts with witless dialogue, ran under 90 minutes (many under 75), and received little distribution marketing. They were shot in less than two or three weeks, with miniscule budgets, on inexpensive black and white film stock, without stars or accomplished actors, using a few minimal sets or locations, and without rehearsed crowd scenes. These limitations functioned as a catalyst for his ingenuity. Improvising practical solutions to production limitations, Lewis devised a complex and unique visual style?a combination of Bresson and Ophuls?upon which his reputation and signature rest. His films emphasize images, employing low key lighting, high contrast, location shooting, long takes, camera movement, great depth of focus with dominating foreground objects, choreographed violence and sexuality, montage, off-screen action, sound manipulation, and a reduction of dialogue to a minimum. Each aspect ultimately accommodates a dual purpose, economic and aesthetic.
The use of low-key lighting served three practical economic purposes associated with B movie making: it cost less than high key lighting; it allowed the construction of only partial sets; and it concealed meager production values. It also served a vital aesthetic purpose by providing a striking visual style differentiating film noir from other genres. High contrast images resulted from the use of cheap black and white film stocks, yet underscored the visual play of blinding light cutting through opaque darkness. Location shooting reduced the dependence on sets and sound stage work while evoking a gritty urban realism. The combination of exceptionally long takes, great depth of focus with dominating foreground objects, and camera movement reduced shooting schedules and post-production expenses. They also added a documentary ?time? and ?atmosphere? to the realism of the films. The depiction of violence and sexuality through montage, off-screen space, and sound manipulation intensified their effect on the spectator while requiring neither complete performance nor extensive set construction and circumventing the Production Code. The reduction of dialogue hid the limited acting skills of his performers and returned the emphasis of his films to the visual. Examples of the combined utilization of these techniques include: the celebrated 4-minute Hampton robbery one-take and the robbery sequence in Gun Crazy, the torture by hearing-aid, the ?kissing? shot, and the climax in The Big Combo; the report of the girl's death in So Dark the Night; and Rocco's assassination in Undercover Man. In other words, due to economic factors, Lewis's films noir represent the genre reduced to its visual essence.
Lewis's visual style stands without question. Whether or not this textual surface supports a consistent thematic content initiates a heated debate. Is he, as Richard Combs claims, ?a stylistic authority operating in a vacuum,? or as Richard Sattin explains, someone with visual intelligence and style who doesn't recognize the need for theme? Or is he, as Andrew Sarris states in Lewis's description under ?Expressive Esoterica,? a ?somber personality revealed through a complex visual style?? Traditional analyses see his films betraying efforts to construct thematic coherence because their pleasure exists only as complex textual surfaces. More recent approaches can note the pleasure of his films' complex textual surfaces precisely activating the thematic concerns of film noir as well as inaugurating a disturbing and fascinating exploration of Existentialism.
The primacy of textual surface derived from the economic limitations of B movie making denies Lewis the luxury of psychologizing characters, character motivation, and events. Consequently, behavior finds its truest and clearest (and only) expression in action. Action is readily observable and objectively presentable as ?pure? textuality. The accent on action as textual surface offers no judgement on or explanation of existence, only description. The world described is Existential, devoid of logic, justice, and order.
Lewis approached these Existential themes by eliding individual identity with social action. These themes find their sharpest focus in Lewis's masterpieces, Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, but appear in all his films noir and his late westerns (A Lawless Street, The Halliday Brand, and Terror in a Texas Town).
Lewis's film career ended in 1958, coinciding with the death of ?classical? film noir. His intensification and fusing of textuality and Existentialism within the genre pushed film noir to its logical extreme. His work, however, influenced a budding French movement, the Nouvelle Vague (a comparison between Gun Crazy and its focus on l'amour fou and Godard's A bout de souffle and Pierrot le fou would prove an interesting study), and may even stand as the base for today's technologically driven and production design oriented action-adventure films.?GREG S. FALLER