Background
Joseph Lewis was born on 6 April 1907 in New York, New York, United States.
Joseph Lewis was born on 6 April 1907 in New York, New York, United States.
There is no point in overpraising Lewis. The limitations of the B picture lean on all his films. But the plunder he came away with is astonishing and—here is the rub—more durable than the output of many better-known directors. Jnlia Ross with Dame May Whitty blithely tolerating her maniac son, George Macready, is not much less disturbing than Strangers on a Train. Gun Crazy is as odd as pairing John Dali and Peggy Cummings, and The Big Combo is as beautiful or noir as John Alton ever shot. Joseph Lewis never had the chance to discover whether he w'as an “artist,” but—like Edgar Ulmer and Buck! Boetticher—he has made better films than Fred Zinnemann, John Frankenheimer, or John Schlesinger.
Joseph Lewis is one of the pleasures of watching abbreviated movies on late-night television, interrupted by commercials so that scrappy plots sometimes begin to separate like reproducing amoebae, flis films are mostly disreputable second features, bought for television in job lots. In no proper sense did Lewis ever make it. But My Name Is /alia Ross, Undercover Man, Gnu Crazy, The Big Combo, A Lawless Street, The Halliday Brand, and Terror in a Texas Town are better than you will expect, adept at catching character in action, skillfully conveying underlying mood and violence while dispensing cliché plot lines.