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| Joseph
H. Lewis |
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Top 250 Directors
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| Director |
| 1907 - 2000 |
| Born April 6, New
York, New York, USA |
| Key
Production Country: USA |
| Key Genres:
Film Noir, Western, Thriller |
| Key
Collaborators: Nedrick Young (Leading Character
Player), Ray Rennahan (Cinematographer), Cedric Gibbons (Production Designer), Randolph
Scott (Leading Player), Nina Foch (Leading Player), George Macready (Leading Player), Harry Joe Brown (Producer), Robert Burton
(Leading Character Player), Russ Tamblyn (Leading Character Player), Gene Havlick (Editor) |
| Highly
Recommended: My
Name is Julia Ross (1945), Gun Crazy (1949), The Big Combo (1955) |
| Recommended: Cry
of the Hunted (1953), A Lawless Street (1955), Seventh Cavalry (1956) |
| Links: [
IMDB ] [
TCMDB ] [
All-Movie
Guide ] [
Senses of Cinema: Great Directors ] [
Film
Reference ] [ Senses
of Cinema Article ] [
Time Obituary (2000) ] [
Wikipedia ] [
Senses
of Cinema Article #2 ] [
Video Watchdog Article (2007) ] [
Classic Film and Television
Home Page ] |
| Books: [
Joseph
H. Lewis ] [
Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor,
Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang,
Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet ] |
| DVD's:
[ Amazon
] |
| 1,000
Greatest Films: Gun
Crazy (1949) |
|
250 Quintessential Noir Films:
My Name is Julia Ross (1945), So Dark the Night (1946), Gun Crazy
(1949), The Undercover Man (1949), A Lady Without Passport (1950), The
Big Combo (1955) |
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"He
brought an imaginative eye even to his earliest, lowly
programme-fillers, making inventive use of props or shooting
from odd angles, but as he progressed to more fruitful subjects
- the Hitchcockian My Name is Julia Ross, the
psychological whodunnit So Dark the Night, the gangster
thriller The Big Combo - he became still more audacious:
the last, a stunningly shot film noir." -
Geoff
Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999) |
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"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...Joseph Lewis never had the chance to
discover whether he was an "artist," but - like
Edgar Ulmer and
Budd Boetticher - he has made
better films than Fred Zinnemann,
John Frankenheimer, or
John Schlesinger." -
David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002) |
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"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, and may even
stand as the base for today's technologically driven and
production design oriented action-adventure films." -
Greg S. Faller (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998) |
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"Never really made it above the B-level narrative, but he did
some excellent work on that modest turf. Many of his quality
productions revolve around plots or characters with complex or
obscured strategies, which enhance their strange power." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978) |
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