Sunday, March 10, 2013

Joseph Lewis






MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2007


Joseph Lewis

I watched Gun Crazy last night and was struck as always by the folk tale power of the story and the bravado with which it was directed. Mystery writer Mike Nevins has written a long and to me definitive piece-interview on Lewis' career and through it I came to understand Lewis' notion that to have suspense you first need to have characters who are slightly askew. You never quite understand their motives so you never quite know what to expect from them.

Most evaluations of Lewis' career speculate what he would have done with A picture budgets. He ended up doing a lot of TV work. He made a good deal of money but presumably wasn't as satisfied with his Bonanza stories as he was with his more personal work. He started in westerns and finished in westerns.

As for what he would have done with A-picture money...who knows. But there's at least a chance that he was most comfortable working with the money he was given. Hard to imagine that pictures as gritty as Gun Crazy and The Big Combo could have been shot the way he wanted them to be in an A-picture environment. These are films that took no prisoners and Hwood, especially in those days, wasn't real keen on grim movies.

I found this evaluation of Lewis by David Thomson, my favorite film critic:

"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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4 comments:

  1. David Cranmer7:51 PM

    Gorman & Thomson have me convinced to watch it.

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  2. Max Allan Collins10:27 AM

    Very nice piece, Ed.

    Lewis is my favorite of the B directors, above even Boetticher, Siegel, Ulmer and the rest. He did graduate briefly to A pictures, after the success of MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS and his contribution to THE JOLSON STORY...but none of those pictures are among his most interesting.

    I just watched the second set of Falcon movies with Tom Conway from Warner Archives -- I have a soft spot for these films, which by any logical yardstick aren't worth a damn. Toward the end of the run, Lewis did THE FALCON IN SAN FRANCISCO, and it's so startling different than the other entries in look and tone that you immediately know you're in the presence of a master filmmaker.

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  3. Ed Gorman1:24 PM

    I've been hooked on the Falcon pictures for twenty years. They are great fun and you're right the San Francisco picture is by far the best.

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  4. Jed Power7:02 PM

    No argument with "Gun Crazy." It's a great film. Just saw one of my favorite movies again, "'They Live By Night," with Farley Granger & Cathy O'Donnell. Nicholas Ray's 1st directing job from Edward Anderson's, "Thieves Like Us."
    Not on the same level, but lots of fun--just zipped through the 15 movie set "Boston Blackie," with Chester Morris. Quality only fair to good+ but like I said, a lot of fun.

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