The highly regarded B-movie film director, Joseph H Lewis, who has died aged 100, was born in New York. The year? It was either 1900 or 1907, with the earlier date most favoured by reference books, the American Film Institute and British Film Institute. However, the later date has gained credibility, with the suggestion that Lewis added years to his age on entering the movie business in the hope of gaining a more senior post.
In fact, he joined MGM as a camera loader in the early 1920s, either as a teenager or aged 23. He stayed in the business until the late 1960s, latterly working in television. His career as a movie director lasted just 21 years from 1937, and, during that period, he also served in the US Army Signal Corps. He directed more than 40 films.
All except one of these were B-movies, often destined for the lower half of double bills. As his career progressed, Lewis moved to bigger budgets, but still directed genre flicks, considered at the time to be run-of-the-mill thrillers or westerns. His film career ended in 1958, as Hollywood, battling the inroads of television, turned increasingly to the wide screen and blockbusters, and the double bill became obsolete.
The style of film at which Lewis had excelled became the staple diet of television - action and genre pieces to fill the greedy air waves instead of local cinemas. For 10 years, he joined the enemy, working on the Lloyd Bridges Show, the Zane Grey Theatre and A Man Called Shenandoah. He directed the pilot of Branded in 1965, and episodes of such popular series as Gunsmoke, The Big Valley, Law Of The Plainsman and The Rifleman. His television work remains a coda to his busy, central years as a film director.
After his retirement, Lewis, like other B-directors, was lionised by the French, and later by American, British and other critics. Many of his quickly-made works were reassessed. In the US, Paul Schrader helped influence his new-found reputation - largely based on one classic - and there were retrospectives of his career mounted, not least at the National Film Theatre, where Lewis also took part in a Guardian lecture. He proved himself exactly the amiable, tough, no-nonsense professional that his works suggest.
Over the years, the works have resurfaced on television, on 16mm and in various retrospectives. Those on view confirm that there are indeed a handful of memorable films, plus a whole series of intelligent, entertaining works - mainly westerns. The rest remain in decent obscurity, although contemporary reviews invariably praise their originality, economy and ingenious camerawork. Lewis was no slouch.
But, as the critic and film historian David Thomson remarked, "There is no point in overpraising Lewis." He worked with limited resources, often with middling actors, on series product offering mundane scripts. He transcended the material - but his liveliness and technical skill only highlight the paucity of the material with which he worked.
Still, we do not need to overpraise him to realise that, on occasion, he created small, beautifully crafted cinema. And a handful of these films are complex works that stand up infinitely better than the grandiose, over-blown epics that were the result of his fellow directors' move into A-features. The often flabby films of the 1960s and 1970s were a riposte to the undernourished budgets of television. At the time, they seemed a valid alternative; today, less so.
After Lewis entered the studios, he stayed there for some 16 years in a variety of jobs. He worked as an assistant editor, second unit director and supervising editor on many films, including In Old Santa Fé (1934) and Ladies Crave Excitement (1935), as well as on popular 12- or 15-episode serials, such as Undersea Kingdom (1936). In that year, he also edited The Devil On Horseback, directed by Crane Wilbur, and, in 1937, co-directed Navy Spy, with Wilbur. After years of sturdy, invaluable experience, Lewis had graduated and, again in 1937, directed his début, Courage Of The West, quickly followed by Singing Outlaw.
He made three films in 1938, including Border Wolves, described as a "visual treat". Within the next three years, he had notched up another dozen B-movies, mainly westerns such as The Man From Tumbleweeds (1940), and three films from the East End Kids series - Boys Of The City, That Gang Of Mine and Pride Of The Bowery. This busy pattern continued with product from studios more interested in quota than quality. The titles tell most of the story - such as Bombs Over Burma and Criminals Within. Among these mainly action pictures was an odd biopic, Minstrel Man (1944), about and starring Benny Fields. The following year, he directed a lively offering in the detective series, The Falcon, in San Francisco.
Also in 1945, Lewis made his real breakthrough. My Name Is Julia Ross was his 25th directorial credit, and probably his best movie to that date. It is a brisk, slightly loopy example of film noir about a secretary (Nina Foch) who is kidnapped and held in a remote mansion by a demented boy (George Macready) and his mother (Dame May Whitty). It is not too fanciful to view this little chiller as a precursor to Hitchcock's masterly Psycho.
Lewis followed this with another melodramatic thriller, So Dark The Night. He was now working for Columbia, the least of the major studios, but still more prestigious than his earlier employers. They gave him the task (probably because of Minstrel Man) of directing the musical numbers for the highly successful biopic, The Jolson Story. But the main credit went to Alfred E Green, and Lewis returned to B-pictures, working with the star of Jolson, Larry Parks, on The Swordsman.
In 1948, he made The Return Of October, before returning to better form with a stylish and stylised crime story, Undercover Alan (1949), which led on to one of two acknowledged masterworks, Gun Crazy (1949). This is often compared favourably with Bonnie And Clyde, although in truth it is a noir gem best ranked with Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night. The story, of a doomed couple, plunged headlong into crime by an obsessional amour fou , is completely unsentimental. It is distinguished by fluid camera work, two brilliant set-piece robberies, and the driven performances of the young leads, John Dall and Peggy Cummins. The tragic ending closes the circular narrative as the non-violent hero fires blindly at the police and dies by the guns he has coveted as a small boy.
The acclaim that turned Gun Crazy into a cult movie came much later, and Lewis continued with B-movies, although with technicians and actors of a higher calibre. His next work was an excellent melodrama, Lady With A Passport (1950), starring Hedy Lamarr, followed by the Korean-set war film, Retreat Hell! and Desperate Search (both 1952) and Cry Of The Hunted (1953).
His subsequent film, The Big Combo (1954) has less of a reputation than Gun Crazy, but boasts even more distinguished camerawork (by the great John Alton) and a remarkable trio of heavyweight actors - Richard Conte, Brian Donleavy and Cornel Wilde. This claustrophobic, violent movie is superbly structured, and remains today a dark and cynical work. It is probably Lewis's most achieved and complex film.
Apart from a short, Man On A Bus (1955), made for the United Jewish Appeal Fund, Lewis made only four more feature films before moving into television. Of these, 7th Cavalry (1956) is a modest western, starring Randolph Scott. Although not in the same league as the Scott-Boetticher westerns, it is an attractive, melancholy work.
The remaining trio are rather more notable. A Lawless Street (1955) is distinguished by characteristically agile camerawork and a brisk narrative. The Halliday Brand (1957) is a psychological western with a dark tone, offering themes of racism, humiliation and an obsessive family. As usual, Lewis transcends his limited budget with visual flair and energy.
T he following year, he directed Terror In A Texas Town, an attempt at an artistic wilful example of the genre. This odd western boasts an almost surreal climax as the hero, Sterling Hayden, seeks revenge, using his dead father's harpoon as a weapon of destruction. It was a flamboyant end to a film career that led to him becoming one of the most discussed of all B-movie directors.
His best work stands alongside that of Edgar Ulmer, Budd Boetticher and Jacques Tourneur, as well as the earlier, better films of Edward Dmytryk, Blake Edwards and Richard Fleischer - before they and others allowed inflated budgets to inflate their egos and bank balances whilst deflating their talents. And while agreeing with Thomson that we should not overrate Lewis, we certainly need never underrate him and his like. There was an integrity, energy and skill that makes such craftsmen key figures in the history of popular crime films.
He is survived by his wife Buena, and a daughter, Candy.