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81 4 Gary D. Rhodes “A House Where Anything Can Happen and Usually Does” Joseph H. Lewis, Bela Lugosi, and (The) Invisible Ghost Writing in the May 1, 1941, issue of the Hollywood Spectator, a film critic noted his displeasure at attending the premiere of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). “After the first half hour, I began to wonder what the story was all about,” he complained. “From there on, I was more bored than entertained .” In years to come, of course, his view proved to be in the minority. The critic also admitted that he had not caught the name “Rosebud” on the burning sled at the end of the film; his wife had to point it out to him on the drive home.1 Not only had he been arguably incorrect in his assessment, but he had also been careless. Elsewhere in the very same issue of the Spectator, another reviewer spoke with even more disdain about Joseph H. Lewis’s Invisible Ghost (1941): “‘[Lugosi] is a finished actor,’ he wrote, ‘but he will be finished for good if he is obliged to continue frightening little children with such inconsequential roles as the demented murderer in The [sic] Invisible Ghost. . . . It is only mildly interesting and can please only those who are shrieker fans—for even whodunit fans will not like it because we all know from the start whodunit.”2 As with Kane, once again we can see the carelessness of a Spectator critic: Invisible Ghost has no definite article in its title. The names Orson Welles and Joseph H. Lewis appeared under the same cover again over twenty-five years later in Andrew Sarris’s book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968. Sarris considered Welles to be a “pantheon director” and believed Citizen Kane had “influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation.”3 While he speaks well of such films as The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Touch of Evil (1958), Sarris clearly believes Kane was Welles’s major contribution to the cinema. 82 Gary D. Rhodes By contrast, Sarris includes Joseph H. Lewis in his section “Expressive Esoterica,” and he begins his discussion on the director by quoting from a previous critic who saw any attempt to “awaken the world to the merits of Joseph H. Lewis” as problematic due to the perceived limitations of his early works. “Admittedly, in this direction lies madness,” the critic concluded .4 Sarris continues by citing Lewis’s My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) as the beginning of a consistent and personal style; he then suggests Gun Crazy (1950) was Lewis’s “one enduring masterpiece.”5 Here we get a different argument than Sarris offers on Welles: rather than starting with a masterpiece and forever after creating inferior work, Lewis honed his abilities on over twenty apparently unimportant films before directing Julia Ross. While he avoids discussion of Lewis’s early work, Sarris did offer a brief rejoinder to the critic he recited: “Madness is always preferable to smugness.”6 Writing about Lewis a few years later, Myron Meisel spoke directly about Invisible Ghost, giving Lewis credit for exemplifying “more fluidity of style than is customary” in a Monogram film. Nonetheless, Meisel seemed careful to avoid smugness or madness, noting, “It is almost as easy to overrate his early, ludicrously ephemeral work as it is to underrate it. The [sic] Invisible Ghost (1941), The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942), and The Boss of Hangtown Mesa (1942) are only arguably related to art, yet, given the intractable awfulness of the goings-on, Lewis manipulates his camera and scissors with startling integrity.”7 Meisel’s essay provides a more in-depth analysis than Sarris but still offers only vague generalities about Lewis’s early work. And he repeats the Hollywood Spectator’s mistake of appending a definite article to the title of Invisible Ghost. When I interviewed Lewis aboard his yacht in Marina del Rey in 1996, he spoke in only vague terms about Invisible Ghost. Though a wonderful bon vivant, Lewis seemed to have even less interest in the film than either Sarris or Meisel. He grudgingly admitted that he might have learned something from its star, Bela Lugosi, but could not identify what that might have been. Lewis then emphasized the fact that many of his B movies were made in days, rather than weeks; his comment seemed an excuse for both his limited memory of Invisible Ghost...

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