The Films of Joseph H. Lewis

Foreword: Joseph H. Lewis, 1907–2000

Foreword Joseph H. Lewis, 1907–2000 ix The last time I saw the man who directed Gun Crazy (1950), we had lunch on the terrace of the Del Rey Yacht Club. It was the summer of 1999 and he was a small, trim man, ninety-two years old, who walked very tentatively, as if he were afraid at every step of falling. He had actually taken a fall a few months ago, he said, and still needed to go in for therapy two or three times a week. He didn’t eat much, just a little fruit salad with cottage cheese. After lunch he felt like strolling over to the slip where his boat was moored. He hadn’t seen the Buena Vista since his fall, he said. We wove along walkways amid the fleet of small craft glistening in their berths under the bright sun but when we reached his boat he couldn’t find the key. He had been losing any number of small objects lately, he told me. We walked back to his car and searched, and I found a key in the glove compartment. “That’s not it,” he said. Somehow I thought it might be. I left him in the yacht club lounge and went out again to the Buena Vista’s slip and tried the key in the door and it fit. On the dining table was the book he’d been reading the last time he was on board: one of Lawrence Block’s Burglar novels. I went back to the clubhouse and gave him the good news, which meant that he was spared an expensive appointment with a locksmith, and the two of us returned to the cabin where several years before we had taped the conversations that had become the first book about his life and world. He had owned and loved the Buena Vista for more than thirty years but had recently put it up for sale because he knew that at his age he could never take it out again. But he wasn’t too old to drive and at the end of my visit he tucked me into his tiny sports car and sped me unerringly back to my hotel. That was the last time I saw Joseph H. Lewis. Francis M. Nevins is the author of Joseph H. Lewis: Overview, Interview, and Filmography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998). x Foreword He was born in New York City to Russian Jewish émigré parents on April 30, 1907, and grew up on the Upper East Side, within walking distance of Columbia University. In his teens he may well have crossed paths with another youth of Russian Jewish roots who lived in that neighborhood and would also make huge contributions to the creative genre we call noir: Cornell Woolrich. During the late 1940s when he was directing films at Columbia , Joe told me, he spent several months preparing a feature based on a Woolrich novel but was never able to adapt the book into a viable screenplay . It was well over forty years later when we had this conversation and he had forgotten the novel’s title but I suspect it must have been Rendezvous in Black (1948), Woolrich’s then most recent book and his only suspense novel that hadn’t already been filmed. (It still hasn’t.) I can’t help feeling that a picture based on this novel and directed by Joe might well have become one of the cornerstone works of film noir. I met him when he was in his early eighties. Before long, whenever I was in Southern California we would hang out on his boat and tape the conversations that eventually became the nucleus of my own book on Lewis. The words he used most often in discussing his life were pride, dignity, respect. Joseph H. Lewis on his yacht in Marina del Rey, California. (Courtesy of Francis M. Nevins) xi Foreword As a director a compulsive perfectionist and tough taskmaster, off the set a loving husband and father and grandfather and a generous and thoughtful friend—these impressions that I formed of him during our tapings were confirmed again and again over the rest of his life. The last time I talked to Joe was about a year after my lunch with him at the yacht club. I had been invited to Canada by a filmmaker who wanted to discuss...