The Films of Joseph H. Lewis edited by Gary D. Rhodes (review)

Since his death in 2000 at the age of 93, the New-York-born B-movie director Joseph H. Lewis has gained an ever-growing reputation as arguably “king of the Bs.” Among his contemporaries, perhaps only Edgar G. Ulmer and Jacques Tourneur have enjoyed anything like that of celebrity. Nonetheless, following Francis M. Nevins’ useful but critically insubstantial Joseph H. Lewis: Overview, Lnterview and Filmography (1998), Gary Rhodes’ collection of essays is to date only the second book-length study of Lewis’ thirty-year career as a low-budget genre director who made — often in a matter of days not weeks — over 100 films. Like Nevins, who contributes a foreword, Rhodes’ professed aim is to examine Lewis’ eclectic work as a whole and thereby bring what he regards as overdue attention to films other than Gun Crazy (1950) and The Big Combo (1954) — both relatively expensive productions which have long been acknowledged as Lewis’ finest achievements and as outstanding examples of the noir crime genre.

All of Lewis’s most celebrated work was made between 1945 and 1958, but he had begun directing Poverty Row B-pictures in the 1930s and continued to make television films — including forty-nine episodes of the popular Rifleman Western series — into the late 1960s. Rhodes’ volume includes useful overview essays on these early and late periods, but the main focus is on the films from the forties and fifties. Gun Crazy and The Big Combo do inevitably feature strongly; there are no fewer than three essays on the former work, thus shoring up the widespread view that it is Lewis’ masterpiece. However, apart from Michael Lee’s fine analysis of the film’s Victor Young score, with its obsessive and, as Lee demonstrates, innovative use of the song “Mad About You” (subsequently recorded by Sinatra, but composed for the film), none of these really adds substantially to the insights afforded by Jim Kitses’ 1996 monograph on Gun Crazy. Robert Singer’s essay on The Big Combo is a solid appreciation, but makes rather heavy weather of both the gay-coded henchmen Mingo and Fante (the latter played by a young Lee van Cleef) and the now notorious scene in which an act of (heterosexual) oral sex is heavily implied. We have, so to speak, been there before; and there are other aspects of the film that might have been explored more fully, not least its wonderfully complex, jazz-inflected score by David Raksin. The real value of Rhodes’ book, however, lies in the separate essays devoted to a handful of key films that have hitherto received relatively little critical attention. These are of mixed approach and variable quality, but all provide valuable contextualisation and analysis of films that deserve to be better known.

Rhodes himself contributes an entertaining essay on the extraordinary Invisible Ghost (1941), a bizarrely comic gothic-horror in which Bela Lugosi, driven mad by the wife who cuckolded him and whom he wrongly assumes to be dead, unwittingly strangles an assortment of hapless houseguests and servants. Rhodes discusses the film principally in terms of Lewis’ canny use of a past-his-prime Lugosi. Similarly outlandish is Lewis’ contribution to the “mad scientist” sub-genre, The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942), a film discussed with considerable flair by Lance Duerfahrd in a conceptually ambitious essay on cinematic “belief (98) that attempts to read the sub-genre as a metaphor for the B-movie industry itself. “The mad doctor’s laboratory is the site of a movie’s production. Here experiments in the film become experiments in film” (98). For Duerfahrd, the conspicuous artifice of the B film is an experiment that “tests (rather than depends on) our capacity to believe” (99).

Brian Taves offers a valuably historicizing assessment of Bombs Over Burma (1943), Lewis’ noir-tinged war film,in which the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong was able to forge a new Hollywood image as...