Subjects and film techniques: Joseph H. Lewis | Genuine Detection | Relationships | Goals and Plot Structure | Politics and Economics | Lewis and Murnau | Film Ratings
Feature Films: My Name Is Julia Ross | The Jolson Story | So Dark the Night | The Return of October | The Undercover Man | Gun Crazy | A Lady Without Passport | Retreat, Hell! | The Big Combo | A Lawless Street | 7th Cavalry | The Halliday Brand | Terror in a Texas Town
Early B-Movies: Courage of the West | Singing Outlaw | The Spy Ring | Border Wolves | The Last Stand | Blazing Six Shooters | Texas Stagecoach | The Man from Tumbleweeds | The Return of Wild Bill | Boys of the City | That Gang of Mine | Pride of the Bowery | Invisible Ghost | Criminals Within | Arizona Cyclone | Bombs Over Burma | The Silver Bullet | Boss of Hangtown Mesa | Secrets of a Co-Ed | Minstrel Man | The Falcon in San Francisco
The Rifleman: The Rifleman: An Introduction | Duel of Honor | The Safe Guard | The Pet | Shivaree | The Trade | The Deadly Wait | Boomerang | The Patsy | Eddie's Daughter | Panic | The Letter of the Law | Surveyors | Day of the Hunter | The Visitor | Hero | The Spoiler | Heller | The Deserter | Shotgun Man | The Fourflusher | Hangman | Strange Town | Baranca | The Martinet | Miss Milly | Flowers by the Door | The Actress | Face of Yesterday | The Wyoming Story | Closer Than a Brother | The Prisoner | The Vaqueros | Sheer Terror | The Stand-In | The Journey Back | Honest Abe | The Shattered Idol | Long Gun from Tucson | A Young Man's Fancy | Waste | Death Never Rides Alone | I Take This Woman | Squeeze Play | Suspicion | Sidewinder | And the Devil Makes Five | The Bullet | The Guest | Old Tony
Other TV Shows: The Fat Man | The Hiding Place | The Quality of Mercy | Pompey | The Vindicators | One Killer on Ice | Incident at Dry Creek | Boots With My Father's Name | Night of the Wolf | The Man from Nowhere | Plunder
Classic Film and Television Home Page
A big Thank You to Aaron Graham and Brandon Bird, for help with researching Lewis' films.
And Special Thanks to Francis M. Nevins, for research and inspiration.
Lewis has two different audiences, which do not overlap much:
This web-book begins with what I call an "auteurist checklist", setting forth common themes and techniques in Lewis films. Hopefully, this checklist will form a useful overview of Lewis, for everyone from beginning film lovers new to Lewis, to professional film historians.
Some common subjects and techniques of Joseph H. Lewis films (followed by lists of films that contain them):
Detection and thinking:
Non-conformist Heroes - and bonding with men and women:
Society and economics:
Personal desires - with social consequences:
Plots:
Story telling devices:
Characters:
Food and drink:
Camera Movement:
Staging:
Architecture:
Foreground objects:
Costumes:
"Genuine detection" can be defined as mysteries that are solved by investigation, finding evidence, and reasoning about that evidence to reach conclusions, that help solve the mystery. The opposite of genuine detection is when a character discovers the truth though dumb luck, chance, coincidence, or making a lucky guess out of the blue.
Most mystery writers and readers believe that books that show genuine detection are good; books that lack it are poor (all other factors being equal, of course).
Lewis regularly structures plot developments, so that his characters learn new things, through a process of real detection.
Pompey (1964) centers on a runaway slave's encounter with Daniel Boone, in Revolutionary War era America. How does Daniel Boone first encounter the escaped slave? Through genuine detection. Daniel is in Salem, North Carolina, when he and his friend discover that sometone has stolen blacksmith's tools from their supply wagon. Why, Boone's best friend asks, would anyone steal a blacksmith's chisel, when they could have stolen a much more valuable rifle from their supplies? At first the men are puzzled by the mystery. But Daniel gets an idea. He has seen Wanted posters around the city, about an escaped slave who still has a chain around his ankle. Daniel reasons that the thief is probably the ex-slave, who needs the chisel to remove the chain. Next, Daniel uses his woodsman's tracking skills, to follow the trail of footprints the thief has left in the forest. After a detailed, step-by-step demonstration of these skills, Daniel and his friend finally catch up with the escaped slave in the forest. This whole process is "genuine detection" using reasoning from evidence to solve a mystery.
Few other film directors would structure a story this way. It would be more common for the escaped slave to be encountered by Daniel through sheer coincidence. Ol' Dan could be stopping by a brook in Kentucky to water his horse, and he could suddenly trip over the foot of an escaped slave, thus setting the plot in motion.
In Pride of the Bowery (1941), Mugs is taking the rap for a crime committed by a friend. Mugs does not believe in squealing on others, to defend himself. When I saw this film, I expected one of two things might happen. One: Mugs would decide that being a stool pigeon was good after all, and speak up. Or Two: Maybe the authorities would stumble, through chance, on the real crook committing the thefts. But neither of these events happen. Instead, Mugs' friend Danny finds some evidence, and he starts reasoning out from it that Mugs is covering something up. Danny's shrewd, clever deductions finally allow truth to come out. Once again, Lewis has structured his plot so that truth is revealed through genuine detection (Danny's reasoning), rather than through the chance of an accidental discovery, or the deus ex machina of a confession.
Real detection is hard work. The sleuth has to investigate, find all the evidence they can, and use their reasoning powers to the utmost to deduce a conclusion. In Lewis, finding truth is hard work, a slow difficult process. This is not because Lewis is cynical about truth. Rather, it is because he believes that truth, like all good things in life, is only produced by hard work and using our brains.
Authors that stress real detection often show it leading first to false or only partially true conclusions, before further hard work of detection leads to the real truth. See E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913) or Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), for some famous prose mystery examples. Lewis follows this paradigm. In his films, detectives can work and work, only to reach conclusions that are mistakes. In Lewis' The Big Combo, hero Lt. Diamond's sleuthing leads him to some conclusions half way though the film about Alicia. Further hard sleuthing eventually shows him his ideas were completely wrong! This is not a criticism of any sort by Lewis of Diamond, who is the hero of the movie. Rather, it is a realistic account of what real sleuthing and thinking are like. One has to work and work and go through false answers, before one can find the truth.
Lewis became famous among cinephiles for Gun Crazy, perhaps the most admired and most delirious portrait of sexual obsession and l'amour fou (mad love) in the history of the cinema. The couple in Gun Crazy are heterosexual - they are even married.
Lewis' other most famous film, The Big Combo, also has a heroine who has a sexual obsession for the gangster villain, including the only scene in studio-era Hollywood history of oral sex. It also has one of the few gay couples in Hollywood history, the hitmen Fante and Mingo. Despite their being villains, Fante and Mingo are oddly sympathetic, and have been called the most likable persons in the movie.
Some of Lewis' early B-movies, also have respectable characters who develop heterosexual-but-forbidden sexual relationships with lower class characters, such as the rich girl in Secrets of a Co-Ed with the mobster boyfriend, and the engineer who is sleeping with the maid in Invisible Ghost.
People who turn from these films to Lewis' episodes of The Rifleman are in for a surprise. The hero of the show, Lucas McCain, is often most gung ho when bonding with other men. Lucas has a special feeling for social outsiders. He develops a personal bond with them, and also stands up for their rights, in shows that preach liberal social values. The male bonding shows up most strongly in Duel of Honor, Shivaree, Hero, The Deserter, Strange Town, Baranca, Closer Than a Brother, The Journey Back, Honest Abe, Death Never Rides Alone, The Bullet. It is present throughout much of The Rifleman, in a lower grade intensity. Lucas sums up his feelings by quoting Proverbs 18:24, "There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother", in the episode Closer Than a Brother.
In addition, Lucas develops what seems to be similar bonding with a series of dance hall women, in the episodes Eddie's Daughter, The Wyoming Story, The Vaqueros. Like Lucas' male friends, these women are social outsiders. The detective hero of The Big Combo has a similar relationship with showgirl Rita, and one of Lewis last TV shows, The Big Valley episode Night of the Wolf, also centers on such a relationship.
Lucas' relations with his men friends are intimate and emotionally intense. It would be easy to call these relationships homosexual love stories. But is this accurate? Such a label runs into the usual roadblocks. None of the films show or hint that the men friends are having sex with the hero. By contrast, in The Big Combo, Fante and Mingo are strongly indicated to be having sex, since we see them as roommates, shown sleeping together at night in a common bedroom. Nor does the dialogue of the Rifleman shows ever refer to any sort of physical attraction.
In addition, while Lucas had no steady girlfriends in the first two seasons of The Rifleman, the producers introduced girlfriend characters in the last three seasons to "humanize" him, as the show's publicity put it. Angry queer theorists might describe this as "heterosexualizing" Lucas, instead. While Joseph H. Lewis actually directed the episode that introduced Miss Milly, this show and the other shows directed by Lewis mainly avoided showing much of Lucas' romance with these women.
On the other hand, the imagery of The Rifleman shows about Lucas and his male friends is often intensely physical, of a kind that can legitimately be labeled as "homoerotic". Watching Lucas slug it out with the lead of Baranca, do full contact wrestling with the lead of Honest Abe, or share a hotel room with the lead of Duel of Honor, suggests strong homosexual feelings that have evaded the censors of 1960. Combined with the strong portrait of friendship, works like Baranca and Duel of Honor do indeed seem like gay love stories.
Where does all this leave us? Lewis is a director who spent much of his career focusing on transgressive romantic relationships, whether these are forbidden heterosexual alliances, or tales of male bonding. His work does not fit easily into any categories known to me. Lewis is the director of both Gun Crazy and Duel of Honor. Trying to make his work as a whole align neatly with either heterosexual or homosexual norms is going to be difficult.
Film historian David Bordwell built on such observations, to point out that most traditional Hollywood feature films have a dual plot structure. Hollywood films almost always have a main plot, and a separate subplot in which the hero and heroine have a romance. For example, a whodunit might have a main plot, in which a cop tries to figure out who committed a murder, and a subplot in which the cop and a woman reporter fall in love. These plots can interact, of course: the reporter heroine might share what she knows about the mystery with the policeman hero, during one of their love scenes, say. Still, the two-plot structure is a norm in Hollywood feature filmmaking.
How does the cinema of Joseph H. Lewis fit into these norms? Many of his features fit clearly. The Big Combo has a main plot in which the hero tries to bring down a mobster, and the subplot in which he romances Susan. A Lawless Street has a similar two-plot structure. Lewis' early Bob Baker and Charles Starrett Westerns, have subplots in which the hero has romance with a woman.
But some of his B-movies, especially, evade such a structure. They use a variety of strategies:
A few of Lewis' Rifleman episodes have a main plot / romance subplot structure. In Sheer Terror, Milly is held hostage by robbers who plan to rob the stagecoach; in a subplot, she and hero Lucas have a simple romance.
But most Lewis Rifleman episodes do not have any sort of heterosexual romance subplot. The shows are only 25 minutes long, and one could argue that there is too little time to fit a love story into each episode. Also, love stories in Hollywood feature films often tend to imply marriage will soon follow the conclusion of the picture. The producers of The Rifleman had no intention of marrying their hero off. They wanted him to be in the same single state in each episode.
I do not know what a systematic study of series television shows would conclude about the presence or absence of romance subplots, as a norm. There is a good doctoral dissertation in this, for somebody!
But what is notable is that such Rifleman shows as Duel of Honor, The Deserter, Baranca, Closer Than a Brother, have both a main plot, and a male bonding subplot. In the main plot of Duel of Honor, the visiting Count has to deal with local bullies; in the subplot, Lucas and the Count male bond. The male bonding in Duel of Honor, has the exact same role in the plot structure of Duel of Honor, that heterosexual romance has in a typical Hollywood feature. This is another reason to consider Duel of Honor a gay love story. Its male-bonding plays the same structural role that straight love does in a conventional movie.
David Bordwell sets forth his ideas on narrative structure, in his book Narration in the Fiction Film (1985). I've been trying to compare what he describes as norms of Hollywood narration, with Lewis' films.
One of Bordwell's key assertions is: "The Classical Hollywood film presents psychologically determined individuals who struggle to solve a clear cut problem or to attain specific goals....The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem, and a clear achievement or nonachievement of the goals."
Trying to find such goals in many of Lewis' films can be difficult. The heroes of his detective stories such as The Undercover Man, The Big Combo and The Bullet have clear goals: find evidence that will allow the killer to be convicted. And the heroes of Border Wolves, My Name Is Julia Ross and The Stand-In are trying to escape from the false identities that have been imposed on them: also a clear problem. But quite a few of Lewis' other films do not seem to open with a clear cut goal, that is resolved at the end. What is the goal in Duel of Honor, Shivaree, or Gun Crazy?
(It is important not to read such a statement as a disagreement with Bordwell. Bordwell's neo-formalism asserts that there are group norms that appear in art movements, such as the Classical Hollywood film, and that there will be artists or groups of artists who violate or bend such norms. So the appearance of a filmmaker like Lewis who violates a norm is to be expected, and is consistent with Bordwell's ideas.
Which brings up the Big Disclaimer. I am not in a position to evaluate whether "most 1915-1965 Hollywood films have protagonists with goals". It is easy to see that a LOT of Hollywood films have such protagonists with goals. So looking at "whether a film has a protagonist with a goal" is a worthwhile research question to ask. But I don't know whether it is true that MOST or nearly all Hollywood films have "heroes with clear cut problems" - or what patterns of exceptions exist to this proposed norm.)
Subjects - rather than goals. Films like Duel of Honor and Gun Crazy have subjects, rather than clear cut goals. In Duel of Honor, the subject is "how society treats, and should treat, people who are different - especially people who seem gay". In Gun Crazy, the subject is "a couple who are obsessed with guns, and where this leads them". Duel of Honor and Gun Crazy are focused clearly and firmly on these subjects. But it is hard to translate such subjects into goals for the protagonists.
Films like Shivaree push this approach to a greater extreme. Shivaree deals with "the difficult transition to adulthood, and mistreatment by grownups" - a big diverse subject that is hard to summarize as some sort of goal.
Films About Everything. Some Lewis films have so many apparent subjects, that it is hard even to describe in one sentence what they are about: Pride of the Bowery, Invisible Ghost, So Dark the Night, Old Tony. I can't tell you who the protagonist of Old Tony is, let alone whether he has a goal.
The Complex Resolution. Lewis' films about young men who raise race horses, That Gang of Mine and The Fourflusher, open with seemingly clear cut goals for their protagonists: the young man wants to win the Big Race riding the horse he is raising. A thousand sports films have similar goals. However, the resolution of these films surprise. The hero neither succeeds nor fails at his goal. Instead, ingenious plot twists move the story in unexpected directions. There is nothing modernist about all of this: the plot is fully and clearly resolved. Lewis' message seems to be: life is more complicated than we originally thought - and we have to modify our plans as we grow up. Lewis' polo movie The Spy Ring, similar in many ways to his horse racing films, also subverts its Winning the Big Game goal through plot twists.
A Mysterious Protagonist. We don't learn till around two thirds of the way through Face of Yesterday, Closer Than a Brother, The Journey Back or The Vindicators what the protagonist knows, or what his goals are. The hero of The Vindicators turns out to have a clear cut goal; the other protagonists are faced with difficult situations in which it is difficult to formulate clear goals.
Multiple Protagonists. Gun Crazy has a couple as the leading characters. The scenes are often structured to show the man's point of view - but both characters are prominent throughout most of the film. Similarly, Retreat, Hell! starts out as if Richard Carlson will be the hero, but Russ Tamblyn and Frank Lovejoy soon get equal weight. The Rifleman is structured to have two protagonists, rancher Lucas and his son Mark. Several of Lewis' episodes have both characters involved in the same storyline - but with differing points of view on how to interpret events and judge the issues they are seeing. Examples include Surveyors, Day of the Hunter, Hero, The Deserter, Shotgun Man, The Fourflusher, all from the second season of the show.
The Erupting Plot Event. Plot events often erupt suddenly in Lewis films. In Gun Crazy, the hero is visiting a carnival for fun, when a chance encounter with a female shootist triggers overwhelming sexual excitement, and a lifelong commitment. Lewis has carefully foreshadowed this - much of the early part of the film presents the hero's obsession with guns. But this is the first indication such interest could be sexual. It is not a "goal": it is something that erupts from his subconscious, and which suddenly drives the story. Lewis' films are full of forbidden sexuality, that often seems to erupt. Such sexuality is not linked to a goal that opens the story. Gun Crazy was apparently first discovered as a classic by French surrealist Ado Kyrou, who wrote about Gun Crazy in his book Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1953). Surrealism, which celebrates the eruption of unconscious drives, is deeply in tune with Lewis' delirious treatment of sexual impulses.
However, it is not only sexuality that suddenly erupts in Lewis. It is also politics. The hero is suddenly confronted at the end of Shivaree with a choice between violence to solve problems, and non-violence. This is a political decision, related to Lewis' consistent support in his films for the non-violence of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Once again, this political conflict was:
Political issues mushroom up in the later sections of other Lewis films, such as The Silver Bullet, A Lawless Street, Day of the Hunter, The Deserter, Pompey. They are foreshadowed by Lewis, but do not seem to be set forth as an initial problem. These political conflicts are not dry - they are as dramatic, unexpected, and emotionally disorienting as the eruptions of sexuality.
Resolving the political conflict is often the climax of the story. This is just as dramatic and definitive as any other Hollywood climax. But it does NOT resolve a problem stated at the opening of the film.
A Lawless Street opens with a seeming goal: the Marshal hero (Randolph Scott) has to deal with outlaws in his Western town, including the one that rides into town in the opening shot. But half way through the movie, there is a violent coup, and the town government is taken over by bad guys, who institute a reign of terror. Now the hero has to deal with something that goes far beyond his original problem or goal. It is linked to his original goal: preserving law and order in town. But the story now has a political dimension that goes far beyond what we thought was happening in the opening scenes.
The unexplained causes of urges. Lewis characters often have strong enthusiasms for something. Sometimes it is for some form of sexuality. Sometimes this seems like a non-sexual emotion, such as their liking for coffee and pie, or the young people in Lewis who love raising and racing horses. Other times, it is not given an explicit sexual link, but one suspects sex might be present, such as the enthusiasm for boots or uniforms. Few of these urges are "explained" psychologically: they are just there, powerful and driving.
Not an Art Film. Lewis films also have lots of plot, and the plot typically follows a logical chain of cause and effect throughout the film (even the surprising sexual or political events are logically foreshadowed). And although Lewis characters' sexual obsessions are not explained in Freudian or other terms, the audience usually has a clear, complete explanation of most other aspects of the film by the end. All of these are Hollywood norms, according to Bordwell. So Lewis' films are closer to Hollywood than to 1960's art films. Lewis is far from being a "modernist who de-emphasizes plot, stripping it of logical causality", some of Bordwell's main characteristics for art films (such as those by Fellini, Antonioni, Resnais, etc.).
Many of Lewis' films contain political, social and economic commentary. Lewis can certainly be considered as a "socially conscious" director.
But nailing down Lewis' political beliefs, as expressed in the films, can be difficult. Films are works of art, and it can be difficult to align them with political ideas. But my best guess is that Lewis' films reflect:
Lewis is certainly left-of-center. The sinister conspiracies by the rich to steal ordinary people's property in many Lewis films make that clear. Lewis would choke on the belief of many contemporary conservatives that rich people are a benevolent force, whose financial actions usually benefit the average person. Lewis' concern for the victims of war is also in direct opposition to the pro-war views of many contemporary conservatives, with their nauseating "give war a chance" propaganda. The consistent support for racial minorities in Lewis' films, made during the Civil Rights era, is a further strong indication of Lewis' left-of-center views. The pro-gay subtext running through Lewis, and his support for working women, also places Lewis in opposition to conservative points of view.
But within the left-of-center political continuum, where does Lewis stand on economic issues? Is he a liberal, a democratic socialist, an anarchist or a Communist?
I frankly don't know. But so far, I have not seen any conclusive evidence that Lewis is any more left-of-center than being a liberal. I see little evidence that Lewis films support socialism, anarchism or Communism. Instead, Lewis seems like a liberal.
The one real life historical figure that appears in Lewis' films, Mark Twain in Shattered Idol, was a staunch liberal, but not a political radical.
The Conspiracy Films. The biggest difficulty in interpreting Lewis' economics, is ascribing a real-world political meaning to Lewis' Westerns about sinister conspiracies of the rich and powerful to take over or destroy the property of others. It is easy to say that the villains in these films are financiers, speculators, crooked bankers and the big rich. Maybe one can even say they are "capitalists". But do these films constitute a denunciation of capitalism as an economic system, as some critics have said? I have my doubts.
One problem is that the victims in these films are ALSO businessmen, usually. And they and their businesses are treated sympathetically:
This point of view is also expressed by a work that is not a conspiracy film: The Silver Bullet. The Silver Bullet is about an election, in which one side represents the "big money interests", and the other side "the small ranchers", to quote the film's dialogue. One might also note Lewis' support for the small bank and its banker in The Safe Guard and Boomerang. He is treated with the sympathy Lewis extends to other small businessmen.
An exchange in Squeeze Play might also be relevant. The big-time financier who is trying to buy up hero Lucas McCain's land tells Lucas that, after all, both of them are just landowners. Lucas disagrees. I actually work my land, Lucas says, but you buy up land just to speculate with it.
A deep suspicion about big-money financiers was shared by liberals, anarchists, socialists and Communists. Lewis' views on the subject do not indicate specifically to which such group he adheres. Lewis' support for small businessmen, even well-to-do ones like bankers and wealthy ranchers, suggests that he is a liberal, not a socialist, anarchist or Communist.
The above discussion perhaps distorts the politics of Terror in a Texas Town. Terror in a Texas Town is clearly the most "radical" of Lewis' conspiracy films. Its rancher victims are the poorest in Lewis. And its villain is not just a financier: he also owns the town hotel, and is constantly referred to in the film as a "businessman". So the film has an "evil businessman oppressing the poor" theme. Still, its plot centers on supporting the small ranchers' claims to their property, which the villain is trying to take away from them through legal swindles. So Terror in a Texas Town is a film in favor of Private Property. And its small landowner heroes are exactly the sort of folks that Stalin would treat as Enemies of the State during his forced collectivization of farms, and who Mao would target during the Great Leap Forward. So it is also hard to see how Terror in a Texas Town can be read as a Marxist tract, however sinister its portrait of big businessmen.
A Lack of Alternative Economics. So far I have not been able to find any labor unions in Lewis films. Or any cooperative-run business enterprises. While I have not been able to see all of Lewis' films, so far there are no alternative economic models in any of them: no labor unions, cooperatives, social security or welfare systems. One exception: Lewis likes the jobs the New Deal provided for the unemployed, in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Pride of the Bowery.
Lewis told Francis M. Nevins that his father and uncles were Jews who had to flee Russia, due to their Socialist politics. And that his parents' apartment building was one of the first cooperatives in New York City. So Lewis was well aware of economic alternatives. They just don't seem to appear in his films. This is a another reason to feel skeptical that Lewis films in any way advocate socialism, anarchism or Communism. These economic doctrines just don't appear in Lewis films.
Public Works. Lewis glorified the road-building US Government-run Civilian Conservation Corps in Pride of the Bowery, part of Roosevelt's New Deal. And the road-building by the Chinese people in Bombs Over Burma. Bombs Over Burma also has a school teacher heroine, the grandmother in The Undercover Man pays tribute to the free schools in America, and there is a brief, neutral depiction of an American public school in Gun Crazy. The political dispute in The Silver Bullet is about water rights and building a dam. So Lewis was supportive of government programs. Belief that government should support public infrastructure like roads or water was a liberal crusade in that era. See the Tennessee Valley Authority, for instance, which was championed by liberals, and loathed by conservatives.
Lewis: a pro-religion director. Lewis' consistent support for ministers, monks and priests also separates him from Communists, who typically loathe religion. One can compare the admirable Buddhist monk in Bombs Over Burma, and the Taoist priest in Night of the Wolf, with a Communist film like Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia, which portrays Buddhist priests as human swine. The opposition to the evil businessman in Terror in a Texas Town meets in the local church, presided over by the town's sympathetic minister.
Ford's films often contain moody nocturnal cityscapes, beautifully composed, and with shining islands of light from geometric street lamps. These nocturnes seem like the ancestors of the equally beautiful ones in Lewis. Such nocturnal cityscapes are in such Ford films as Seas Beneath (1931), The Informer (1935) and Stagecoach (1939).
Subject matter that appears in The Little Foxes before it does in Lewis:
By contrast, I've looked for possible sources for aspects of Lewis' visual style in Wyler's film, but only found a few. After all, by 1941 Lewis had been directing for five years, making fifteen pictures, and many aspects of Lewis' style had long been fully formed.
Lewis had used fairly complex stagings in mirrors (The Spy Ring, Invisible Ghost) before The Little Foxes, which is rich in such shots.
The issue of depth staging is more complex. The Little Foxes is famous for its depth staging in interiors, and also in street scenes that are actually interior-like studio sets.
There are kinds of depth staging in Lewis before this. Right from the start in Courage of the West (1937), Lewis shoots through every sort of foreground object in his films, earning the nickname of "Wagon Wheel Joe". Lewis also shot through doors and windows, right from the beginning of his career, including two-level deep shots of a doorway seen through a doorway in The Last Stand (1938). All of this is long before The Little Foxes.
Lewis' first feature, Courage of the West has a shot where horsemen ride from the rear of a shot towards the front (the reprise of the song "Ride Along, Free Rangers"). A similar shot of Bob Baker riding from back to front of the screen occurs in The Last Stand. Such background-to-foreground shots will play a major role in later Lewis, often times involving even more extreme distances and foreground close-ups.
But the radical interior depth filming in The Little Foxes is different from Lewis' early films. It might have encouraged Lewis to use extreme depth filming in his later works.
It is clear that the depth staging and mirror shots in The Little Foxes might have excited Lewis' admiration. But they do not seem to be uniquely ancestral to his film techniques.
Some visual style aspects of The Little Foxes that reappear in later Lewis films:
The circular tracking shot around the farm courtyard in Godard's Weekend (1967) resembles Lewis:
All of this could well be a coincidence. But this shot definitely would fit in with Lewis' work.
In his book on Lewis, Francis M. Nevins justly complains that most film historians are only looking at Lewis feature films made in 1945-1958, and that they are ignoring his early B-movies and later television work.
Lewis made more films for television than he did for theaters. Lewis' television films are among his finest works. Lewis becomes a vastly more interesting filmmaker, when one starts looking at his 100+ films as a whole, rather than just the 16 theatrical features from My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) to Terror in a Texas Town (1958). (One cannot give an exact count of the films Lewis directed. Lewis' filmography still has gaps: there might well be television films directed by Lewis not known.)
Here are my ratings for the Joseph H. Lewis films I have seen. The ratings go from **** (best) to "no stars" (a bomb). Anything with at least **1/2 is recommended viewing.
Early B-Movies:
Features:
The Rifleman:
Other TV Shows:
All ratings have their arbitrary side, and most Lewis films have interesting shots or scenes.
Most of the assertions in this Lewis book are assertions of fact, or of fairly low-level categorization (this shot is a lateral track with foreground objects, this scene shows one of Lewis' duels with strange weapons, this background is full of peaked roofs, the hero and his friend male bond). Readers can judge the truth or falsity of such statements by comparing them to the films themselves. Because of this, I hope that most of the contents of this book can be considered as knowledge: ideas that are backed up by solid evidence.
By contrast, ratings are far more vague. The above ratings don't explain what factors caused me to give one film a high rank, and another a low one. And many readers would use other criteria than I did, anyway, to rank Lewis' films.
Because of this, it is not really clear that the above ratings have the slightest value, accuracy, or any real informational content.
I am including these rankings, despite this, for two reasons:
In Lewis, the hostage taking is often a component of a larger scheme, one that illegally benefits the villain. This is true in My Name Is Julia Ross. It is not a direct attempt to brutalize another person. The villain of My Name Is Julia Ross married his first wife for her money, a motive that will return in I Take This Woman. There is a feminist dimension here, showing male exploitation of women.
The villain in My Name Is Julia Ross is a suave, soft-spoken sophisticated man. Such suave villains are typical in Lewis. The bad guys also have two servants to carry out their orders. Here the servants are a man and a woman, rather than the two men that are most typical in Lewis. The servants also preserve a certain British gentility; more often, Lewis henchmen will be thug-like. So we are close in My Name Is Julia Ross to Lewis' paradigm for villains, without being entirely there.
Like Gaslight, we have a suave, sinister man bullying a woman, at home. We also have a conspiracy by that man to create sinister illusions. However, the villain of Gaslight is trying to drive his wife mad, while the villain of My Name Is Julia Ross is mainly trying to delude other people. There are signs near the beginning that he is trying to delude the heroine, as well, but this plot soon vanishes with the heroine's forthright refusal to be fooled.
My Name Is Julia Ross is based on Anthony Gilbert's mystery novel The Woman in Red (1941). "Anthony Gilbert" was the masculine pseudonym of the prolific British woman mystery author Lucy Beatrice Malleson. The Woman in Red is one of a series of prose mystery thrillers of the era that dealt with an "innocent young woman forced into a new identity": see Helen McCloy's The Dance of Death (1938), and Rufus King's Design in Evil (1942).
Before and after My Name Is Julia Ross, Lewis used the subject of men forced into new identities. See Border Wolves (1938), and The Rifleman episode The Stand-In (1961): a show that makes a direct contrast with My Name Is Julia Ross. Variations on the plot also show up in late TV shows like Pompey and The Man from Nowhere.
Sleuthing by the heroine uncovers more and more of the hidden personal lives of the characters. She gradually learns the back story of the villains and the villain's wife. Personal information about the characters is also the subject of ongoing revelation in The Falcon in San Francisco, The Big Combo and A Lawless Street.
Men in My Name Is Julia Ross are associated with phallic symbols:
The heroine, by contrast, helps herself through using large phallic objects:
Lewis films frequently criticize people who engage in conventional ideas. Heroes are often people who defy such ideas, and who think differently from the crowd. Examples include The Rifleman episodes Duel of Honor, Shivaree, Eddie's Daughter, Panic, Hero, The Deserter, Strange Town and The Bullet.
The vicar is part of this conventional thinking - and criticized for it implicitly by the film. He is a contrast to later, sympathetic clergymen: the minister in The Rifleman episode The Martinet, the Taoist priest in The Big Valley episode Night of the Wolf (1965). Both of these later clergymen are without permanent assignments, while the vicar is deeply established in the "proper" social life of the town.
In My Name Is Julia Ross, conventional thinking is not linked to any political issues. In some of Lewis' later work, conventional thinking often involves rejection of outsiders. And its criticism becomes politically charged: conventional, conformist thought is linked to rejection of minority groups by bigots, and people with original ideas by the small minded.
Many Lewis films, such as the famous Gun Crazy, deal with men who get pulled into the "gun cult": an obsessive interest in the world of guns. The villain's knife fetish here has something of the same effect. There are some differences, however. Gun "culture" is a whole organized world, a subculture to which people can be drawn. Macready's knife fascination has no such social organization. It is just one man, and his interest in sharp objects.
When the mirror is shattered, the villain picks up one of the sharp pieces. The villain also stands next to the shattered mirror in Gun Crazy.
The entrance hall, with the steps going up on the right, is a bit like the one in Invisible Ghost. The rain also recalls that earlier film.
Later scenes in the hall, allow us to see from the hall into the hero's room. Just as Lewis likes to connect outside to inside, so does he like to connect areas within buildings, such as this hall and room.
The hero's fireplace contains a statue of a horse and rider. Such equestrian statues recall The Spy Ring. In both films horse-and-rider statues are associated with good guys. Oddly enough, a cowboy statue will be in a bad guy's office in The Wyoming Story.
The square is seen in a shot, that contains a close-up of a street light on its right. Such geometric lights and lanterns run through Lewis.
At the house in the square, we see the hero through some grillwork on the door. This recalls the shots through the grillwork in the monastery door in Bombs Over Burma.
The panning shot in the square that shows the hero walking behind the metal fence is notable. It is one of many shots in My Name Is Julia Ross that show the characters behind bars or grillwork.
Later, there will be a lateral camera movement behind a fountain in the square. Camera movements around fountains anticipate A Lady Without Passport.
In the London house of the bad guys, Lewis makes some striking compositions out of lamps and the fireplace.
Signs are common in the opening: at the landlady's, the square and the employment agency. Lewis regularly uses signs to tell the story, in his films. We see the shadow of an employment agency sign on the wall: something common in police stations in other Lewis films (The Undercover Man, The Fat Man).
The mansion is full of gables. These form some of Lewis' beloved peaked roofs. These gables form angles, adding to many compositions in My Name Is Julia Ross.
The lamp with a circle of hanging prisms is similar to one that will return in Old Tony.
Macready's shiny black dressing gown makes him one of many Lewis villains dressed in black. He also frequently changes his clothes, something associated with Lewis crooks and bad guys.
The opening shot of the village is through a store window. This anticipates the opening of Gun Crazy.
What follows is a long take dialogue shot. During this shot, the actors sometimes face and sometimes turn away from the camera. As is often the case in Lewis, he keeps the camera going, allowing characters to speak while their back is turned to the camera. Such as strategy, a bit heretical in Hollywood, allows Lewis to preserve his long takes in dialogue scenes, rather than breaking up shots to show first one character, then another.
During most of the dialogue shot, the actors keep turning around, and changing the direction they are facing. But they almost always are either:
Towards the end of the shot, the heroine does turn slightly at an angle towards the villain, different from 90 degrees. This makes a slight challenge to the consistency of the staging.
Some of the camera movements involve the staircase: always a favorite Lewis subject for tracking. When the nurse ascends the stairs, the camera makes a lateral movement along the upper landing. The two types of movement combine in counterpoint.
When the villains break into the bedroom, they are first seen at the door. Then the camera pulls forward, and moves out through the bedroom window. Now we are seeing the room from outside, through the window. This is typical of Lewis' interest in camera movements that unite both interiors and exteriors.
The camera movement that starts in the closet, moves on into the bathroom. This is a linking, not between exterior and interior, but between two rooms. It seems to be a shot that moves through a wall: a stylistic device that runs through Lewis. Soon we see a shelf in the foreground, filled with bottles. Shooting through this sort of "foreground material" is common in Lewis' filming.
The swinging doors in the bathroom are like those of a Western saloon, a somewhat unexpected effect. Lewis gets mileage out of such saloon doors in Westerns like A Lawless Street, and The Rifleman episode Shivaree.
The camera suddenly moves to the left, when the villain is about to kill the heroine at the end. This discloses two new characters, who we have not seen before. This too has a disorienting effect, of changing the basic plan of the movie.
My Name Is Julia Ross takes place on a beach, not a swamp. But there is still something of the same effect. Lewis' wetlands show small regions of land, surrounded by shallow water. This is the same as the beach. The heroine is stretched out on a small sandy region surrounded by water; this is like the small tuft of grass with the couple at the end of Gun Crazy, also surrounded by water.
The Jolson Story (1946) is more a curiosity, than a coherent movie experience. Lewis directed the musical numbers in this biopic of real life singer Al Jolson; Alfred E. Green directed the non-musical dramatics. The whole thing does not really gel. There are some pleasing musical numbers here, but it is hard to argue that much of it is Essential Joseph H. Lewis.
The film is low budget, by the standards of Hollywood musicals; most of the numbers consist of little more than Jolson (played by Larry Parks) standing and singing. Parks is lip synching to performances by the real Jolson.
I confess I have never "gotten" Al Jolson as a singer. Jolson seems like a moderately talented man who over-stylizes songs in a peculiar way. Many of the songs in this picture were later recorded by Judy Garland in her Carnegie Hall album, and sung so much better by Garland than Jolson, that it is hard to enthuse about Jolson's versions. Still, it is a historical fact that Jolson, in his day, was one of the most popular entertainers who ever lived. Audiences were as crazy about him as this film depicts. Charlie Chaplin, who saw Jolson on-stage at his peak (years before Jolson's movie debut), says that Jolson was the greatest entertainer Chaplin ever saw (see Chaplin's autobiography). Even I can enjoy Jolson's energetic performances here of "I'm Sitting on Top of the World" and "California Here I Come", upbeat works that are guaranteed to bring a smile.
The Jolson character shows the gung ho enthusiasm of many Lewis heroes. His intense smiling and emphatic emotions recall Bob Baker, John Dall in Gun Crazy, the Fat Man, the Count in Duel of Honor, and Baranca. His confidence also ties him to Lewis villains like Mr. Brown in The Big Combo, although there is nothing villainous about Jolson's character.
The two priests who run the orphanage in Baltimore resemble a bit the older man in authority / younger good looking deputy in Lewis films - although this dramatic section was presumably done by Alfred E. Green.
Several of the numbers have ties to later Lewis approaches, characters and themes.
On the Banks of the Wabash. The early numbers in the film, sung by a performer representing Jolson as a young man, are sincere, gentle, and beautifully sung. They resemble the performances given later by young Johnny Crawford in A Young Man's Fancy and Old Tony. Like Crawford, this young man is gentle, respectful, dignified, sincere - an adolescent nice guy. These early song numbers are old-fashioned, turn of the century standards, like "On the Banks of the Wabash". Lewis will have a flair for nostalgic songs in films like Old Tony.
William Demarest's comic character here resembles Kevin McCarthy's performance as the zany Western pitchman in Suspicion. Both are comically exaggerated characters, both are full of energy, both engage in odd motions: Demarest's tumbling on stage anticipates McCarthy's hopping and skipping about.
Demarest causes spot lights to be shone, first on himself, then on young Jolson. This echoes scenes in Lewis crime thrillers, in which lights are shown by one character on another - see the end of The Big Combo.
After the Ball. This number is set to a striking montage, showing the young singer's face superimposed over old postcards, showing the cities where he is traveling and performing. The montage is original: I have never seen anything else quite like it. Having a performer in front of postcard cityscapes, anticipates all the Lewis films in which characters are shown in front of real architectural complexes with peaked roofs. On the other hand, this sequence might be by the film's Montage Director, Lawrence W. Butler. It would be interesting to see production records on The Jolson Story, to see who actually did what.
When You Were Sweet Sixteen. The adult Jolson celebrates getting his new, grown-up voice for the first time, by singing this song. It is in a hotel room shared with Demarest, who is on a bed full of Lewis' beloved spiral metal work. There are also spiral shadows on the walls. Two men sharing a hotel room at night, with one man sitting on the other's bed - with spiral metal work - anticipates Duel of Honor. It is a most unusual way to stage a scene celebrating a hero's passage into manhood. In both films, it conveys a strong, intimate sense of male bonding, a Lewis tradition. The song about Sweet Sixteen echoes the transition to the adult state.
Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own. Two dignified ladies in light red dresses dance to this tune briefly. The hoops they carry remind one a bit of the circular hanging baskets in Bombs Over Burma. In both films, the circular objects are associated with female characters. The circles form "female symbols", a counterpart to the phallic symbols linked to men elsewhere in Lewis.
Also: the title of this song perhaps has a double sense for film lovers, who enjoy every camera movement in Lewis and other filmmakers.
The Jazz Number. This opens with a lateral track down a New Orleans street, with objects such as food in the foreground - a Lewis standard. Many of the objects are pushcarts, anticipating a lateral track down a pushcart-filled urban street in The Undercover Man.
Next, a view into a New Orleans music club, through a door with spiral metal grillwork. This recalls views into the monastery through its gate in Bombs Over Burma.
My Mammy. When the hero gets down on his knees, a famous styling of the real Jolson, it oddly anticipates Lewis films like Face of Yesterday, with overwhelmed heroes on their knees. Mainly, however, I've always been baffled by the popularity of this Jolson signature tune. Why would millions of Americans want to see a white man in blackface, singing a fake Southern song about a mammy? One suspects racism, that's what. It's a grotesque chapter in US taste.
Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye. This is staged to a series of news clippings in scrapbooks, that feature photos of Jolson. Is this another example of Lewis' interest in photographs and newspaper articles? Or is this too the work of Montage Director Butler?
Liza. This stage number is set on a giant gold, geometrically stylized staircase. Lewis loves staircases. This is the most abstract one in any of his films. The number is also notable for the brightly colored costumes, with the heroine in gold, surround by a chorus line of men in powder blue evening clothes.
A Latin from Manhattan. Bright stage number has good choreography by Jack Cole, and is perhaps the film's number most closely resembling a full production number in a more conventional movie. It is shot in one long take. The take shoots from head on, moves laterally from left to right and right to left, and also rises to elevated views. Very nice camera movement merged with dancing. The shot resembles a bit in its motion the long take in the courtroom in Secrets of a Co-Ed (1942).
About a Quarter to Nine. After an establishing shot, this dance number for the hero and heroine is also in one nice long take. Like "A Latin from Manhattan", this song is from Al Dubin and Harry Warren. One of the few scenes anywhere in Lewis of a hero in white tie and tails. (The villainous, wealthy criminal in The Fat Man is described as being part of "the white tie set," but we never see him in anything more than a tux.)
Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody. Jolson is shown singing, superimposed over camera movement showing his enraptured audience. Great staging that merges an entertainer with his audience, a powerfully evocative scene.
The whole nightclub finale reminds one of the dance hall scene near the end of Gun Crazy. There is an orchestra seated in front of a dance floor, largely on the same level as the audience. Both orchestras feature male string players. A singer stands in front of both.
WARNING: This discussion contains SPOILERS.
It starts off as a film about a workaholic hero, like the protagonist of The Undercover Man and the Colonel in Retreat, Hell!. However, those men were slave drivers to their subordinates, while the exhausted detective in So Dark the Night pushes only himself. All of these men use work to destroy or interrupt personal relationships and a sex life. The hero is also known as the best detective in France - which aligns him with warnings in later Lewis films about the danger of trying to be publicly recognized as The Best: see The Big Combo, Day of the Hunter.
The older hero falls in love with a young woman, to whom he proposes marriage. The young woman is interested in the old man's money: a plot that returns in The Actress.
Delirious sexuality erupts, with the young woman and her handsome young boyfriend - like the erupting sexuality of the young couple in Gun Crazy.
A serial killer strikes: as in Invisible Ghost and Flowers at the Door. The plot here is very close to that of Invisible Ghost, right down to its solution, and the identity, psychological state and modus operandi (strangulation) of the killer.
We now have a detective story, with the hero using his detective skills to track down the killer - like many other Lewis detective films. There is a struggle not just to learn who the killer is, but also to develop clear evidence against him: like The Undercover Man, The Big Combo and The Bullet.
The well known mystery critic Jon L. Breen has coined the useful term "stunt construction" (Breen used it in his review column in the November 2007 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine). Breen did not offer an explicit definition, but I think it refers to mysteries which use clever twists to change, extend or violate the standard paradigm of mystery construction, which is "mystery occurs, detective solves mystery". Breen also might be referring to works in which we think we are seeing one thing, but which we later learn is something else: say a character whose thoughts we are following turns out to be misleadingly presented, say a character who we think is a cop, turns out to be a horse, small child or angel instead. The mystery public today apparently loves stunt construction - for example, readers of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine often vote in the annual awards contest for stories which twist the ordinary mystery paradigm, or conventions of narration.
So Dark the Night is a classic example of stunt construction. At first it looks like a normal "detective solves a mystery" movie, but eventually plot twists are introduced that violate standard patterns of the mystery genre.
I have mixed feelings about stunt construction, in general. It is not wrong, or inherently bad. But I suspect that some people automatically overrate stunt construction, and underrate mysteries constructed according to normal paradigms. Such a phenomenon seems to happening sometimes with Lewis films. Such good "normal mysteries" in Lewis' oeuvre as The Last Stand and The Falcon in San Francisco seem to be ignored. And the delightful A Lawless Street, a film that is full of mystery-like plot revelations, is also often dismissed. A big mistake!
If the plot is constructed around a gimmick, the use of genuine detection to track down the killer is skillful, rich in detail, and both rigorous and generous in invoking the classical detective tradition. The hero never guesses in his detective work. Instead, he is always discovering evidence, and using it to reason things out about the killer. Even when he has found the truth, he gets no intuitive realization or psychological discovery. It is all based on careful rationalistic discovery.
So Dark the Night is rich in shooting through foreground objects:
The shot of the hero walking down a Paris street, follows his feet. Most such Lewis shots show groups of men marching in unison; this is unusual in that it has a solitary hero. The kid who offers to shine the hero's shoes will return in Night of the Wolf. Lewis' camera moves up, then down, repeatedly, while it is tracking back and forth.
The first shot of the inn interior moves right through the wall: something Lewis regularly did, especially in his early B-movies. One suspects there is a cut here, while the camera is behind the wall - atypical of such through the wall shots.
At the end of the film, the hero repeats this camera movement. But it is more elaborate, with the camera stopping and starting while the hero pauses behind upturned chairs. This camera movement finally goes upstairs.
When the hero and heroine kiss, the camera moves in a circular arc behind them.
The big confrontation between Leon and the hero mainly consists of a long take. Leon is filmed so that the huge wine bottle rises up in front of him. This phallic symbol appears when he is threatening the engagement with his sexuality. Unlike the hero's ten gallon hat in front of him in The Last Stand, which seems good naturedly romantic, this is a angry, sinister phallic display. Before the threat, Leon walks from the background to the foreground; afterwards, he reverses his path back to the background.
Lewis follows the hero across the inn, then upstairs, with simple camera movements. A later shot shows the priest moving along the reverse path, down the stairs, and across the inn.
There is a most unusual tilted camera angle, that starts a camera movement across the town street, from bank to police station.
The housekeeper is first seen behind the bar, partly reflected by the mirror. In her last scene at the end of the film, she and the hero are also seen in the mirror in her room.
So Dark the Night is especially full of shots through windows and doors. These often incorporate camera movement.
Shots show the musicians through the inn window. At the middle of the film, we see both in and out through that window, watching the hero and the heroine. At the film's end, there is a very complex scene involving that same window.
We see first see the hunchback, cross the inn yard, then through the window inside we see a pantomime conversation.
We see out through the window of Leon's locked farmhouse. The camera moves from the window, to the door, then back to the window. We last see a huge mound of hay. Hay is often used in Lewis films (mainly Westerns) to structure settings.
The barn door is used for three camera movements:
In the town, the camera moves down from a light, down so that we are looking through an arched gate. Further small camera movements follow, adjusting views through the gate.
The tiny window outside the hero's bedroom, recalls the tiny openings in doors and gates in other Lewis. The camera will pass right through this window, into the hero's bedroom.
At the police station near the end, we see through the hero's door, then through that through his boss' door. Lewis likes such door-through-door stagings. The shot winds up in a downward pan.
The uniformed chauffeur is introduced, and often filmed, from the rear - like many Lewis gunslingers. His uniform gives a touch of militarism, along with the fact that he is a police employee. He also wears giant boots.
The boyfriend Leon is also in a costume with militaristic feel: a high peaked cap, jacket with patch pockets and belt. There are signs that this gives him an advantage with the heroine.
The hero is in a tuxedo, at one point: something rare for a Lewis protagonist.
The Return of October is always described as a "comedy". If a "comedy" is defined as a picture that actually tries to make people laugh, then The Return of October is not a comedy. Rather, it is a cheerful, light-hearted piece of storytelling. This charming movie is definitely what people today call a "feel-good film".
Lewis told Francis M. Nevins that he was fired in the middle of shooting The Return of October; the film was reportedly finished by Rudolph Maté. It is unclear how much or how little of the film was actually directed by Lewis. Many of the most personal Lewis touches in The Return of October are matters of design, costume and setting. These would all have been set during pre-production, while Lewis was preparing the film. They would have survived into the film itself, whether Lewis was on the set directing the scenes that contained them, or not.
While playing horseshoes, Ford is seen in sports clothes: a shirt and trousers in different but color-coordinated shades of brown. This anticipates the color-coordinated cowboy clothes of multiple shades of brown, worn by the Marshal in A Lawless Street, and Nick in The Big Valley. Also, sports clothes seem fairly uncommon in Hollywood films, which typically prefer their heroes in suits. The stylish shirt and trousers in The Return of October are full of elegant features - they are definitely high fashion. Photographs of Lewis sometimes show the director in sports clothes.
Ford also gets to be one of Lewis' heroes in white clothes. He wears an unusually spiffy long white lab jacket. And a white robe before swimming. Later, in Gun Crazy. it will be the heroine who wears a white robe. The heroine of The Return of October also wears a white jacket briefly.
There are numerous policeman and guard costumes throughout the film: a Columbia Studios tradition in the 1940's. The motorcycle cops are in black uniforms, something that will return in many of Lewis' crime films.
The jockey is another Lewis character wearing elaborate boots.
A deep focus staging shows us a window, which is in turn seen through a door. Such double level views are typical of Lewis.
The heroine moves on a pan through the crowd, while people at the auction make foreground objects in front of the pan. Such "camera movements with foreground objects" in Lewis are more typically lateral tracks rather than pans.
At the end, we are outside the auction barn, looking into to the barn through a large doorway. This is typical of how Lewis uses depth staging to link inside and outsides of rooms.
The hero and heroine do the dishes together. Dishwashing is a common activity for the characters on The Rifleman, although it is not usually linked to romantic pairings.
But the characters develop some unique aspects. The hero may be pompous when talking, but he is both a genuine lover of animals, and a person with original scholarly depth on the subject of animal psychology. The research that has gone into his dialogue is impressive. Unlike scientists in Hawks, who tend to be dismissed, this guy is a genuine thinker about his field. At the end, when he suddenly develops into a determined champion in the court, he reminds one of the Rifleman to come, and his articulate support of various causes. Both men are genuinely independent thinkers, who try to go deeply into subjects.
And the heroine in court also stands up for open-mindedness, and looking at both sides of an argument. This Lewis virtue was celebrated in Bombs Over Burma.
Lewis' early Westerns, Courage of the West and The Man from Tumbleweeds, also have characters who work for institutions, and who face funding difficulties with their work from the authorities.
The encounter between a man of science who has a lab and works for a big institution, and a zany outsider who comically ties him up in knots, anticipates The Hiding Place. The Hiding Place has Tige Andrews as a policeman with a police lab, and Jay North as a little kid who leads him on a merry chase.
The heroine dislikes the classical music and ballet, to which she is exposed by the inhabitants of the mansion. This anticipates in a comic way, the heroine of The Big Combo, who rejects her life as a classical musician, with tragic results. It will not be until The Fat Man (1958?), that a Lewis hero unequivocally endorses the worlds of classical music and intellectual culture.
The Undercover Man anticipates The Big Combo, being a portrait of a determined policeman, seeking evidence that will send a mobster to prison. The hero of The Undercover Man uses genuine detective work to develop evidence against the villain. In this he resembles the cop hero of The Big Combo. However, The Undercover Man differs from The Big Combo, in that it lacks mystery. Both the hero and the audience of The Undercover Man essentially know everything about the gangster villain right away. The hero's efforts are to find evidence, not to unravel some mysterious situation.
However, there are many ways in which The Undercover Man does NOT follow semi-doc conventions:
The early scenes of The Undercover Man show the dark, dark photography pioneered in T-Men, especially a movie theater illuminated only by the projection beam. And also that film's squalid urban settings, including a really cheap hotel room for the heroes, even tackier than the one in T-Men. There are encounters between police and crooks in men's rest rooms, also a prominent locale in T-Men. However, the film seems to lose interest in imitating T-Men after the opening Zanger episode, and The Undercover Man becomes less of a pastiche as it progresses.
The Undercover Man keeps to both semi-documentary tradition, and that of Lewis' own crime films, in showing scientific detection going on in government crime labs.
What is most unusual about the heroes of The Undercover Man is that they do not seem to carry guns. Until the final shoot-out, they never use guns or violence in the course of the film. They are among the most non-violent detectives in film history. Instead they use subpoenas, adding machines, and labs to do their detection.
The Final Shootout is a Western film tradition - one that shows up regularly in Lewis' work. In The Undercover Man, we see Ford strapping on his gun holster before he goes out for this last encounter. And using it in self defense at the end.
The detective heroes of The Undercover Man are described as "bookkeepers from the Treasury Department". A sign on their office door says they work for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the branch of the Treasury Department that collects taxes in the United States. However, this IRS connection is not stressed in the film. The opening narrator does NOT describe their branch of the Treasury, the way a film like T-Men did; instead, the narrator describes the heroes as "ordinary people" who stood up to crime.
Most semi-docs, and most crime films in general, show "policemen" going after "criminals or spies". The heroes of The House on 92nd Street (Henry Hathaway, 1945) target Nazi spies; the heroes of T-Men pursue counterfeiters. By contrast, Lewis' semi-docs have heroes that are part of the infrastructure of American society, rather than being cops in the pure sense of the term. The heroes of The Undercover Man collect taxes; those of A Lady Without Passport enforce immigration laws; in Retreat, Hell! we see US Marines fighting the Korean War. In addition, Gun Crazy takes us inside a meat-packing plant, giving us an inside tour of the beef-eating part of the US food system. This is a round trip through America's infrastructure.
While these characters are mainly presented sympathetically, Lewis does not try to hide down-sides of their work. A Lady Without Passport explicitly concludes with its hero realizing that attitudes towards immigration need to be changed, and that immigrants need help. In Retreat, Hell!, the Marines die in record numbers in the massacre at Chosin Reservoir. Gun Crazy criticizes low pay at the meat plant. The Treasury agents of The Undercover Man mainly work by offering payments to tax informers, a distinctly unglamorized view of their profession.
The Undercover Man also sets forth the infrastructure of the Mob. We get a detailed look at the Mob's financial and legal teams, and how they do business.
Other Lewis films also look at infrastructure. Bombs Over Burma pays tribute to the US volunteers who helped keep China's infrastructure going during the Axis invasion. The Last Stand includes US Customs agents, somewhat unusually for a Western. And many of Lewis films have heroes who build infrastructure, such as telegraphs, roads or railroads.
Lewis films often portray a whole city, and the businesses within it. The Undercover Man shows a traditional urban American area, with people packed in tenements. Street peddlers and stands are everywhere, selling everything from newspapers to fish. More stands are inside the train station. We also see ice haulers. All of these small businesses seem to be honest. They are largely treated sympathetically, although the film mildly criticizes them for not standing up to Capone and his hit men.
The grocery store also pushes "numbers" on its pathetically poor clientele. The sinister grocer is one of the few small businessmen anywhere in Lewis, who is viewed negatively. He is severely criticized for being part of the gambling racket. This recalls the hair salon that doubles as a gambling joint in Railroaded! (Anthony Mann, 1947).
Mrs. Rocco works as a janitor in a squalid tenement. This recalls the rooming house and its bitter maid in My Name Is Julia Ross.
When the hero and his wife go to the country, it is seen as a place where farmers do business, NOT as a tourist destination. A sign announces we are in the "Dairyland of America": probably Wisconsin, although The Undercover Man coyly refuses to name its locales. The hero talks about buying such a dairy farm himself. Lewis sees the countryside as a place of business, just like the city. The dairy farmers here complement the cattle ranchers that run through Lewis Westerns.
The detective hero is compared to an adding machine. Later, the ledger that contains the key evidence will be compared to a school arithmetic workbook. Both the detective, and truth itself, are compared to the mathematical process of Addition.
In some other Lewis films, the plot gets a metaphor: in The Fat Man, the mystery plot is compared to a Bach "Theme and Variations", for example. Here in The Undercover Man, the metaphors center on the detective and the evidence, instead.
In the train station, the camera moves in a circular arc, around one of the characters. This movement goes through nearly 90 degrees.
The line-up contains a lateral track down the line-up, with watchers in the line-up audience serving as foreground objects. And the police identification room has a lateral track, with filing cabinets serving as the foreground objects.
Glenn Ford moves down the street to the Rocco apartment. The camera tracks with him, shooting Ford through people and stands on the street, that serve as foreground objects. The track is a bit on the diagonal, rather than the pure lateral track more often seen in Lewis. This shot also has a slightly elevated angle. It anticipates the great tracking shot through the carnival people in Lewis' next film, Gun Crazy.
Later, when Salvatore Rocco is attacked by mob hit men, the camera moves in the reverse path down what looks like this same street (it might be different). These tracking shots are a reverse of the earlier track with Ford. They are example of a Lewis standard: a pair of tracks, one that that moves forward along a path, a second shot that moves in the reverse along the same path.
When the wife arrives at the train station in the middle of the picture, the camera moves with her, around the corner of the train station building: also a Lewis standard. A second camera movement soon reverses the path, showing the wife and husband moving back around the corner. This second shot includes one of Lewis' fervent reunion scenes.
The killing of the lawyer near the end, has two camera movements shot through the window of a moving car. Such shots will return in even more spectacular form in Lewis' next two pictures, Gun Crazy and A Lady Without Passport.
The heroine's departure on the train, near the start of the film, anticipates the first shot after the credits of The Fat Man (1958?), an hour-long TV detective pilot Lewis directed. The train in the background is full of elaborate windows and other rectilinear patterns, like the apartment buildings in The Fat Man shot. Both the train and the buildings are viewed on the diagonal. In the foreground of each shot, a short path leading straight to the camera makes an angle to the diagonal background. Stan walks straight from the background to the foreground, in The Undercover Man shot, in the Lewis manner; a sidewalk stretches from background to foreground in The Fat Man.
When the lawyer drops the Feds off at the post office, the shot anticipates a related shot in The Hiding Place (1959), an episode of the TV series The Detectives. The Undercover Man shows a car pulling up, stopping, just before the detectives get out; in The Hiding Place, a bus drives up, stops, and the villain gets off the bus at the end of the shot. Both shots are pans; both start at angles; both end with the camera in a frontal, straight on view of the characters. In The Undercover Man, this frontal shot shows the post office in the background. In The Hiding Place, the bus and a hill behind it are at the end of the shot. In both shots, the transition from an angled view, to a straight-on composition, is visually striking.
The lawyer's huge estate, and tree-lined grounds, recall the mansion in My Name Is Julia Ross.
The early shots through merchandising stands in the train depot, anticipate the shot through the store window that opens Gun Crazy.
The morgue shows a door in the background, seen through a pair of door-like arches. Such doors seen through doors are a common Lewis staging.
The police station has high, arched windows, like the stations in So Dark the Night and The Big Combo.
The grid at the line-up perhaps recalls the grids of windows that run through Lewis, such as the crook Evans' window in The Last Stand. It also looks like the grid of dates in Heath's notebook in Night of the Wolf: both grids are full of numbers, both are used for measurement. See also: the grid-like floor plan drawn on the newspaper in Gun Crazy. (Historical note: what looks like the same police line-up grid turns up in The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk, 1952).) The line-up sequence is notable for its many elaborate compositions, that succeed one after the other, as separate shots. While it contains a striking camera movement, the scene shows that Lewis can also build episodes out of a series of short, creatively composed shots.
Lewis shows the complex lighting fixtures of the line-up room, and shows the room in different lighting schemes.
The outside doors of the police station are swinging doors.
The lawyer's mansion features many complex peaked roofs and gables. Such peaked roof complexes used as backgrounds are a Lewis staple.
The chairs and table support framework at the mansion seem to have small spirals in their metal work. Spirals also appear over the outside entrance to Rocco's cellar apartment.
The apartment shared by Salvatore Rocco and his girlfriend has an alcove in its rear.
Signs are everywhere in The Undercover Man, helping to tell the story, in the Lewis manner.
A room at the coroner's office has a sign projected as a shadow on the wall, allegedly from an unseen window. A similar sign-shadow will recur at the police station in The Fat Man.
The country sequence midway in The Undercover Man forms a contrast to the urban ugliness which surrounds it. It has a lyrical lake scene, associated with romantic love: a Lewis standard. And we see the hero and heroine under a tree with arching branches, also a Lewis standard. The hero soon sits and leans against the trunk, as in Old Tony to come.
Just before this the hero and heroine have gone hunting together: a scene presented with a straight face as a nice, romantic activity for a husband and wife to do together. This romantic scene with guns anticipates Lewis' next film Gun Crazy. - but without the irony and criticism of guns found in all Lewis films from Gun Crazy (1949) on. Similarly, Lewis' later work from Gun Crazy on will take a consistent anti-hunting position. And in The Rifleman episode Old Tony, the hero and heroine will once again enjoy roughing it together around the countryside, but they will be collecting old Indian arrowheads for their outing, rather than using guns or hunting.
The Undercover Man also shows the hero and heroine fishing together. Lewis will show characters enjoying fishing throughout his work: it is the favorite activity of young Mark in The Rifleman.
Costume designer Jean Louis did the spectacular suits Glenn Ford wore in such films as Gilda and The Big Heat. But The Undercover Man is set in the seediest urban districts imaginable, like many semi-docs, and Ford's look has been toned down. He wears the dowdiest, cheapest looking suits as possible, in keeping with his "Federal Agent just getting by financially" character, and just manages to look decent enough to be a movie hero.
Sympathetic young bookkeeper Sydney Gordon and his wife do better, costume-wise. We see them both in black bathing suits, with husband Sydney being another Lewis hero with his shirt off. Then Sydney Gordon switches over to a black leather pilot's jacket and white pants, while his wife is in a white dress. Such black and white clothes run through Lewis. They often signal things about character (white clothes for non-conformist heroes, black for gunslingers), but the white-and-black clothes of the Gordons do not seem to have any such meanings. They instead seem to mark out the couple as glamorous, and being "sympathetic young lovers".
The Gordons are young married lovers on the run. They anticipate the couple in Gun Crazy.
Sydney Gordon is played by future director Leo Penn. Quite a few Lewis actors will go on to careers behind the camera: Lamont Johnson (Retreat, Hell!), Cornel Wilde (The Big Combo) and Brian G. Hutton (Long Gun from Tuscon) as directors, Lewis regular Ned Young as a scriptwriter. All of these performers are cast as nice young leading man types, mainly in suppporting roles.
Cops stationed in public places, such as the train station and outside the movie theater, also wear black leather jackets. Police in later Lewis TV shows will often wear black LAPD style uniforms, including a leather-jacketed motorcycle cop in The Hiding Place.
The crime empire here includes bookies, crap games and the numbers racket. This is consistent with the many anti-gambling films Lewis made, which show gambling as part of a crook's evil sway. There are also scenes of crooks gambling themselves, with the vicious lawyer betting at the track - also a Lewis tradition.
The grandmother's soliloquy about the evils of mob rule in Sicily, will return in The Guest. Both describe reigns of terror, in which a loved one of the speaker was killed because he stood up to the Mafia. Both embody Lewis' thesis that ordinary people need to stand up to crime and oppressive leaders, and help establish decent government. This view will be central in A Lawless Street and Terror in a Texas Town. They also reflect Lewis' general belief in mutual aid among citizens.
The Undercover Man is a based-on-fact version of the government attack on Al Capone. This subject would be treated a decade later in Phil Karlson's 1959 pilot for the TV series The Untouchables. (Karlson's pilot is also known as The Scarface Mob.) Karlson's film in turn would be remade as The Untouchables (Brian De Palma, 1987).
Both The Undercover Man and Karlson's version tell a similar story. We see a dedicated Federal Man arrive in Chicago, and set to work uncovering evidence against Capone. In both versions, the Fed has little personal contact with Capone, interfacing instead with Capone's lawyers. Eventually, the Capone case is brought to trial with the Fed's evidence, which convicts Capone. In both, the Fed is a low key, businesslike man, who wears stuffy suits with vests. The Fed has a loyal, sensible wife who gets in danger of mob reprisal, in both films.
Karlson's film has a much more violent hero, however, in that his Fed is constantly staging raids on Capone establishments, something the hero of The Undercover Man never does. In fact, The Undercover Man never shows a Capone night club or distillery - although it does get to a non-Capone burlesque theater. The Undercover Man concentrates entirely on Capone's gambling enterprises. Capone is never named in The Undercover Man, being referred to as the Big Fellow.
Gun Crazy (1949) opens in the night and rain - almost the archetypal image of film noir! (My Name Is Julia Ross also opens in the rain.) More personally for Lewis, this is a picture of a city street. The camera moves straight forward - and we see that we are now looking outward, from inside a shop window. This combined exterior and interior, with a camera movement encompassing both, is also a trademark of Lewis' visual style.
The young anti-hero throws a brick - it makes a circular hole in the window. This is like the circular hole that another young boy, Mark in The Rifleman, will rub out on the stained glass window in Waste (1962).
The business-with-the-gumball-machine robbery shows the couple backing out of the store, the camera moving with them. Eventually we reach the door, and can see the street through the window. We watch as the couple move out into the street.
The most famous shot in Gun Crazy is the long take sequence, showing the bank robbery from the car. Like many Lewis camera movements, this combines both outdoors and indoors, with the "indoors" here being the interior of the car. Lewis shoots through the windows of the car: showing the outdoors from the "indoors". And in the middle of the take, the camera shoots out of the car along with the heroine, waits with her on the sidewalk, then pulls back into the car. This is an even richer movement between indoors and outdoors.
After the robbery, there is a moving camera shot in the country, where the couple switch cars:
When the hero enters the payroll office, the camera tracks laterally with him. Many people at their desks are in the foreground, as the camera tracks past. It really conveys the sense that his path is surrounded by people.
A third lateral track is at the dance hall. The couple and camera move from left to right. Other dancers serves as foreground "objects" in the shot.
Lewis like such symmetry in his staging, with people coming to an area, then leaving it.
2) The tracking shots during the meat plant robbery also contains a mirror image of its opening:
The second half is a direct reversal of the first half, in the path it follows through numerous locations.
However, this extended sequence is more elaborate than most such path / reverse path combinations in Lewis. Each path is broken down into a series of camera movements, rather than the usual single camera movement following the path. And the camera movements during the reverse path involve different set-ups from those of the entrance path, even though the path itself is an exact reverse.
3) A third pair of moving camera shots take place at the sister's house, at the end. When the couple first arrive, they and the camera move from right to left. They go through the porch, then continue on to the side of the house, looking through the window.
When they leave the house for the last time, a virtuosic long take moves roughly along the same path - but in the reverse direction, from left to right. The hero comes out the door on the far left, and moves right to the car. He is joined by the heroine, and they get in the car after discussing the baby. The camera moves around to show them in the car. They and the car leave, revealing the reporter and sheriff, still standing on the porch, at the far right.
Cities are often "protagonists" in Lewis: shown in detail in his films. In the opening shot of a city street, we can see many individual buildings, in the Lewis tradition. There seems to be a feed store, and a small restaurant, just like in the main street of Lewis' Western series, The Rifleman.
The bank robbery shows much of a town - another Lewis city as protagonist, shown in detail. The car goes up and down numerous city streets.
Other robberies also show much of other towns, as do the tracking shots near the end, depicting the couple fleeing the dance hall.
The young hero at the start will slip and fall. As he tries to raise himself from the pavement, he will see a policeman has caught him. Agonizing experiences and sinister revelations that come to Lewis heroes while they are near the ground are a Lewis image.
In the court, the hero and the hero's sister are both facing in the same direction, not looking at each other. This is an example of a geometric principle of staging common in Lewis. Soon, the hero's two young friends will be at right angles to each other at the table in the courtroom: also a common Lewis staging.
The hero in Gun Crazy is obsessed with guns. Unlike later Lewis films about the gun cult, no one tries to lure him into the cult. In fact, his sister and the court try to wean him from it, unsuccessfully. But people do try to pressure him into the next step: killing with a gun. First his buddies put macho pressure on him. Then his wife uses her sex appeal. These are both tremendous forces.
The gun cult is linked to sexuality in Gun Crazy. Clearly, the hero finds guns sexually exciting. Like the heroine of The Big Combo, he has a strong need for a non-standard kind of sexuality.
The gun cult was already present in writer MacKinlay Kantor's original prose short story, "Gun Crazy" (1940), and later appeared in Kantor's 1947 first draft of the screenplay for the film version of Gun Crazy (see Jim Kitses' monograph Gun Crazy for details). There has always been a consensus that Kantor was the inventor of the gun cult, as a subject of storytelling. Lewis likely first encountered it in Kantor's screenplay circa 1948.
While Lewis did not invent the idea of the gun cult, there are elements in his pre-1947 films that reflect some parallel, related ideas:
After making Gun Crazy in 1949, Lewis returned to the subject in many later works:
After Gun Crazy, other directors took up the subject of the gun cult. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) has a hero trying to escape from his gunfighter past. But the heroine is dubious about whether he has really changed his gun-use compulsion: "You're still gun crazy!", she tells him.
The hero joins the US Army, and works exclusively with guns there, as a shooting instructor. Lewis himself made training films about the M-1 rifle for the US Army during Lewis' 1943-1944 Army service in World War II: six hour-long films about the rifle that explored every part of the gun in exhaustive detail. See Francis M. Nevins' book for Lewis' account.
A later Lewis episode of The Rifleman, Honest Abe, will make connections between the gun cult, and the seductive appeal of militaristic life styles, although the connection is not close. Militarism appears in The Spy Ring, Pride of the Bowery, A Lady Without Passport, Retreat, Hell! and The Rifleman episodes Panic, The Deserter, The Martinet, The Prisoner and Honest Abe. Militarism and its seductive appeal are explored most deeply in The Deserter.
The hero of Gun Crazy winds up disguised in a stolen naval uniform. Discussions of militarism in Lewis often center around uniforms: see dialogue in The Deserter. Like the gun cult, there are suggestions in Lewis that the appeal of militarism is partly sexual. Like many other things the hero does in Gun Crazy, his wearing of this uniform is a transgressive sexual fantasy, the acting out of a forbidden sexual impulse.
The connection between uniforms and sexuality is made explicit in Lewis' The Spy Ring (1938). The Mata Hari villainess seductively tells the Army officer hero, that she is attracted to him because she has a "uniform complex".
Uniformed policemen are everywhere in Gun Crazy. The hero's friend the sheriff seems to live inside his leather uniform jacket - it's rarely off during the entire movie, even when he's a kid! While there are no comments on this, it is clear that lots of groups of men are finding psychological satisfaction in their uniforms.
Gun Crazy is not the first crime thriller in which a bad guy dons a stolen uniform. The naval officer hero of Honeymoon for Three (George Blair, 1948) has his stolen by a killer, who wears it as part of his crime schemes. This is faithfully based on the mystery novel Puzzle for Puppets (1944) by Patrick Quentin, a writer whose work frequently explores gay imagery.
And in Lewis' own Boss of Hangtown Mesa, the bad guy steals the hero's cowboy clothes at gunpoint, also so that he can pass himself off as something he is not.
The delightful shooting contest, in which the hero meets the heroine, is a splendid set piece. It is one of many strange "duels" in Lewis, that use unusual weapons - here a contest over lighting matches. Such duels occur in Gun Crazy, Retreat, Hell!, Terror in a Texas Town, Pompey, and in The Rifleman episodes Duel of Honor, Strange Town, Baranca, Honest Abe, The Shattered Idol, Death Never Rides Alone and Sidewinder. The boxing match in the early Pride of the Bowery, also has elements anticipating such duels. This is not counting all the "routine" gun battles or fist fights in Lewis films. The contests with strange weapons all have a comic side. They deliriously present something the audience has never seen before, and are comically over the top.
Like the duels in Baranca and Duel of Honor, the Gun Crazy contest involves alternate actions between the two contestants. This duel is unusual in that involves a man and a woman: most of the later contests in Lewis are between two men. Like Baranca, it leads to strong feelings of friendship between the two contestants. Earlier, the hero shows off his English dueling pistols: such weapons will return in Duel of Honor.
The duel is staged along a strong axis: a straight line connecting the man and the woman. This is true as well of the contests in Baranca and Duel of Honor.
The hero's wonderful fringed Wild West outfit is fun, but not quite real. Buckskins almost never show up in Lewis' Western series, The Rifleman. Exception: In Sheer Terror, a man wears one, and the hero comments on how they are never seen in his town. It turns out the man wearing the buckskin is a fake - a bit like the carnival costuming here.
The hero's cowboy outfit comes with huge, conspicuous boots. These are much bigger than they need to be - part of the "boots as a bravado display mechanism" that runs through Lewis.
Gunslingers in Lewis Westerns are often shown from the back, and often followed by a moving camera. When the hero first wears his cowboy clothes, he is shown from the back, during such a tracking shot. Later, the Sheriff will also be shown from the rear.
The couple, and especially the hero, keep putting on new clothes and disguises, as part of their hold-ups and getaway attempts. The bad guy in Boss of Hangtown Mesa also changes his outfits to aid his schemes. And the mob killer in The Fat Man changes from a chauffeur's uniform to a business suit, right on camera.
This perhaps relates to Lewis heroes who take on new identities.
The opening finds the young hero unable to shoot an animal, while out hunting with his friends. A variation on this incident is discussed in Lewis' Bonanza episode, The Quality of Mercy. Lewis would later express systematic skepticism about hunting for sport in one his most powerful works, Day of the Hunter.
The hero and heroine are themselves hunted by dogs at the end. This is one of many Lewis films in which humans are in danger from animals. This ranges from the bear attack at the end of Day of the Hunter, to shows like The Pet and Night of the Wolf, in which heroes are infected by diseases by animals. In some ways, these films show animals turning the tables on humans, endangering them instead.
And like most such proponents of non-violence, Lewis shows a deep skepticism about the use of violence.
Shelley, who was one of the founders of non-violence, wrote two poems that sum up two different roads of possible social change:
Some Lewis films have positive portraits of people who use non-violence to solve social problems. These films are Lewis' Prometheus Unbound:
For one thing, the couple in Gun Crazy differ from the heroine of The Cenci in that they are far from being any sort of idealistic social reformers. They are bank robbers. They are out to better themselves, not to improve society. As the remorseful hero of Gun Crazy says, "We are killing other people so we don't have to work!" In general, Lewis' positive films about people who use non-violence are often about social idealists, whereas his tragic, negative portraits of the violent are about protagonists that are less socially committed.
This is not the whole story. The heroes of Gun Crazy are explicitly presented as working class. And working people in Gun Crazy are shown to have real problems, especially low pay. In some ways, the couple can be seen as people in revolt against low pay: they reject the $40 per week the hero could earn at an honest job, and turn to robbing banks, instead. Still, they only try to help themselves, rather than trying to change the system, build a labor union, or do any other sort of social activism.
Whatever elements of legitimate social revolt exists in the heroes' actions, it is doomed by their embrace of violence. Their choice of guns and violence leads their revolt to both failure and death.
One might also note that Lewis films are consistently against stealing. So are most Hollywood films, so this is hardly unusual. But Lewis also makes a personal stand on this issue. The remarkable civil disobedience drama, The Deserter, explicitly condemns stealing, for example. A number of Lewis films have couples who use violence and theft to try to get rich: see The Visitor and Boots With My Father's Name. These films make no excuses for their villains at all: they are seen as purely and simply rotten. The films do not show their crimes as having any political dimension. This makes it likely that Lewis views the bank robbing couple in Gun Crazy as also being morally wrong.
A number of Lewis films have heroes who escape the gun cult. Usually this happens near the end of the story. The hero's escape is a narrow one, and usually means he has just managed to escape with his life. Such films include A Lawless Street, and the Rifleman episodes Shivaree, Boomerang, Face of Yesterday, Sidewinder and Old Tony. The escape is often linked to a solitary, alienated man in the gun cult rejoining the human race and society. One gets a similar perspective in Gun Crazy. The friends emphasize that the town is "their community" - and that they want no one to get killed in it. By contrast, the hero's rejection of their plea alienates him and the heroine even further from society, driving them out to the mountains.
The hero's choice here is also between violence and non-violence. The hero of Shivaree is faced with a similar choice at the end of his story - one presented in starker and more explicit political terms than in Gun Crazy. In both films, the hero is also asked to think about the future: what will the consequences be of his choice?
Considering other Lewis films, it is likely that Lewis feels sympathetic to the cop and reporter and their offer in this scene.
Marxist interpretations of Gun Crazy (by critics other than myself) depict the hero and heroine as "attacking capitalism" when they go on a crime wave. But these interpretations present too narrow a picture of the kinds of labor shown in Gun Crazy. The couple are not merely rejecting work at capitalist enterprises like the factory: they are rejecting every sort of work, including kinds praised in other Lewis films, such as teaching and infrastructure building. I think such Marxist views are just plain wrong.
The chase finale pits the fleeing couple against the sort of workers glorified in other Lewis films:
Scientific detection will return (briefly) in A Lady Without Passport and more centrally in The Bullet. And all the use of communication equipment in Gun Crazy recalls the telegraph company at the center of Boss of Hangtown Mesa, and the importance of sending telegrams in The Deserter.
Many semi-docs have a finale shot on location, at an industrial or technological facility. In Gun Crazy, the robbery at the meat packing plant is similar, even though it happens in the middle of the film. The year before, the semi-doc thriller Bodyguard (Richard Fleischer, 1948) had a finale in a meat plant. However, the meat plant in Bodyguard was shot on small, shoddy looking studio sets, unlike the spectacular real factory used in Gun Crazy.
A Lady Without Passport (1950) looks at an INS agent investigating the smuggling of aliens from Havana into Southern Florida. This is long before Castro's rise to power in Cuba, and the film involves none of the political complexities that the subject of US-Cuban immigration holds now. Most of the people being smuggled are refugees from Eastern Europe, who have come to Cuba hoping to leave from there for the US. This is hardly a new theme for Hollywood pictures: see Mitchell Leisen's Hold Back the Dawn (1941) and Herman Shumlin's Watch on the Rhine (1943) (two films I didn't especially like, by the way). Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (1949) also deals with displaced persons who move from locale to locale.
A Lady Without Passport can be seen as a mixture of the semi-documentary film noir, with the tale of exotic adventure.
Semi-documentary features include:
However, there are some important differences here from the semi-doc tradition, as well. Most gangs in semi-docs are monsters. The murderous spies in Henry Hathaway's The House on 92nd Street (1945) and counterfeiters in Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947) are especially terrifying. By contrast, George Macready's smuggler here is genteel and civilized. He is a Bad Guy, and up to no good, but he is a representative of a far different tradition of suave, sophisticated and articulate movie villains. Macready is a member of a theatrical family - he's a descendant of the famed 19th Century Macready the Tragedian - and he is one of the gifted classically trained actors that old Hollywood loved to employ as character actors.
Macready is a suave villain with two thug-like henchman, a Lewis tradition. One of the henchmen tries to persuade him to murder the hero. This recalls the insidious villain of The Patsy, who also tries to incite a murder.
Another key difference between A Lady Without Passport and semi-docs. Usually, the hero of a semi-doc goes undercover as a mobster, and tries to infiltrate the gang. Here the hero pretends to be a refugee hoping to be smuggled into the US, and poses as a customer of the gang. This gives the film a very different feel. Semi-docs are full of men who discover new, macho and often frightening personalities when they go undercover as crooks. Our hero instead is impersonating a sophisticated, world weary Hungarian refugee, one of many fleeing from the Communist takeover of that country.
This does all sorts of things. It helps him gain new sympathy for the refugees the INS deals with. He gets to see the other side of refugee issues from the inside, and causes a moral awakening in the hero. In the final, tracking shot of the film, he decides to identify with refugees, and help them - like the way the hero of The Rifleman repeatedly identifies and bonds with social outsiders.
It also helps the hero bring out a sophisticated side of himself that is buried deep within. In real life he is a Hungarian-American, named Peter Karczag, and probably of poverty stricken, Depression era working class origins. It is clearly a good experience for the hero to express such intellectual yearnings. It is part of the great movement of ordinary Americans after World War II to get an education and make something of themselves. The hero's experience here mirrors in a fictional way the real life experiences of many Americans of the era, in getting an education and opening up new horizons for themselves. It also helps him meet Hedy Lamarr, who is also an East European refugee hoping to get into the United States.
This brings us to the film's biggest difference from both semi-documentaries and noir films in general: the elements of exotic adventure here. The tale of adventure in an exotic, often tropical clime was a standard Hollywood genre. It lacks a catchy name, such as "film noir", but it is a recognizable Hollywood film genre all the same. Hedy Lamarr often specialized in such films. Her The Conspirators (1944), directed by Jean Negulesco, is a classic of the kind. I confess I miss such films today. Contemporary Hollywood thrillers all seem to be set in some hick town full of good old boys who hang out in the town's only lunch room - bar - pool hall. They never take us to Lisbon or Vienna or Caracas or Kuala Lumpur. Especially with today's color cinematography and location shooting, such films could be visually spectacular, as well as wonderfully escapist.
A Lady Without Passport (1950) resembles Josef von Sternberg's Macao (1952) in its combination of noir with exotic adventure. Both films are also very sympathetic to their heroines, who are straightforward, decent women. Exotic adventure films always tended to have a likable leading lady at their center. These were not the destructive femme fatales of film noir. Rather, usually they were good women in trouble. Both they and the hero would struggle to solve their problems.
Unlike such Lewis films as The Falcon in San Francisco (1945) and The Big Combo, A Lady Without Passport is basically a thriller, not a mystery story. There are few if any mysterious situations to be solved in A Lady Without Passport, and both the hero and the audience know all of the information about the criminal gang right away. The policeman hero does little that resembles true detective work. The operation of the INS is sophisticated and shown in great detail in the second half of the movie; but they are basically conducting a large scale manhunt, not solving a mysterious crime.
Most of the true detective work in A Lady Without Passport occurs in its brief opening section, before the entrance of the hero and the INS into the film. This sequence shows the New York City police investigating a killing, using both investigative and high tech lab work.
The characters of A Lady Without Passport resemble those of The Big Combo (1955), at least when looked at in broad terms. Both films have a young policeman hero, who is investigating a criminal gang run by a sophisticated, menacing villain. In both cases the heroine is a basically decent woman who has become romantically involved with the gang's powerful leader, in both films the hero falls in love with the heroine, and tries to get her to leave the gang and the villain. In both films the villain has a pair of murderous henchmen, who operate as a team, and who do the villain's dirty work, violent killings and mayhem. The henchmen are much more lower class acting than the suave villain. In both the policeman hero has a boss; in both police organizations there is also a colleague who collaborates with both the hero and the boss.
However, the characters in the two films have strikingly different personalities, when looked at up close and in detail. The hero of The Big Combo is a man of straightforward directness, and also of a maniacal intensity. By contrast, the hero of A Lady Without Passport is a suave, wily trickster. He is a low key person who approaches life with wry humor and a sense of confidence. He is a smooth, fast talking con man, always coming up with a slick scheme to manipulate the situation. He is fast on his feet, always with a tricky, manipulative story, and a benevolent con game to pull, rather like Sgt. Bilko. He is also always beautifully dressed. He is basically a comic character. The hero's ability to play roles, and to appear to be something other than he actually is, link him to the hero of Lewis' A Lawless Street. The scene where the hero flirts with the landlady here anticipate those between the hero and his landlady in A Lawless Street.
The heroine's motivations in the two films is different, too. In The Big Combo the heroine is perversely involved with the evil gangster. But the heroine of A Lady Without Passport is involved with the villain only because she is desperate to be smuggled into the United States. She has no emotional feeling for the villain; she is simply another one of his customers. She also has a far less privileged background than the heroine of The Big Combo. In fact revelations about her refugee history are a political and dramatic highlight of the film. These revelations are also one of the few places in A Lady Without Passport in which hidden truths come to light. As usual in Lewis, these hidden truths are deep, all-important parts of a character's mind and life.
Perhaps the most unusual camera movements in A Lady Without Passport occur towards the end of the film. The villain's plane has just landed in the Everglades, and we see the passengers leaving it. We see this through the eyes of a good guy Navy pilot from above, who is watching them from the skies while he is piloting a small aircraft of his own, just a bit above the ground. He repeatedly circles above the landed aircraft. We can see all of the characters below; each is a distinctive, recognizable figure, as they scramble over the huge landed plane, and move through the complex Everglades landscape around it. I do not recall seeing such moving aerial shots of figures on the ground in any other movie. The circular motion of the watching plane / camera, the intricate movements of the characters below, and the complex landscape all combine to make beautiful visual patterns. There are two such main overhead shots; each executes a nearly 360 degree complete circle around the landed plane. Such circular camera movements are fairly rare in film history, let alone from a moving plane above the action. These shots recall the robbery sequence in Gun Crazy, in that both are shot from within a moving vehicle: a car in Gun Crazy, a plane in A Lady Without Passport.
The Havana interior sets for A Lady Without Passport include elaborate staircases. The one at the hero's hotel has a curved, sweeping staircase; the villain's cantina has a rectilinear staircase that is enclosed in a cage of barred grillwork. Lewis exploits the staircases for all sorts of moving camera shots. He is constantly finding new ways to move his camera along the staircases, tracking the movements of the characters up them. And the characters do move up: they are often ascending, but rarely shown descending in this film.
Two spectacular moving camera shots show the Cuban police arriving at the hotel. First they go up the exterior staircase, then a second shot follows them as they move around the hotel's interior circular staircase, then up it.
Both the tall, pillared banister at the hero's hotel and the grilled cage at the cantina allow Lewis to shoot his characters through grill work, also a favorite device of Lewis', one that will return in The Big Combo. An early scene here in a police lab is also shot through shelves full of lab equipment. Lewis has shown a consistent fondness for such masking objects in the foreground of his compositions.
Macready's cantina has arched, semi-circular windows; we see a similar shape in the police building in The Big Combo.
The walk the hero takes through Havana at night is one of the most visually complex scenes in the film. We see both a geometric street lamp, something favored in Lewis' Westerns, and also neon lights. The hero passes by a white picket fence, also a Lewis favorite. The man singing with his accordion to a woman, is one of many gentle Lewis men, who sing accompanying themselves with an instrument.
The Border Patrol office has a giant wall map, like the Marine headquarters to come in Retreat, Hell!.
The hero's bed is full of spiral metalwork, a Lewis tradition. Once again, the spirals seem to be a different shape, and arranged in different patterns in the bed frame, than in any other Lewis film.
During the first fight in the hero's room, spiral shadows from the bed are projected on the white clothes of both the hero and the villain. It is a unique effect. The spirals shadows change as the two men move around. There will be spiral shadows on the walls from a bed in The Safe Guard.
During the final fight, we see the bed spirals themselves.
Back at the Immigration headquarters, we see two agents: an older, highly knowledgeable man Frank Westlake (James Craig), and his handsome young assistant Jack (Steven Hill, who would go on to a long television career). This is like the Marshal and his good-looking young deputy to come in The Bullet. Like the Marshal, the older agent is an expert at technology. He also likes coffee, with a pot on his desk, recalling Micah in The Rifleman. The younger man is far from being dumb, unlike the deputy in The Bullet. Instead, the young agent is dressed up in a snazzy black uniform, making him resemble one of the black-clad gunslingers in Lewis Westerns. Like them he is always conspicuously armed, with a gunbelt here, and a rifle he carries erect in the swamp boat.
When the hero is on the phone with the older agent, there is an elaborate camera movement following the young agent. First we see him at a file cabinet, with a jutting drawer. Then he moves behind a giant pillar. Lewis loves foreground posts and pillars in his traveling shots: this is one of the thickest and most gigantic. When the young agent emerges from behind the pillar, he has turned around, so that we see a side view of him, centered on his gun. The camera movement stays on his gun while he crosses the room. This is like the gun-focused camera movement on the gunslinger in Squeeze Play. It includes a full figure view of the agent, unlike the close-up on the gun in Squeeze Play. As in some other Lewis films, the black leather gunbelt is echoed by black leather chairs in the room. There are also black, phallic looking objects: telephones, the jutting file cabinet with an open drawer.
There is also a complexly staged shot, in which the older agent walks completely around his desk, while talking to the younger man. The camera often faces the younger agent, while the position of the older agent slowly revolves during the shot.
Other shots with the young agent also serve to show his uniform in the round. This includes the one where he walks back and forth in front of the older agent's desk, and finally sits down in a chair in front of it. The INS is a non-military government institution, run on quasi-militaristic lines. In this it resembles the Civilian Conservation Corps in Pride of the Bowery (1941). Lewis shows enthusiasm for uniforms and militaristic discipline in both movies. There is also the man in an airplane pilot's uniform standing at attention, when the New York policeman flies in to meet Westlake near the start of the film. In later works, such as The Deserter, Lewis will show great skepticism about military life and militarism.
In the wall behind the young agent's desk, there is some sort of high tech equipment. It has a wheel inside, that looks for all the world like a small wagon wheel. Perhaps this is an inside joke from Wagon Wheel Joe. The arched, spoked windows at the American embassy also look wagon-wheel like.
In the airplane, Lewis uses his staging at 90 and 180 degrees. There are three rows of passengers, each sitting at 90 degrees to each other. At first, Macready has his back to the heroine: 180 degrees. Then he turns around, so now he is facing in the same direction as the heroine. This recalls the conversation by the cliff in My Name Is Julia Ross, in which Lewis characters make similar spins.
The passengers look out of a window, which also reflects the government airplane tagging along. This combines reflections with through-the-window staging.
At the Jackson airport, Lewis gets complex staging out of a shack whose walls seem nearly all windows. Lewis has several shots that look through two windows of the shack at once. Such two-levels deep staging through windows or doors in a Lewis tradition. One such shot also involves camera movement around the corner of the shack, to look in the window. This shot also includes some reflection in the window at first, before the moving camera makes the window transparent, allowing us to see inside. This transition from reflection to transparency invokes the "mystery of movement", the way things suddenly change when things move. It is an effect that anticipates Stan Brakhage's Wonder Ring (1955), although it is not identical with any camera shots in the Brakhage film.
The finale of the film resembles that of Lewis' Gun Crazy, with the characters moving through the tall grasses and vegetation of the Everglades while a mist covers everything. The mist and pier also recall the finale of The Conspirators. I think mist and fog were considered appropriate backgrounds for the glamour and mystery of Hedy Lamarr.
Some down-the-river shots are Lewis straight-line lateral camera movements shot through foreground objects, here vegetation. Some shots of the heroine and Macready walking through the misty vegetation at the end are also of this form.
The hero seems to be the only person in Havana wearing a white, tropical suit. However statistically unlikely this is, it does serve to focus attention on him in every scene in which he appears. There is usually extra light on the hero as well. His white suit stands out blindingly in shot after shot.
This is the exact opposite of many films, in which the hero is wearing the darkest suit in the scene. The dark suit makes the hero similarly stand out. It also makes him look like an authority figure, and the most important man in each scene.
The heroine is also in white clothes. The similar colored clothes are a visual sign of "bonding" between the hero and heroine.
The white suit and courtly, old world manners assumed by the hero when he goes undercover, link him to the visiting Count in Duel of Honor, a man who also dresses in elaborate white clothes.
In general, the costumes here show the well known MGM "gloss", the lavish design that engulfed many MGM movies. A Lady Without Passport at least looks as if it had a bigger budget than many Lewis films. It is not expensive by Hollywood standards, but its middle range budget seems bigger than the ultra-cheap productions of many Lewis movies.
The airport attendant in South Jackson wears a cap with a jagged crown. This is similar to the cap worn by Jughead in Archie comic books.
The hero's INS boss is played by James Craig. Craig appears here with his mustache. James Craig sometimes appeared with mustache and sometimes without it. He looks completely different with and without it, virtually like two different people. The mustache is the sort of idiotic thin one worn by 1940's Society playboys, such as Zachary Scott's spineless Society leech in Mildred Pierce. In films without it, such as Sam Wood's Kitty Foyle, George Marshall's Valley of the Sun and Anthony Mann's Side Street, Craig seems like a strikingly handsome leading man. With it, he looks ridiculous, I think.
Retreat, Hell! (1952) is set in the Korean War, and is Lewis' sole film to deal with modern-day ground combat. The subject of Retreat, Hell! is linked to Lewis' Cavalry films. 7th Cavalry, The Journey Back and The Vindicators all deal with Native American massacres that left few US Cavalry soldiers alive. Retreat, Hell! similarly shows a disastrous campaign in Korea, that decimated the US Marines' First Battalion. The Cavalry films largely concentrate on the bitter afterwards of the massacres, and look at who was to blame for the military disasters. By contrast, Retreat, Hell! shows the actual massacre itself, a slow, step by step process of annihilation that takes up the final third of the film. And Retreat, Hell! offers no criticism of the military tactics. Instead, it concentrates on showing that the Marines involved were heroic fighters.
Although Lewis was a political filmmaker in much of his work, Retreat, Hell! avoids any discussion of politics. The situation is treated simply as a military one. The politics of the Korean war are never broached; there are no patriotic speeches glorifying the United States; and the enemy in the film is never discussed in political terms: the word Communist is never even mentioned. There are some stirring, but non-political, speeches by the Colonel (Frank Lovejoy) glorifying the Marines and their willingness to fight, and take care of their wounded. And a tribute is paid to the British Royal Marines, once again for their fighting and support of the American Marines.
The Colonel's speeches at first seem admirably defiant. But actually, throughout the whole movie his speeches are always about how his men are going to survive. They don't: their casualties are huge. Everything the Colonel says about survival turns out to be false.
The film is mercifully free of the slightest racism in its portrayal of the North Korean and Chinese enemy soldiers. They are simply depicted as a formidable fighting foe, and nothing else.
The film gives a sympathetic depiction of South Koreans. This is consistent with Lewis' pro-Civil Rights, respectful treatment of non-whites point-of-view throughout his work.
A Southern US soldier briefly compares the North-South conflict in Korea to the US Civil War, and points out that he is once more fighting on the Southern side. As best as I can tell, this is simply a comic observation, of no significance. It does not seem intended as a political commentary on either the Korean War or the US Civil War, and has no unintended political depths either. The Southern soldier is simply there to establish that cliché of war films: that soldiers from every part of the US are serving. Lewis' Rifleman episodes would emphasize that his hero Lucas McCain had served in the Northern (Union) Army during the Civil War.
Retreat, Hell! is set entirely within the point of view of the US Marine Corps. The film opens with Marine generals at the Pentagon making emergency preparations for the Korean War, and the rest of the picture never leaves Marine Corps characters or settings, aside from brief glimpses of the US Navy or British Marines. The Marines' job is to fight, not to get involved in politics, and the film adheres to this approach.
Retreat, Hell! was made with the cooperation of the US Marine Corps, and has one of those official US Armed Forces "technical advisors" credited whose job it is to ensure that the film reflects official US Government doctrine. The presence of such a government censor was the price Hollywood always paid for US Armed Forces help with men, material and locations. Early scenes contain interesting location work at Camp Pendleton, one of the two main Marine Corps bases in the United States. And Lewis told Francis M. Nevins that many of the "Korean" locations were actually reconstructed in outdoor areas at Camp Pendleton, as well.
The Wikipedia article on the 1950 battle of Chosin Reservoir (the subject of Retreat, Hell!) says that Chosin was a famous and publicized battle in its time, with Western media being especially admiring of the Marines. This perhaps explains why the film Retreat, Hell! (released early 1952) got made about it, even while the Korean War (1950-1953) was still raging. The article also says that even today, the US Marine Corps regards Chosin as one of its finest hours.
I am not an expert on military history, the Korean war, or Hollywood war films. So you will not be learning here anything about the portrayal of military events in Retreat, Hell!.
But even an ignoramus like myself can be startled by the differences in US Government views between 1952 and 2007. Retreat, Hell! is a mournful film, that concentrates on the sacrifices of countless Marine Corps lives in a disastrous battle that led to a retreat, not a military victory. By contrast, the right wing Bush administration does everything it can to cover up military casualties. When ABC News broadcast a program showing photographs of soldiers who had died for their country in Iraq, many right wing owned TV stations refused to show it. While Retreat, Hell! makes a big deal of the Marine Corps' concern for its wounded, the Bush administration abandoned wounded soldiers to scandal-plagued hospitals.
Most conservative, Bush Administration era doctrine about war promotes the idea that "War is an easy, effective and inexpensive way to solve political problems." The Iraq War was sold by conservatives as a quick, easy way to get rid of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and to build a prosperous democracy there. The war would be cheap, and maybe even pay for itself. As I write (2007), the Iraq War has been going on for over four years, has cost nearly a trillion dollars, killed over one hundred thousand lives, found no weapons of mass destruction, left Iraq in ruins, and led to an endless civil war. Conservative ideas about "easy, effective" war have been proved wrong, and have led to a huge disaster.
By contrast, Retreat, Hell! suggests that war is very difficult, costly and slow - and does not comment on whether the Korean War is effective at achieving any goals or solving any problems. Or even winnable. Instead, its message seems to be "The US Marines are brave fighters, even in nightmarish circumstances." Retreat, Hell! seems to have been made to glorify the US Marine Corps. It is not made to promote the current right-wing line that "war is easy and effective at solving political problems".
Aside from its links to Lewis Cavalry pictures, Retreat, Hell! has an isolated position in Lewis' work. It shares remarkably few of the characteristics that run through most other Lewis films. Most of the shared characteristics are related directly to warfare: gun use, the injured, mourning.
Guns. Combat in Retreat, Hell! is almost entirely in terms of rifles, although hand grenades make an appearance too. The film's most frightening scene is the one where the Marines run out of ammunition. I've never seen anything like this in any other war film. This seems like a personal scene for the director of Gun Crazy. Lewis spent World War II making training films about Army rifles, so guns and ammunition are definitely a core part of his view of combat.
What is perhaps stock footage of a huge naval gun being loaded is also interesting.
However, Retreat, Hell! is not about the gun cult, and does not show anyone with an obsession with guns, unlike other Lewis films. Instead, it shows the military use of guns.
Injury. Lewis films often show sick or injured people; the wounded and their care are a major part of Retreat, Hell!.
Mourning. Lewis also often showed mourning for the dead; it plays a role in Retreat, Hell!, as well. There are also characters thought to be dead, who come back to life - also a Lewis tradition.
Infrastructure. The hero wants to use his skills as an electronics expert, and work in communications. This perhaps links him to the infrastructure specialists in other Lewis films, such as telegraph installers and road builders. He is forced into a rifle company leadership role, instead, and never gets to do any infrastructure building, unlike other Lewis films.
Strange means of combat. The early scenes where the sergeant trains the recruit in jujitsu are one of Lewis' comic duels involving unusual means of combat. This scene offers some welcome comedy respite in what is otherwise a grim film.
Photograph. The hero has a photograph of his wife and kids, the way the hero of The Wyoming Story has during his separation from his son.
The three main characters are summoned by a ticker-tape teletype. Such mass communication devices are a favorite in Lewis semi-docs.
The Colonel leaves for his duty by train - like the hero of The Undercover Man.
The hero enters the film outside a Marine Reserve center. The center has two giant lanterns on its front, glowing in the twilight: a Lewis motif. The hero soon walks from the background to the foreground, a common Lewis staging.
Camp Pendleton is treated as one of Lewis' "cities". Its entrance gate contains a building that is all glass walls, like the airport building in A Lady Without Passport.
The first view of the Camp's interior shows a street leading back into the distance, and another street stretching off to the right. This is the same layout as the Western towns in Boss of Hangtown Mesa and The Wyoming Story.
The hero's Quonset hut has a white picket fence around it.
The peaked tents relate to the peaked roofs that run through many Lewis films. The tents form a well-composed Camp cityscape, in the shots outside the headquarters. The hero once again walks from the background to the foreground, near the headquarters. This gives us our first full view of his elaborate dress uniform. His walk echoes his previous foreground walk at the Reserve center, where his walk showed off his snazzy civilian suit and tie. Parallel walks also occur in Shotgun Man.
Lewis gets compositional mileage out of the camp amphitheater. This is perhaps like the boxing arena in Pride of the Bowery, a place where public events can be witnessed by crowds.
There are signs everywhere, also a Lewis tradition.
The commanding officer Colonel Corbett (Frank Lovejoy) and the hero Captain Hanson (Richard Carlson) are another instance of that familiar Lewis pair, the tough older man working for a government institution, and his younger, good looking deputy. (Actually both actors were the same age in real life - but the Captain seems younger on-screen.)
The hero is gradually forced by the Marine Corps to give up his civilian life as a family man, with wife and kids. The whole process is a bit like the way Julia Ross is forced to give up her old identity. The hero of Retreat, Hell! loses his family life, however, rather than his actual identity.
Retreat, Hell! is like the anti-Gun Crazy, in that the hero allows the government to separate him from his wife. By contrast, the outlaw couple in Gun Crazy defiantly stay together, no matter what. Retreat, Hell! also anticipates Lewis films about men who separate from their children under pressure, such as The Wyoming Story and Night of the Wolf: always a totally wrenching experience for a Lewis hero. To be fair to the hero, he has little real practical choice in any of this. The government here is just way too powerful. It is determined to send him to Korea, and that's that. One might note that unlike other Lewis films, there is no fervent reunion between the hero and his loved ones. In fact, it is not really clear at the end that the hero is going to get back alive from Korea...
While many Lewis films deal with the seductive appeal of militarism, here a desperately unhappy hero has to be forced into a military role, every step of the way. The hero does seem to like his spectacular dress uniform, in which he looks great. But he only gets to wear it for five minutes, before being forced out of it and into dungarees by the Colonel, in an act of military discipline. The Colonel keeps on wearing his own dress uniform. This is perhaps a bit like the way the villain of Boss of Hangtown Mesa forces the hero to change clothes with him.
The hero spends the first half of the film relentlessly being chewed out by his tough commanding officer. Despite this, they eventually come to male bond a bit in the second half. This is quite different from most male bonding in Lewis, which involves spontaneous connection between the hero and social outsiders.
The opening shot is a one-take shot, moving down from a giant map of Korea, to a room full of generals. The giant map, hovering over officials in a war-room, recalls the D-Day map of Europe in Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1943) - and the giant wall map of the Caribbean in Lewis' own A Lady Without Passport. The opening seems modeled on that of Courage of the West, Lewis' first feature. Both take place at a US Government wartime planning conference in Washington, with all participants seated around a table. Both open on a map, both are one take, moving camera sequences.
Many Lewis camera movements are a bit less spectacular in Retreat, Hell!, than in much of his cinema.
A pan shows the hero entering headquarters at the camp for the first time. We see other soldiers in the foreground, including the entrance into the film of Sgt. Novak (Ned Young), who is at 90 degrees to the hero and the Major. These soldiers are not placed as systematically as the "foreground objects" in front of many Lewis tracks. And this shot is a pan, not a lateral track. The pan ends with the opening of a door, through which we see the Colonel for the first time in the film.
Inside the Colonel's office, the characters sit at three sides of a table, showing Lewis' fondness for 90 degree angles in staging.
The urban combat scenes are filled with hokey heroics. But they also show some good compositions, centered on telephone poles with cut wires, that droop to the ground. Both the poles and the hanging wires are creatively arranged. They recall Boss of Hangtown Mesa, with its telegraph poles being installed. In Boss of Hangtown Mesa, the wires are hanging down because they have not yet been connected. In Retreat, Hell!, they are being destroyed in war. Some of the compositions in Retreat, Hell! are first rate. They benefit by putting the film on Pause, and allowing one just to look at them - they go by fast in the movie. The compositions also show rectilinear building facades, of a kind often not seen in Lewis. They perhaps recall a bit the facades in The Vindicators.
The wires recall the posts and bars that Lewis likes to shoot through - but they are much thinner, and more curved. They also recall the beaded curtain doorways in Lewis films.
Only after the combat is done, do we see a building in the background with three peaked roofs. Such roofs are a Lewis favorite. But they are not part of the compositions with poles and wires.
Soon, we have scenes staged around the corner of a building - a common Lewis architectural background. We eventually see rows of covered bodies on the ground. This image will return in One Killer on Ice.
The final third of Retreat, Hell!, the relentless massacre, is set in the snow. These are the only snow scenes in Lewis that I can recall. The mise-en-scène suggests death. The only comparable scene is the nightmarish, surreal icehouse in One Killer on Ice (1965) - also a scene of death.
The Colonel loses consciousness after being shot, and there is a gap in story continuity while he is out. This is like the traumatic scenes of the hero being drugged in The Falcon in San Francisco, My Name Is Julia Ross and The Big Combo.
The Chinese Army enters the film as an off-screen fanfare by military bands. As often in Lewis, such off-screen sounds are menacing.
Retreat, Hell! is mainly nightmarish in feel, especially after the first half hour of training, when we move into actual combat. I find it hard to imagine most people "enjoying" it, whatever the word "enjoying" might mean. Could anyone make - or want to make - an "entertaining" movie about a tragedy like Chosin Reservoir?
Retreat, Hell! has a simple subject: people are shot at in combat, and lots of them die.
Retreat, Hell! suffers from a lack of two things found in Lewis' best work: brilliant storytelling and camera work. It cannot be considered one of his better films. On the other hand, the films succeeds at its own apparent goal, which is to show the War Is Hell side of combat. Lewis deserves credit for showing the dark side of mass death in war.
In addition, the training scenes are lively and visually inventive. And the final third has a nightmarish power.
Still, Retreat, Hell! and 7th Cavalry are among Lewis' least typical films. Despite some real merits in Retreat, Hell!, one can be glad that Lewis made so few war films, and concentrated on Westerns and crime films instead.
Many of the scenes in The Big Combo (1955) seem designed to reveal the personalities of their characters. Many of the scenes are interrogations, where either the police or the mob grill someone. Others are confrontations between the police and the mob. The point of most of these scenes seems simply to show the hidden tics of personality in the characters. Typically, the characters in these scenes do not know each other very well. Often times, the interrogators are trying to find out some simple facts from the person they are grilling: it is an attempt simply to get to know the person, and some basics of their lives. The film treats this as an opportunity for character revelation. There is also an effect of separation between characters: the policeman seems to have few close friends, and spend all of his time with strangers, for instance.
The overall structure of the film seems directly reminiscent of Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953). Both films in turn recall John Cromwell's The Racket (1951). They deal with an isolated solitary but incorruptible cop who is trying to bring down a powerful mob leader. He is obsessed with this quest to the point of delirium. The films center on his search for evidence against the mob leader, evidence that will lead to a conviction. In Lang's and Lewis' films, the cop falls in love with the mobster's girlfriend; in The Racket, a decent young newspaper man falls in love with her. In earlier, 1940's film noirs, when this happened, the sinister girl friend led the hero into a life of crime and corruption. In these mid 1950's films, the opposite occurs: the girlfriend rejects the mobster, and aids the hero on his quest. The girl friend is virtually a prisoner of the mobster in these works, menaced by his henchmen. There is often a feminist subtext here, showing the oppression of women by the mobster.
In the 1950's mob films, the mob seems to have powerful social ties, and to be deeply entrenched. The Big Combo lacks the emphasis on social corruption found in The Racket or The Big Heat, but its mobsters seem as open and as untouchable as these. The mobsters in all of these films use dynamite as a principal weapon.
The world initially depicted by the film seems grim. Mr. Brown and the Combo he controls seem both all-powerful and invulnerable. The film literally refers to the mob here. One also suspects that there is a political allegory. The Big Combo was released in 1955, and it emerged from a world menaced for decades by totalitarian dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Consciously or unconsciously, the portrait of the viscous Mr. Brown reflects such dictators.
Like the semi-documentaries, the police have high technology equipment to aid them in their quest: the hero of The Big Combo uses a lie detector and has help from a photographic enlargement lab. The squad room outside the hero's office has a police radio center, although the hero never sends a radio message, unlike many other Lewis crime movies. Maps are prominent on the walls in the police station - but they play no role in the story, unlike other Lewis films.
Although they have honest policemen heroes fighting crime, these mid-1950's films like The Racket, The Big Heat, and The Big Combo differ from the earlier semi-documentaries in several ways. Their police hero is an isolated cop with little help from the rest of the force, unlike the team oriented semi-docs. In fact, his superiors are often critical of his investigation, and try to have it shut down. He works for a city, not the national organizations of such films as T-Men (the Treasury Department) or The Street With No Name (The FBI). He does not go undercover. His identity is known to all the mobsters right from the start, and he operates in public. Similarly, he seems to know all about the mobster and his organization, lacking only evidence to convict. By contrast, in the semi-docs the villainous gangs are often shadowy, dimly understood organizations about which the police know little.
The Big Combo is structured as a mystery story. It is not a whodunit: everyone knows from the start that Mr. Brown is the sinister mob head. Instead, it tries to track down Mr. Brown's secrets, secrets that will allow police Lieutenant Diamond to break his power and send him to prison. These secrets slowly emerge from inside people. They are locked deep in their emotional being. Only personal revelation of the deepest part of their psyches will open these hidden truths up.
A number of mechanisms come into play here. The truth sometimes emerges from altered states of consciousness, such as the heroine's delirious remarks while hospitalized. These remarks are straight from her unconscious. They start the whole mystery unrolling, and are the key breakthrough in the case. Their source in the unconscious mind of a basically innocent woman suggests surreal truths about the world: that the human mind is deeper and more powerful than all organized forces, including the mob and its money. The goal of bringing the unconscious into the open is one of the main aims of the surrealist movement. This story is a hopeful tale about the positive forces that emerge when people unleash their subconscious ideas, feelings and knowledge. Other use of unconscious truth occurs in the lie detector scene, in which Mr. Brown's secrets are partially revealed.
There are other sources of truth in the movie. Rita, the kind hearted burlesque dancer, hears information from the street. Such info has become a cliché in movie and TV crime dramas. Yet there is also something profound about the idea that people, ordinary people without money, know things that can change the world.
Photography also reveals truth here. These scenes invoke the semi-documentary tradition, that crime labs can use high technology to make discoveries. But even the human eye of the hero Diamond reveals truths here from photographs: his analysis and understanding of the photo of Alicia gets everyone closer to reality. The discovery of every photograph here is an elaborate, highly dramatized moment. Photography leads to truth, especially when it is interpreted by human intelligence.
The structure of the plot in The Big Combo emphasizes detection. It shows the step by step detective work by which the detective hero and his allies gradually uncover the truth. Such step by step detection was also the main subject in a large group of detective stories contemporaneous with The Big Combo. This is the detective comic book Big Town, a now largely forgotten comic book (1951- 1958). Big Town is perhaps the greatest of all detective comic books. It is not a noir work. But its reporter hero behaves very similarly to Diamond in the film. He uses endless intelligence and effort in the step by step, logical uncovering of hidden truths and mysterious secrets.
The Big Combo is among the purest detective and mystery stories in the history of film noir. Its hero is a detective, and he does detective work throughout the whole movie. His detective work is successful, and he uncovers the truth at the end. The detective work is successful in another way: it makes the world a better place at the end, by breaking the power of Mr. Brown.
Unlike those semi-documentary films, where the hero's undercover work makes the often makes the film as much as an adventure story as a detective work, this film sticks to pure detection. There are other examples of film noir that also emphasize detection, such as Edgar G. Ulmer's Murder Is My Beat (1955) of the same year. Such semi-documentaries as Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948) also concentrate on detection.
The Undercover Man, The Big Combo, The Fat Man all feature determined good guy detectives battling urban mobsters. All three films contain sympathetic, poor Italians, who are victimized by the mob, and who the detective heroes try to get to speak up against the mobster villains. We see the poverty stricken living quarters of the Italians in all three films.
In The Undercover Man and The Big Combo, the police stage mass arrests, in the hope of extracting some unknown knowledge. In both films, mob lawyers get writs of habeus corpus to get people away from the clutches of the police.
In The Undercover Man and The Big Combo, the detective hero is compared to an adding machine. Both detectives are also workaholics - unlike the gourmet and culture-loving hero to come in The Fat Man.
Both The Big Combo and The Fat Man feature character actor Robert Middleton as a sympathetic, good guy sleuth: the police Captain in The Big Combo, the private eye hero of The Fat Man. In both films, the detective hero reminds a bad guy that we will be judged by a Higher Power. Both films have climaxes at airports.
Both films use classical music performed on a keyboard as a metaphor. In The Big Combo, Diamond's intensive lecturing to Susan at the concert, is compared to the fierce hammering of the pianist on stage. The Fat Man contains even more elaborate metaphors, comparing the plot structure to classical music played on the harpsichord.
In both Secrets of a Co-Ed and The Big Combo, a mobster insists on carrying a gun, despite his superior's orders not to. And in both films, this leads to a shooting.
Both Secrets of a Co-Ed and The Big Combo have a respectable upper crust woman carrying on a transgressive romantic relationship with a mobster.
In all of The Spy Ring (a spy, not a mob film), Secrets of a Co-Ed, The Undercover Man, The Big Combo, The Fat Man there is internal dissension among the bad guys. They quarrel and disagree among themselves, and scheme against each other.
Many of Lewis' scenes show the characters alone in a big space. This space is an interior, and often surrounds the characters with emptiness. At the concert, for instance, the heroine seems to be entirely alone, except for the performer on stage. This could just be an artifact of low budget filming, but it still has an emotional effect on screen. Similarly, the interrogations seem to take place in rooms in which there is lots of empty, unoccupied space. The characters are often in the center of this, instead of near some wall. The hero is often photographed framed against an arched window in his office; its unusual, non rectilinear shape suggest a troubling lack of support for him - he is not backed up by the geometry of architecture anywhere.
The simplest archetypal style in The Big Combo shows a character in one plane of the picture, then another character much deeper into the shot. These two characters are often on a rough diagonal, receding either to the left or right of the frame. There are many variations on this. Sometimes there is a whole group of characters instead of a single person, either in the foreground or background of the picture. One scene with the hero and his former girlfriend shows them both seated; the girlfriend is stretched out towards the back of the frame, isolating the two characters just as in the typical Combo two shot.
At the end of the film, there is a striking variation. First we see the heroine standing, with the hero standing further out, just as we have seen countless separated characters throughout the film. Then she moves forward and draws abreast of him. They walk together from this point on.
The character in the foreground often has a desk or a table. This helps orient the shot, create a rectilinear coordinate system, that is often different from the view angle of the frame. Walls of rooms sometimes help with this coordinate system as well, for example in the shot with the projected photographs in the police lab.
Lewis often positions his characters according to strict 90 degree coordinates. Surprisingly often in the film, they will be positioned so that they are at sharp right angles to each other. On other occasions, they will be at 180 or 360 degree angles, so they are facing each other, or both facing along a common axis. Group scenes might have characters at all of these angles. Furthermore, all the angles of the characters will tend to be parallel with the rectilinear coordinates of the scene, as established by walls and tables. Chairs sometimes help keep the characters in these strict orientations. For example in the scene where the heroine confronts Alicia, the hero places a chair for the heroine at a 90 degree angle to Alicia's. Surprisingly, when the characters are standing, they also form into strict 90, 180 and 360 degree angles. The characters often slightly turn to look at each other; a head might be turned, or a torso slightly twisted. But still not enough to disrupt the fundamental rectilinearity of the staging.
Most often, the camera is on an angle to the coordinate system of the characters. Occasionally, as in the hero and Mr. Brown's confrontation at the bend of the hospital corridor, the camera is pointed directly at the characters, making the plane of the screen be parallel to the planes in which the characters stand. Oddly, here the characters are at an angle to the corridor itself; they are not parallel to anything in the background of the image, which is somewhat unusual in Lewis' style here.
People in the film are often lying down, due to sickness or fear or romance. They also stand up a good deal, especially the heroine and the hero. The men are often seated; it is a common posture for them.
Cornel Wilde is often photographed in a way that shows his upper body, from the waist up. Alton sometimes has a blindingly bright light on his white dress shirt, that emphasizes his torso.
Fante and Mingo are in matching suits and ties at the opening, that makes them look like a pair.
Fante has his shirt off, when he is phoned at night. Later in The Rifleman, it is always hero Lucas who has his shirt off. This makes Fante be a "hero character" in The Big Combo, an index of his sympathetic treatment in the film. The boxer is also shirtless, recalling the boxers in Pride of the Bowery.
The dialogue discusses Dreyer's career as a sea captain, and mentions that he seemed to disappear as an individual, when wearing his ship captain's uniform. There will be later discussion of uniforms in The Deserter.
Lewis loved long takes, and often employed them in his films. Nothing in The Big Combo is as spectacular as the long-take robbery in Gun Crazy. Still, perhaps the majority of the scenes in The Big Combo are filmed in single long takes. Oddly enough, this is not especially noticeable - it took me several viewings of the film to catch on to this. Maybe I'm just dense!
Lewis sometimes "interrupts" these takes to insert close-ups. For example, when the hero is interrogating Bettini, the long take is cut into on two separate occasions to show close ups of the hero (Cornel Wilde). After the close-ups, the camera resumes its original position it had when the long take was going on, and the long take shot resumes. The effect is almost as if the scene where originally shot in one long gigantic take, and the close-ups were only inserted much later. It is not clear if this is true, however. Long take shots present tremendous burdens to actors, who have to hit all sorts of cues and who have to sustain their performances over many minutes. It is possible that by breaking his shot up this way with two close-ups, the three long take segments remaining became easier for the actors and crew to shoot that a single humongous take would have been.
Sometimes these interruptions proliferate. The scene towards the end, where Mr. Brown grills his men over the shooting of Dreyer (what a name!), starts outs as a long take single shot sequence, like so many others in the film. However, it is eventually interrupted by shots of Mr. Brown and other shots of MacClure. The camera cuts back and forth between these views, and occasional resumptions of the camera position of the long take, which fitfully resumes and goes away throughout the rest of the scene.
A brief scene in an elevator is similarly interrupted by so many kinds of shots that it becomes a virtual montage sequence. After so many long takes, its change of technique seems very unusual.
Whenever there is a change of set, for example when a character walks through a door to go into a new room, Lewis cuts, and starts a new scene and a new long take. Whether for reasons of budget or style, he does not track a character from one room to the next, weaving his camera along with him, as do some moving camera stylists. In any case, this means that for Lewis here, a scene and a take is confined to a single room and studio set. This "single set" approach to long take filming is also found in Frank Tashlin's comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957), a film whose subject matter is completely different from Lewis', but whose camera approach is oddly similar.
Within a scene, Lewis tends not to employ continuous camera movement, except for a few scenes showing his characters entering or leaving. Instead, he constructs his long take through a series of static positions. First the characters will be in one tableau, standing or sitting at fixed angles to each other. Then the characters will move into a new position; sometimes the camera moves here too, to reframe the image. Then both the characters and the camera become relatively still again, until the next change of position. Both the actors physical positions relative to each other, and their framing by the camera, tends to be significant. Lewis will sometimes move his camera closer in, to get a tighter shot of the characters' faces. He also experiments in moving the actors to the far rear of the set. Bettini at one point moves to the rear and faces away from the camera, for all the world like a character in a 1930's Mizoguchi film. It seems unlikely that anyone in America was studying Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy (1936) in 1955, but Lewis' effect is startlingly similar. The characters can also move up to the far front of the image, too. This includes the memorable scene in the hero's apartment mourning the killing. This scene shows some of Lewis' most virtuoso restaging of events within the set and his single long take.
There are a number of sequences in The Big Combo that involve camera movements through visually elaborate environments. These scenes are in the tradition of complexly designed moving camera shots found in such directors as Josef von Sternberg and Max Ophuls. The sequences in The Big Combo involve the passage of people through the outer office that leads into Wilde's private office at the police station; and the scenes backstage at the burlesque theater. What is most notable about these scenes is their rich visual design. Both sets are visually complex, and loaded with every sort of wall covering, tables full of objects and paraphernalia, and complex lighting, just as in Sternberg and Ophuls. The backstage sequences also involve shooting through elaborate grill work in the foreground of the scene, a device frequently employed by both Sternberg and Ophuls.
These sequences are relatively brief in The Big Combo. They usually involve the rapid passage of some character through the set. While they are unbroken long takes, they are not typical of the long takes in much of the rest of the movie. Lewis did much experimenting with all sorts of long takes and camera movements throughout his career. His films are not confined to one approach; instead, they are wildly eclectic, experimental, and imaginative in terms of their use of mobile camera work.
There are no dramatic confrontations going on during these highly designed scenes. They simply show a character walking calmly through a complex environment. They briefly change the mode of the film, away from intense dramatics, and towards a contemplation of visual beauty. They are like jewel like bits inserted in the storytelling.
The shot that opens in the secret bank room for the first time, moves out of the room, to the left in the apartment, and over to the door. Then the same shot reverses direction, and moves back along the same path, back into the secret room.
The Big Combo seems non-architectural. In many films, the architecture of the sets is used by the director to create a visual style. This is not true here. Lewis and Alton evade this by a number of strategies. For one thing, most of the sets of The Big Combo are remarkably plain. A corridor or a room will be bare, just plain walls with a door in it.
Also, the photography tends to obscure the architecture. Often times, the background will be simply dark, or misty. This obscurity tends to de-emphasize architecture in the composition. By contrast, the people in the shot are intensely emphasized.
A number of standard types of Lewis architecture do occur in The Big Combo:
Another approach: many of the scenes have objects in the foreground. These are more important to the composition than any background imagery. These objects tend to be free standing. The coffee paraphernalia in front of the policeman hero in his office is supported by a table that can be barely seen, it is so dark. The coffee pot and stuff seems almost to be floating in space. Similarly, when the policeman interviews Alicia, her flowers are shown in front of them. These are numerous free standing spikes. We do not see the ground supporting the flowers; the spikes just seem to be standing up in the foreground of the frame. For all we know, the flowers are on an unseen wheeled cart that the director is positioning in front of the image, and not in the ground at all. Or they could have been added by process photography.
These objects are always in the lower part of the screen. They do not form a "frame", surrounding the actors. Instead, they form a low wall or boundary in front of the image. They serve as another row in the depth of field. Just as the two characters tend to be seen at different depths of the image, so does this low wall of objects form another planar layer in the foreground. It serves to underline the receding depths of the image even more.
Other sets have foreground barriers ranging from floor to ceiling, notably the jail and the backstage corridor leading to the dressing room, which contains a large wire mesh cage in the foreground behind which the hero passes. People are often in movement through these. They do not form static compositions; instead they form scroll like images that unroll in time, as people pass through these regions. The same is true of the outdoor path bordered by the flower spikes, the path through the outer police office leading to the hero's private room, and the walking through the antique shop. These scenes almost seem to swallow up the characters, to suggest that they are passing through a maze. The objects in the foreground tend to have a "soft" look to them: flowers, wire mesh. Such foreground visual effects remind one of Ophuls and sometimes Sternberg.
Dreyer's antique store has a shelf of knickknacks on it. Lewis treats these as foreground objects, through which he shoots tracking shots of the character. The shelf recalls the bathroom shelf near the end of My Name Is Julia Ross.
Towards the beginning of the film is a genuinely architectural montage. This is a series of shots showing the heroine running, chased by Fante and Mingo. These shots show considerable architectural/compositional flair, in the tradition of film noir. They go by very rapidly. Using the pause button will help you slow down and linger over these beautiful compositions.
Especially beautiful in these scenes is what seems to be a lunch room or food vending area, in the wall of some sort of auditorium or giant lobby. Alton has lit the lunchroom and other segments of the wall, so that beautiful geometric patterns of light and darkness are created.
In the opening, the heroine often moves from the background to the foreground of the frame: a Lewis tradition. Later, we will see Rita similarly move to the foreground of the alley outside the theater.
There are only a few genuine exteriors in the film. Shots that take place "outside", such as in the entrance to the theater, or the flower path, tend to be on sets that are as enclosed as any of the interiors of the film. This avoidance of exteriors also aids in the lack of any architectural quality to the film: few buildings are shown.
There are a few genuine exteriors. When Diamond goes to visit Bettini, we see his apartment building along side one of the huge aerial storage tanks that frequently show up in noir movies, especially the semi-documentaries. A similar tank occurs in the background, near the end of The Undercover Man, when Ford and the mob lawyer talk outside. This circular structure also occurs in Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947), Richard Fleischer's Follow Me Quietly (1949), Robert Parrish's Cry Danger (1951) and Phil Karlson's Kansas City Confidential (1952). These tanks are virtually a signature of noir. It is as if the filmmakers thought, "We're making a film noir, we better put in a storage tank somewhere".
Similarly, we see a nearly obligatory shot of a street at night, with cars streaming through, followed by a pan showing Diamond walking along the storefronts along the street. Such night in the city shots are also typical of noir. The Big Combo is full of lighted signs, rather than the street lamps which are typical in Lewis.
The shots of suspects being taken to the police station use the same covered, arched outdoor area as Anthony Mann's He Walked by Night (1948) and Richard Fleischer's Follow Me Quietly (1949). This shows the film's link to the semi-documentary tradition.
A Lawless Street (1955) is the first of the four Westerns that make up Lewis' final feature films. A beautiful looking film in color, it does not on the surface much resemble The Big Combo, made in the same year. Like Lewis' next Western, 7th Cavalry (1956), the film stars perennial Western hero Randolph Scott. Lewis would go on to direct a large number of Western TV shows over the next decade. Lewis' switch from film noir to the Western was hardly a simple personal choice. The emphasis in the whole American film industry tilted from crime films to Westerns in the early 1950's, and other directors such as Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher made similar changes of genre.
The plot structure of A Lawless Street resembles a mystery, without a detective. As in a mystery film, the plot is full of secrets and surprises. These are gradually revealed over the course of the film. As in a good mystery the plot is both logically constructed and surprising, with each new development logically based on, and consistent with events and characters that have already been established; yet surprising and unexpected. Unlike most mysteries, however, there is no detective figure here. No one in the movie is working to solve the mysteries of the plot, and uncover its secrets. Rather, the script uncovers the secrets themselves, with most scenes revealing some new hidden fact about the plot.
The mystery construction here resembles those in other Lewis mystery films, such as The Falcon in San Francisco (1945) and The Big Combo. As in those films, the mystery is solved gradually. Its solution is revealed step by step, throughout the course of the film. Each step, each new secret revealed, brings us one step closer to understanding the truth. As in The Big Combo, the mysteries involve secrets in the past lives of the characters, secrets that are deeply buried. Many of the secrets involve the inner lives of the characters, what they are feeling deep inside of themselves. As in The Big Combo, many of the secrets involve characters' romances. Other secrets involve corruption, people engaged in the sort of mob-like criminal conspiracies that also appeared in The Big Combo.
There are also differences in construction here from The Big Combo. In The Big Combo, nearly every plot revelation was linked to uncovering the truth about the sinister Mr. Brown. Here, the story has a multiple focus, instead. Nearly every character has some sort of secret, and the plot gradually brings them all to light. There is not a focus on one central mystery or character. Instead, each person in the plot gradually has some sort of secret revealed.
As in The Big Combo, there is also an emphasis on the revelation of character. Even when a person in the plot has no actual mystery secret, often times what they are like as a personality and human being is not fully revealed on their first introduction. The film gradually brings to like the deeper aspects of their character and personality. These revelations are interspersed with the uncovering of actual plot secrets throughout the film.
A Lawless Street shows Lewis' flair for mystery storytelling. Lewis was a director deeply oriented towards the mystery form.
A Lawless Street is based on a story by Brad Ward, The Marshal of Medicine Bend. I've recently learned that "Brad Ward" is a pseudonym of the well-known Western writer Samuel A. Peeples.
The film's screen writer, Kenneth Gamet, has a long history of credits. During the 1930's and early 1940's, he frequently worked on Warner Brothers mystery films, especially those with female sleuths. He did the film that inaugurated the Torchy Blane series, Smart Blonde (1936), with Glenda Farrell as the brainy reporter sleuth, and all four Nancy Drew films (1938-1939), as well as an unusual Western-crime drama about a highly effective little old lady sheriff, Granny Get Your Gun (1940). During the 1940's he did a number of war films about aviators. In the 1950's, he mainly worked on Westerns, including two directed by André de Toth, The Man in the Saddle (1951) and The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953). He was clearly no stranger to either the mystery or Western genres, and it is not surprising to see him as the scriptwriter of a movie that combines both.
The opening scenes of A Lawless Street resemble the early Havana sections of A Lady Without Passport. Both films introduce a city and a cast of characters together. Both films contain a sort of mini-travelogue, exploring the buildings and streets of a city: Havana in A Lady Without Passport, Medicine Bend, Colorado in A Lawless Street. At the same time, we first meet the characters of the film. Many of the characters are linked to a certain building or locale within the city. Their work or profession centers on this building.
Both A Lady Without Passport and A Lawless Street thoroughly depict and explore the exteriors of the buildings in the city. They contrast with The Big Combo, which virtually excluded exteriors from its construction.
As the film's title suggests, one of the main subjects of A Lawless Street is the operation of the city as a whole. We see a sort of documentary in the opening, showing the whole normal operation of the city. Later, the film's finale will again explore the workings of the city, this time under a changed or transformed operation. The depiction of negative social change here is powerful.
The opening shot of the film shows the main street of the town itself. It is an excellent camera movement: the camera is high on a crane above the city during much of the credits, showing a long panorama of the town's main street, then swoops down to the level of a lone horseman riding into town.
In Pride of the Bowery (1941), Lewis treats the camp in the film as a miniature city, showing us all of its buildings and activities. He also takes us into the local town, and gives us some documentary-like glimpses of its main street.
In Gun Crazy, the long-take bank robbery sequence gives a guided tour of the streets and buildings of the city where the robbery takes place. There are briefer glimpses of other towns in later robbery sequences, and when the couple leave the dance hall near the end of the picture.
Later, in Lewis' Western TV series The Rifleman, we meet the entire town of North Fork, New Mexico. The series was shot on a gigantic standing set, that includes both the exteriors and interiors of the buildings on the town's main street. The people who work in the buildings are mainly series characters. This too is a portrait of an entire city and its people.
The hero visits other small cities in The Rifleman episodes Strange Town, The Wyoming Story, Waste and The Bullet. The Big Valley episode Night of the Wolf also visits a town, and discusses much of its history.
Randolph Scott's Marshal in this film presents an all-powerful image to deter lawbreakers. This image is far removed from reality: Scott's hero is an exhausted stressed out person. An early scene shows him getting dressed up in his cowboy clothes in his room. This is set-up to underscore the fact that an image is being constructed. We see Scott putting on shiny black leather cowboy boots: a bit too fancy to be real work clothes. This reminds us of Rita's fancy shoes in The Big Combo, and the hero putting them on her feet. We also see Scott adjust his neck kerchief in the mirror. Scott's image is just as much an artificial construct as that of the undercover detective in A Lady Without Passport. Both men are police officers who are doing their deceptions for a good cause.
Kenneth Gamet scripted a strange musical-cop movie hybrid, Tear Gas Squad (1940), directed by Terry Morse. In it, night club singer Dennis Morgan wears a sharp police uniform as part of his act. Eventually, he decides to join the police himself, for real. This film also deals with the creation of a police image as an artificial construct, and how it intersects with reality.
Boots show up in episodes of The Rifleman. Lewis opens The Prisoner with a close-up of one of the visitors' military boots, recalling a similar close-up in The Martinet. The hero has his boots stolen in The Vaqueros and Waste. The punk gunslinger in Death Never Rides Alone is always challenging people by displaying his black cowboy boots, and the arrogant gambling czar villain of The Bullet puts them up on his huge desk. And there is a moving camera close-up of the bad guys marching in unison in Long Gun from Tucson, concentrating on their feet.
Both the Marshal and the bad guys are deep into the use of guns. A Lawless Street is an anti-gun film: the heroine left her husband because she could not stand his use of violence, and Dooley is presented as a good man because he does not believe in guns. The Marshal gives up his guns at the end, being one of those select Lewis characters who manage to escape with their lives from the use of guns, rejecting their use. In this they differ from the protagonist of Gun Crazy, whose gun use leads to his death.
However, there is no organized "gun cult" in A Lawless Street, unlike Gun Crazy or other Lewis works. The Marshal only uses guns for his job. This also gives him a certain moral step up, although as the doctor warns him, gun use will still probably cause his death if he stays on his job and keeps using his guns.
The Marshal refuses to shoot the unarmed Dooley. He takes the hard route instead, trying to beat the giant Dooley in a fair fist fight. The Marshal's refusal to use guns is seen as a moral victory. It redeems Dooley. It oddly anticipates Daniel Boone's refusal to shoot or harm the giant bear in Pompey, also seen as a productive act. Hero Lucas refuses to shoot the bad guy in Day of the Hunter, the heroine refuses to kill her tormentor in Heller, and the hero refuses to shoot Mr. Brown at the end of The Big Combo.
The Marshal's "giving a lickin" to Dooley is also seen as needed discipline to a character like Dooley who never had any. This idea will recur at the end of Sidewinder. This seems like a dubious idea to me. Be that as it may, there are times when it seems both the Marshal and Dooley are enjoying their saloon fight. Parts of it anticipate the wrestling-match-for-fun in Honest Abe.
Dooley has scars, from a cougar attack. Animal injuries are a Lewis theme.
The end states that gun fighting should be replaced by "mutual aid", with all citizens in town supporting law and order.
Villain's Thorne's sinister actions and downfall stem from his trying to be best: to be publicly recognized as Number One in everything he does. He is chewed out for this by Cody. Hero Lucas gives a similar anti-being-best lecture to young Mark in Day of the Hunter. Lucas says it is merely important to be good at what you do, not to be better than other people, or to be recognized as The Best.
The opening credits show a man riding from the far back of the screen towards the front - a Lewis trademark. This shot will include a vertical camera movement, straight down.
The shot shows the street layout of the town. It emphasizes the geometric pattern formed by the buildings and sidewalks. There will be similar overhead, geometric view of a town in the Rifleman episode The Deadly Wait. Both views have sidewalks that turn at slight angles to the main street, making for a polygonal line in the composition.
The town buildings in the opening shot of A Lawless Street are mainly in pink or gray. The road is in a matching reddish pink. One wonders if it were painted, to create a color harmony, the way Max Ophuls painted the road in Lola Montes. There are some peaked roofs in the background, but not anywhere as many as in many Lewis shots of buildings.
Soon, there is a camera movement, focused on the man's holster, a movement that will recur in some Rifleman episodes. It then does a whiplash pan around, to show a man emerging from the livery stable.
Both this gunslinger in this pan, and later Marshal Scott and gunslinger Baskam, are featured in rear shots that show us their gun belts - as are almost all gunslingers in Lewis. Good guy Asaph is shown with decorated pants pockets - like the bad guy in A Young Man's Fancy.
Later on in the movie, gunslinger Harley Baskam will enter the film riding down the same street that the original gunslinger took during the opening shot. This is a typical Lewis "echo", showing a repeated use of the same path.
When the Marshal leaves the hotel at the start, we see a cityscape full of complex peaked roofs in the background. The shots from the saloon porch near the start also show a peaked church steeple, and later an ordinary building with a peaked roof. Peaked roof backgrounds run throughout Lewis.
Suspense scenes in a barbershop will return in The Patsy. We see through the barbershop windows, in moving camera shots.
Asaph's ranch includes several types of white fence around its buildings, including a white picket fence. The fences, and the front yards they enclose, resemble other such front yards with picket fences in Lewis. These fences are most shown during the attack on Asaph's men.
Both the Marshal's room, and the kitchen below, have alcoves in the rear - a Lewis tradition.
There are signs everywhere, on the various buildings.
A remarkable long take, during the rioting, includes gunslinger Baskam smashing a saloon's multipaned window (recalling the smashing window at the end of So Dark the Night). The moving camera travels from one swinging door of the saloon to another - an example of a Lewis camera movement that oscillates between left and right. It also shoots an outdoor conversation, through the smashed window: an example of Lewis staging that joins indoors and outside.
The shot shows Lewis' multi-colored approach. It has a whole rainbow of different shades. The street looks painted in streaks of pink and gold - just beautiful. The wagon is in dark green, with bright yellow-gold wheels and trim. The cafe sign is in a bright, light blue. The brick of the Marshall's office is red. There are all sorts of cowboys on foot, or on horses, in colorful clothes, that take part in the shot. One cowboy near the start is in blue denim, talking to another in orange and beige.
The buildings across the street are in a rich variety of architectures. The cafe has huge arches, an arching sign "cafe" is painted on the windows, and circular wagon wheels are prominent.
The end of the shot moves from one side to the other of the row of pillars in front of the Marshal's office - a common Lewis staging. We then see a perspective view under porticos, down the sidewalks. The sidewalks move along polygonal angles. Such sidewalk views will be common in The Rifleman. The shot as a whole is one that most closely anticipates The Rifleman.
The entertainers are in bright clothes, in the musical sequence. The heroine wears a purple outfit that merges into silver-gray. And the chorus girls are in red outfits with gold capes, and contrasting green hats. They all perform against a pinkish curtain. The theater boxes have yellow backgrounds, and Cora is in a red dress.
During the late camera movement, while the heroine chases the villain through the theater, the theater is in a mix of orange, red and blue walls above: Lewis' typical mix of bright colors.
The saloon is full of a reddish wood. It provides bright color during the many interiors at the saloon.
The drummer has a blue drum, and a uniform with matching blue and bright red.
When Harley Baskam negotiates in the office with Thorne and Cody, nearly everything is in some shade of beigeish-yellow or dark red. This scene is "color-coordinated" - it is built around a handful of colors that pervade everything. This is a common strategy in directors like Vincente Minnelli. It is not always followed by Lewis, who is capable of building a shot out of a whole profusion of multiple colors.
In scenes such as this, and many in The Big Combo, the camera movement is exploratory. The camera explores the scene, moving around to bring new details to the viewer's attention. The director might move in to a close-up, or shift the camera to one side to create a new composition. The camera movements tend to enable the viewer to see the action in some new way. The result of such camera movements, what they show when they are finished, is more important than the movements themselves.
By contrast, the camera movements in the finale of A Lawless Street, discussed below, are kinetic. The experience of watching the actual camera movement is all-important in them. It conveys a delightful sense of motion to the viewer, conveying energy and excitement. The visual effects during the actual camera movement, the flow of screen composition created by the movement, the motions of characters during the camera movement, are all-important.
The distinction above is not entirely true. Even in the exploratory scenes, the graceful flow of Lewis' camera movements is a visually gratifying experience. Lewis certainly intends the movements to be visually interesting. Conversely, in the kinetic scenes, it certainly does matter where the camera is ultimately headed. Lewis often arranges the camera movement so that it stops on some visually revealing tableau; and a fixed camera piece of action will follow. The camera movement was not just fun in itself; it also brought the camera to a useful position, which shows some interesting event. Lewis has certainly arranged even his kinetic camera movements so that they support his staging of the action, and the exposition of information in his film.
Still, there is a genuine contrast of emphasis in the two kinds of scenes. They are at opposite poles in Lewis' work. The mood of the two types of scenes tends to be different as well. The long take, expository types of scenes tend to be grim and dramatically intense. The kinetic scenes tend to be entertaining, with dynamic storytelling and excitement.
The finale of A Lawless Street is filled with camera movement. Except for a few close-ups, nearly every shot contains a pan or a track. This is the big, final confrontation between the hero and the bad guys. It starts with heroine Angela Lansbury's visit to the jail, and ends with the capture of the villain. The camera movements here are within Hollywood norms. It has long been standard practice to add motion and kinetic energy to shots by moving the camera. And it is traditionally appropriate for a suspense sequence like this finale. But Lewis executes these camera movements with uncommon skill. The whole sequence is like a wind-up toy or machine, that never fails to delight with its beautifully staged shots and camera work. Lewis' years of experimentation with moving camera work pays off in these gracefully executed scenes.
One subsequence has the heroine and villain in a room up above, while the hero is in the street down below. Lewis takes advantage of this to create overhead shots, that pan along with the hero's motion below. These shots have an exciting dynamic quality. Lewis also shoots upward from the street level, and combines this with small camera movements too. Later, he will execute a graceful shot down a staircase, that reminds one of the cantina staircase shots in A Lady Without Passport. This shot, which is followed by a pan into another room, is one of the high points of the whole finale.
The shots in the finale tend not to have a continuously moving camera, in the manner say of Ophuls' Lola Montès. Rather, the camera will move along to a position, then stop for a while, then maybe move again later. Both the moving and fixed parts of the shot are closely tied to the movements of the characters on screen, and to the dramatic events that are unfolding in the story. The whole pattern of camera work, character motion and story development makes graceful, delightfully intricate patterns. They have a kinetic quality that seems exactly right. They are never over bearing or overpowering; but they always have plenty of energy and motion.
Lewis temporarily breaks the pattern of camera movement for the big shoot out. Here, we see a rapid succession of fixed shots, showing what the coming shoot out looks like from the point of view (more or less) of the two participants. This sequence builds up real suspense. The most striking shot here is a shot of the door of the saloon through which the unseen hero will soon come. This shot is utterly empty of motion. There are no people in it, and no motion at all. The music stops too, and we have dead silence. The shot's suspenseful stillness is powerful. The shot has an Ozu like stillness, like one of the transition images in his films.
One does not want to over-sell this finale, or misrepresent what its contains. Most of the tracks and pans within it are simple. From a technical point of view, most are within the standard repertoire of fairly conventional filmmaking. There are few moving camera shots here of the jaw-dropping elaborateness one finds in Murnau, Ophuls or Mizoguchi, or in the robbery sequence in Lewis' own Gun Crazy. But everything is gracefully done. Lewis' framing, composition and tracking are beautiful and dramatically effective. They both tell the story vividly, and create exciting visual patterns.
7th Cavalry (1956) is a film I don't like. It has the least appeal of any of Lewis' post B-movie work, due to its mix of mournful tone, and subject matter glorifying military bravery and General Custer. Lewis will return to the subject of bravery and alleged cowardice in the Indian Wars, in the Rifleman episode The Journey Back (1961), another one of his most problematical works; and in his Branded pilot The Vindicators (1965). All of these look at the aftermath of a massacre of Cavalry troops by Native Americans. All contain performances by Harry Carey, Jr, as a Cavalry man.
The opening of 7th Cavalry is perhaps its best part. Its eerie exploration of the deserted fort is rich in atmosphere. These scenes often show Scott standing alone, in huge empty spaces: a Lewis tradition.
The scenes also form a mini-version of a Lewis detective story, with:
These are all characteristics of detective work in Lewis.
Also strange is the way in which the fort is slowly repopulated.
Several of the best shots in the opening feature compositions built up out of peaked roofs at the fort:
There are also shots where Scott moves from the extreme background of the frame, to the foreground:
Lewis pans when Scott climbs the outdoor staircase to headquarters, an example of his mix of camera movement and staircases. The base of the staircase has wood painted yellow, which echoes the gold in Scott's uniform.
Nolan's speech in the barracks embodies two kinds of funeral rituals. It is set against the empty bunks of the dead men. And she talks about the Sioux rituals among the bodies.
In the next sequence, hero Scott is branded as a possible coward, and ostracized by everyone at the fort. In some ways, this reminds one of the ostracized heroes to come, of such Rifleman episodes as Panic. Scott goes through the same social horrors as these later heroes. But there are key differences in cause. Scott is falsely accused of something he did not do (cowardice). While the Rifleman characters are usually criticized either for being "different" or for taking an unpopular stand - something they did do. The Rifleman shows look at genuine social nonconformists, and people who stand up for unpopular ideas. They are far more trenchant, and have more real substance.
Scott also faces opposition from his future father-in-law, as in Hero.
The map on the wall during the inquiry, recalls those in other government offices in A Lady Without Passport and Retreat, Hell!.
Scott hits a fellow officer after he says things Scott does not want to hear, then regrets it. This recalls scenes in That Gang of Mine and Night of the Wolf.
Scott's fiancée joins him, sitting down on his bed while he is lying on it. This recalls The Jolson Story and Duel Of Honor. However, in those films two men are on the bed; here it is a man and a woman.
Scott's hero is far more interested in militarism, than is anyone else in the film. He enjoys saluting, turning on his heel with military precision, etc. None of the other officers seem interested in this. And Scott is regularly contrasted with enlisted men who are completely out of order, when it comes to discipline. He keeps trying to whip them into shape.
The other officers instead treat the Cavalry as a social club. They are of a higher social class than Scott, who is a former riverboat gambler recruited into the service. They never let Scott forget this class distinction. The other officers are obsessed with drawing this class line. This status is their main interest in the military - the sort of militaristic ceremony Scott loves means nothing to them.
Lewis heroes tend to be fascinated with militarism. Scott here is typical. But we also see that Scott is out of tune with everyone around him, who instead are deep into class privilege.
Lewis heroes often follow personal obsessions. This is most famous in Gun Crazy, but it is a central theme in much of Lewis. Lewis heroes tend to care far less about social perks such as class status. Here we see that contrast underscored.
There is a nice camera movement towards the middle, which follows the hero and heroine talking outside, and gradually walks along with them till they go through the giant gate of the fort. This is like one of Lewis' camera movements linking indoors and outdoors. Only here, "indoors" and "outdoors" are the two sides of the fort's wall and gate. The shot is full of peaked roofs, again.
The film is full of Cavalry troops, in blue uniforms with yellow trim. Some Cavalry Westerns de-emphasize yellow, by showing characters without their scarves or gloves. But 7th Cavalry does the opposite, by always having the characters wearing these accoutrements.
Warm, light brown wood is everywhere in the background. So is yellow grass. These form color harmonies with the yellow in the Cavalry uniforms. The hay in the early drunk scene is also bright yellow, to the point that one wonders if it were painted. Lewis loved structuring backgrounds out of hay; here is a rare chance for him to show it in a color movie.
There are also jarring notes added to this simple harmony. The heroine's clothes are in completely different colors. She is first seen wearing a dark green dress, with dark red trim. She makes an utter contrast to Scott, in his blue and yellow uniform. Such contrasts will run through much of the first half of 7th Cavalry. The heroine has numerous dresses, many of which emphasize dark red. Her Native American maid also is in red.
In addition, Indian rugs on the floor are full of dark red, mixed with stripes and zigzags of white and black. These continue the red motif of the heroine's clothes. And a dark green lamp and a bottle of green liqueur also maintain the red/green touches. All of these green and red colors are dark - none is at all pastel.
Once again, we have a Lewis film that does not look like the work of anybody else. We once again have a color design, with more colors on screen than are often seen, with the colors seemingly more clashing.
Such a non-violent campaign is highly unusual in a 1950's Western. I have never seen anything like it.
In real life, Martin Luther King's non-violent campaign against racism enforced by state power was underway in 1957. It is likely that the son's campaign in The Halliday Brand is an allegorical reference to it.
The first half of The Halliday Brand starts out like an Anthony Mann Western such as The Furies or The Man from Laramie. We see a family tearing itself apart over rivalries that escalate into horrendous violence. However, the second half of The Halliday Brand plays out in drastically different ways. While Mann films tend to have the cycle of violence continuing, the good characters in The Halliday Brand all move to break the cycle of violence. The hero engages in his unique non-violent social resistance. The sister Martha (Betsy Blair) also moves in directions of peace making.
One does not want to obscure, that the hero's campaign involves crimes against property. The burning of the silo is especially questionable, and has to be categorized as "violence", even if no people are injured. In other Lewis films, it is always crooks who are terrorizing towns who use fire, not heroes.
The co-writer of The Halliday Brand, George W. George, will go on to script one of Lewis' most powerful condemnations of the gun cult, The Rifleman episode The Letter of the Law. In that film, a man will also try to lure a younger male into the gun cult.
Interrogation is a theme that runs through Lewis. There are many characters who refuse to speak up, and reveal what they know. The Halliday Brand makes the political dimension of interrogation explicit.
The dying declaration of a cowboy, claiming that Jivaro Burris was involved in the rustling of the cattle, recalls the opening of Border Wolves. In both films, innocent men are falsely accused of crimes, by dying men who sincerely but mistakenly believe they are involved.
The discussion of whether Jivaro Burris is guilty of the crime, is conducted by everyone strictly in terms of evidence. Even his supporters look for police evidence, after his story is over. These supporters follow the Lewis tradition, of keeping an open mind, and trying to follow where evidence leads. However, they do not do any of the detective work found in other Lewis films. They simply ask the Sheriff about what the actual criminals had to say about Jivaro Burris' involvement. This is sound reasoning, worthy of any detective, and fully morally admirable. But it is not the creative deduction found in many other Lewis films.
An early shot, follows riders as they move in front of a row of bushes. This is largely another of Lewis' lateral camera movements with foreground objects.
In the house, the camera moves from one side of a row of pillars to another. This is a familiar Lewis trope. However, it is more often seen outdoors, using the pillars of a porch. Interior pillars as in The Halliday Brand are less common.
There are also camera movements around the tall bed posts, another Lewis favorite.
The house front is seen through the buggy, when the characters leave. This is a striking deep focus composition. It also involves no less than four small camera movements, each of which adjusts the perspective a tiny bit. These adjustments seem like a formal, stylistic device. They are not "necessary" to re-frame the image, or follow characters. Instead, they seem to be there to make unusual figures of style.
The general store has an outdoor staircase. Late in the film, there is some simple, small camera movement involving the staircase, also a Lewis tradition.
The second appearance of the noose, makes another Lewis foreground object. Lewis shoots through the noose, to make some striking shots.
Lewis films often have backgrounds built out of hay. Hay trucks will return in The Rifleman episodes The Fourflusher and The Actress.
A later shot shows a rider moving from background to foreground, near the same Sheriff's office exterior we saw earlier with the hay truck. This shot ends with a pan to the left. It seems to reverse many of the actions in the earlier hay shot.
There are also some other foreground-background moves: other shots feature the hero or the grandmother moving.
The steep staircase at the jail, recalls the one in My Name Is Julia Ross. Both have high balconies at top.
We see the prisoner in the jail, through barred doors: also a Lewis favorite.
The Chad Burris and Son is one of the many signs that play such a role in Lewis' cinema. The Rifleman episode Long Gun from Tucson will end with such a father-and-son sign being erected. The word "Halliday" on the tomahawk stump is also a sign.
The music rack on the piano, has the spirals that run through Lewis.
The change of emphasis relates to their molls, as well. In both films, a decent woman is helplessly devoted to the crook, and needs to find the self esteem to leave him. In both films, involvement with the hero helps her do this. However, in The Big Combo, she is the moll of the gang leader; in Terror in a Texas Town, she is the girl of the hit man.
The specific plot of Terror in a Texas Town, a crooked businessman throwing farmers off their land, is repeated in The Rifleman episodes Baranca and Squeeze Play. In all three shows, the farmers' homes are burned by the villains. A similar attempted burning is shown in The Big Valley episode The Man from Nowhere. In Terror in a Texas Town and Squeeze Play, fences are torn down and the farmers' cattle are stampeded off their land.
A detailed look at the rich-versus-farmers politics of Terror in a Texas Town can be found in one of the opening sections of this book, in the section "Politics and Economics".
The town Marshal is a tool of the villains who run the city. Such a bought-and-paid-for Marshal will reappear in The Rifleman episode Strange Town. And when we first see the Marshal in The Bullet, we suspect that he is also such a tool.
The Mexican-American family are in a familiar situation in Lewis films: they have to decide whether to speak up, and tell what they know. In this they recall the sympathetic Italian-American family in The Undercover Man. Both families wind up with wakes in their homes, filled with Roman Catholic religious imagery. In general, the Mexican-Americans in the Western Terror in a Texas Town, play an analogous role to the equal poor Italian-Americans in Lewis' modern-day anti-gangster films, The Undercover Man, The Big Combo and The Fat Man.
As a married couple in trouble, the family also resembles the bookkeeper and his wife in The Undercover Man.
The wife is expecting. Pregnancy and birth plays little role in the cinema of Joseph H. Lewis. Oddly, the next pregnant woman in a Lewis film will also be Mexican, in The Rifleman episode Waste. The two films do not have much in common: the characters in Waste are villains. Waste is one of Lewis' worst films, and people who study it in an attempt to gain insight into Terror in a Texas Town will be disappointed.
Terror in a Texas Town is filled with political ambiguities, and that extends to the scenes of the ranchers' meetings. The ranchers take no specific actions in the film, except for following behind the hero in his final confrontation. Nor do they ever even formulate a specific goal. Consequently, it is hard to link them to any one political philosophy: liberalism, labor unions, anarchism, Communism, Gandhian non-violence. They are clearly left-of-center, but beyond that, it is hard to specify further.
The way the ranchers march through the street behind the hero at the end looks like the real-life street protests of the era, either for Civil Rights or peace. But is it really a protest march? The ranchers are not actually protesting anything explicitly. And whether they are gathered for peaceful protest, or there to use physical violence againt the henchman, is also unclear.
The street crowds in Terror in a Texas Town can also be seen as the people rising up against their oppressors. But once again, since the crowds don't actually do anything, it is hard to make an iron-clad case for this interpretation. One recalls the Chinese farmers rising up against the Axis agent at the end of Bombs Over Burma (1942).
People who are interested in the scenes of street crowds should see Lewis' The Rifleman episode The Deserter (1960) immediately. It is one of Lewis' most important works.
One can say that the ranchers' meetings are intended to encourage the audience to take part in communal organizations in real life. And the finale in the street is a generalized endorsement of street activities, probably including protest marches and sit-ins. The film is full of vivid left-of-center imagery. But it is hard to align this with any concrete political orientation.
I am impressed with these scenes in Terror in a Texas Town, and view them as significant. But also feel that caution is in order, in giving them too-specific political interpretations.
The hero of Terror in a Texas Town also does not engage in male bonding. He gets to know the Mexican-American farmer, but seems to form a friendship with the farmer's whole family, not with the farmer per se.
There is, in fact, no clear indication of whether the hero of Terror in a Texas Town is heterosexual or homosexual. This is actually not unusual in Lewis films: the detective heroes of The Fat Man also are without any clear sexual orientation. By contrast, both Sebastian Cabot's villain and the henchman are straight men with girlfriends. And the Mexican-American couple are married.
The hero of Terror in a Texas Town does have the phallic imagery one finds in many Lewis men. While demonstrating how to use the harpoon in the Miradas' cottage, he holds the harpoon at a phallic angle. A couple of points about phallic symbols in Lewis are in order:
The hero speaks two languages, Swedish and English, and the dialogue with the Marshal shows that he can read legal documents both two languages. Like the banker in The Rifleman, he brings a worldly business knowledge to this small Western town. His conversation with the henchman's moll stresses that he knows people all over the world.
Terror in a Texas Town is not the first use of this weapon. A pulp detective short story "Death on the Hook" (1937), by John K. Butler, came earlier. The story is available on-line, at: http://www.adventurehouse.com/e_texts/adventure_house_pdf_pulp_texts.htm.
We see the henchman cross the street before the duel. The camera follows along, with a moving camera close-up of his holster. Such camera movements focused on holsters appear in other Lewis films. (See the auteurist checklist that opens this Lewis book for details.) The shot ends with a rear view of the gunslinger: also a common Lewis angle.
Both men can be seen as members of the gun cult, a key Lewis theme. Both men meet a fate reserved for members of the gun cult in Lewis, too.
By contrast, Cabot's other three henchmen, while rotten, don't seem to use gun violence. And they escape with their lives at the end, being paid off and leaving town.
The big duel at the end, can be seen as pitting a gunman, against a working class man using a work implement - not a gun:
The little boy has a mistaken idea about the hero: first he thinks he is one of the killers, and only gradually learns that the hero is the farmer's son. This is another example of the Lewis concept, that our first ideas are often wrong, and need to be revised. In some Lewis films like The Big Combo, this idea-revision is worked into the detective plot: but in Terror in a Texas Town, it is just part of a simple scene, not connected to any detection.
The hero winds up prone on the ground, after the final duel. The young hero of Gun Crazy winds up flat on the ground after the robbery in the rain at the film's start.
The use of long takes is less consistent in Terror in a Texas Town than in The Big Combo. Lewis will mix in a long take with edited shots. It is a much jumpier, and apparently more arbitrary mix, although the overall effect creates a fine rhythm. The two techniques can be blended in a single scene, with both long takes and cutting used to stage the scene as a whole.
A shot towards the middle of the film, in which Sterling Hayden talks first to the moll, then to bad guys, in the saloon at the bar, moves laterally down the bar in short bursts. It, too, is most unusual and different from conventional camera movements. This movement follows the staging of the confrontations - they move down the bar as well - but the over all effect is startling. It is of a camera that can make short direct changes, wait awhile in a fixed position, then make more changes. It is like a nervous rabbit, or perhaps more like a watchful but jumpy tiger.
We also see action from within the shed, with a deep focus landscape framed in the huge door opening.
The railroad tracks pass in front of the Miradas' farm house. The hero moves from right to left on them, in a direction perpendicular to the house and the farmer in front of it. This geometry recalls the way the hero swoops in and robs the robbers in The Last Stand. However, the hero of the The Last Stand is on horseback and lightning swift; the hero of Terror in a Texas Town is on foot, beaten up, and painfully slow.
Terror in a Texas Town has the least likable musical score of any Lewis film. Gerald Fried's blaring brass becomes less endurable every time one tries to watch Terror in a Texas Town again. A cynic could compare it to the sinister fanfares that marked the entrance of the Red Chinese Army in Retreat, Hell!. Sterling Hayden's fake Swedish accent is an endurance test, too.
Courage of the West (1937) is the first of the four Westerns Lewis made with singing cowboy Bob Baker. And Lewis' first solo outing as a director (after doing some retakes on another director's film, Navy Spy). Courage of the West is full of original touches, most of which presage later Lewis subjects and techniques. Lewis' staging, camera work and visual motifs in Courage of the West are more inventive than the story or the characters, which tend to the routine.
A later nearly circular camera movement opens on Bob Baker singing to the heroine. The camera circles around Baker, then moves behind a post to reveal the heroine in a hammock.
There are a number of camera movements from the moving train. Some are from the train side; another looks through a train window. These all anticipate the moving camera shots from cars in Lewis' noir thrillers, such as the famous long-take bank robbery in Gun Crazy.
The Rangers' song around the campfire includes some free form, exploratory camera movements, moving from the fire to the singers, and down along the row of the Rangers' faces.
A pair of pans shows the villain riding through water, then later on, moving in the reverse direction through the water on the same path. While simple and short, these camera movements are templates for much longer path / reverse path camera movements to come, in Lewis.
Some camera movements connect outdoors and indoors, in the Lewis tradition. At the Free Ranger headquarters, the camera follows Baker through the door, then moves in as he throws himself casually on his father's desk. His posture on the desk is like nothing else in cinema, either in Lewis or films as a whole: Baker kicks up his heels. It also represents the enthusiasm of a Lewis hero.
Baker immediately opens a second door, looking into Fuzzy Knight's bath. Baker's huge grin here also anticipates many smiling Lewis heroes to come.
While they are mainly fixed shots, the telegraph office scenes also link indoors and outdoors. One shows us the street outside, through a plate glass window. A later scene shows the street through an open door. The shot from inside the bad guy's cabin also shows us a curtained window, looking out on an outdoor landscape.
After a song by a group of good guys, villain Jed enters on horseback. His path is at 90 degrees to the camera, and the group of good guys. This anticipates a more emphatically staged scene in The Last Stand, where hero Baker rides past bad guys on a similar path right in front of them. In both films, the right angle of the path makes vivid the opposition between the rider in front and the crowd motionless behind.
Earlier, we saw parts of the first massacre, though wagon wheels.
The massacre also includes a striking wagon wheel shot, that is NOT a view though it. We see a spinning wagon wheel from the edge, which makes spectacular light patterns below. This recalls some of the odd lighting effects on the monastery staircase in Bombs Over Burma.
There are also some shots through arching tree branches. These are simpler and more tentative than the elaborate compositions in later Lewis pictures.
Several favorite Lewis subjects make their apparently first appearance in Courage of the West:
The scene anticipates The Jolson Story, which also focuses on its singing hero's changeover to his adult voice. In The Jolson Story, this occurs while the hero is sharing a hotel room with William Demarest. As in Courage of the West, the hero is with other men, during his transition to adulthood. In the Rifleman episode Baranca, teenage Mark's wisdom teeth - also seen as a transition to manhood - come out in a scene he shares with two grown men, his father and the dentist.
This is also the entrance of Bob Baker into the film, and into Lewis' world. Baker is first heard briefly as an off-screen voice, a kind of staging that will run through all of Lewis.
Courage of the West falls into two parts, a prologue showing the youthful hero, and a main film set many years later, depicting him as an adult. Other Lewis theatrical films will have such a construction: Minstrel Man, The Jolson Story, Gun Crazy. None of Lewis' Rifleman episodes has such a time gap, however, and neither do any other of the Lewis TV films I've seen (The Vindicators includes a flashback, but only to events a few years in the past.)
The Free Rangers are the first of several "non-military, US Government institutions organized on militaristic lines" in Lewis. The Civilian Conservation Corps in Pride of the Bowery, and the INS in A Lady Without Passport, will follow. One can speculate that such groups embody the appeal of a militaristic life-style, without the horrible consequences of war that attend actual military institutions.
The Free Rangers all wear what might be termed a cowboy uniform: matching black shirts, white hats, and white neck scarves. In addition, they all ride pinto ponies: black-and-white horses. A line of dialogue explains that this allows them to recognize each other at a distance, during fights. Francis M. Nevins writes: "The "uniformed cowboys" bit is commonplace in Thirties Westerns directed by Robert N. Bradbury, like Westward Ho (with John Wayne) and Riders of the Dawn (with Jack Randall)."
The hero keeps to the same general uniform plan, but his shirt is much fancier, with white trim, and he has a fancier, if still white, cowboy hat. And he has cowboy boots, which can be seen best when he is leaving the general store with Fuzzy Knight.
In the next three Bob Baker films, Baker plays new characters, and the Free Rangers are nowhere in sight. Baker reuses his snazzy black-and-white outfit from Courage of the West in his third and fourth Lewis films, Border Wolves and The Last Stand. However, the clothes no longer have any "uniform" connotations: they are just a spiffy cowboy outfit for the hero in these later films.
The Captain of the Free Rangers, and his adopted son and second-in-command, played by Baker, form a pair that will run through Lewis: the middle-aged man who runs some Government institution, and his young, good-looking deputy. Baker is in a fancy uniform, just like the deputy in the dress uniform in A Lady Without Passport.
Fuzzy Knight shows up with his shirt off, after a bath. Such shirtless men will be frequent in Lewis.
The villain is the first character in Lewis to run away from home, and like some other Lewis runaways, he abandons his child. This leads to a more tragic conclusion than in later Lewis films, with the hero and his biological father at each other's throats. I confess I did not enjoy this plot at all, either here, or where it is partly reprised in Minstrel Man - in both films, the abandoned child winds up getting adopted by others. It is too downbeat to enjoy, and in the words of Andrew Sarris on another movie, "too clinical for comfort".
Both the outlaw father and abandoned young hero wind up with new identities, another Lewis staple. Unfortunately, the new identities do not lead to much here, other than the aforementioned father-son conflicts. Lewis will treat this subject much more inventively in later movies.
Unlike many later Lewis films, Courage of the West seems to have no politics and no social commentary. It pits the good guy Free Rangers, who are essentially cowboy policemen, against bad guy train robbers. This is not a very original or substantive plot. While the film shows us both the founding of the Free Rangers, and a later threat to disband it, it never explains what is special about the Free Rangers, or why we should care about them.
Similarly, Courage of the West lacks any mystery or much real detection. The youthful hero deduces that he is talking to law officers, when he spies a badge one is carrying. This anticipates more momentous discoveries made by young Mark McCain in such Rifleman episodes as The Journey Back and Suspicion, where he also discovers objects revealing hidden truths about people.
And later, the grown up Bob Baker follows the tracks of a bad guy's horse. This anticipates the tracking done by later Lewis heroes, as in Pompey.
Abraham Lincoln shows up briefly in Courage of the West, just as he did in The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924).
Singing Outlaw (1937) is the second of the four Westerns Lewis made with singing cowboy Bob Baker. This inoffensive film is neither very entertaining, nor does it show many Lewis personal characteristics. It is an apprentice work, that occasionally contains ideas and techniques that will appear in later Lewis films, where they are better developed.
One bizarre aspect of the plot: people keep speculating that the hero, who sings well, is actually the mysterious Singing Bandit who is running around committing robberies. I kept expecting we would meet the real Singing Bandit - who after all, is the title character of the film. But he never shows up, and this aspect of the plot seems dropped completely, in the film's second half. Unless the Bandit is one of the villains arrested at the end - none of whom sing.
Changing Identity. One of the villains impersonates a good guy he kills. And three different times in the film, the hero is more or less forced into a new identity by someone: a gambit that will return in Border Wolves, My Name Is Julia Ross and The Stand-In. None of these identity changes are very sustained in Singing Outlaw.
Cooking. Fuzzy Knight plays a cook, who cooks for other men at a round-up. Later, the bride also has prepared a lavish wedding feast.
Contests. The hero takes part in rodeo-like contests, and wins in both singing cowboy songs, and shooting. The shooting competition resembles in a small way the far more elaborate displays of trick shooting in Gun Crazy, Duel of Honor, Sidewinder, and other Lewis works. The contests, with their relentless dialogue about how the hero is The Best Singer and The Best Shot, make an odd contrast to much later Lewis films that warn about the dangers of trying to be recognized publicly as The Best at something.
There are also warnings from an older man authority figure, that the hero's shooting skills might lead him to a bad end - which is exactly what happens to the hero of Gun Crazy. However, here the possibility that being good with guns can lead to trouble is vehemently denied by sidekick Fuzzy Knight.
Water. The same lake will reappear in Border Wolves - and be photographed better there. Its fence will also reappear in that film.
Knocked out. The hero is knocked out, and is unconscious for a while. Later Lewis heroes will be attacked, in more sinister such scenes.
A man who reads. The jailer is reading a Western magazine.
Searches through papers. Both bad guys and lawmen search through people's papers, making discoveries.
Real detective work? At the end, Fuzzy and one of the lawmen announce that they have reconstructed the film's opening murder, using evidence found at the crime scene (presumably footprints, shells, etc.). This reconstruction exonerates the hero. This is a nice try - and it certainly anticipates all the detection to come in Lewis. However, Fuzzy provides no details of his detective work - and it is hard to see how anyone could have reconstructed the history of the opening shoot-out in such detail, anyway. This scene is more a nod at detection, rather than the real substantive sleuthing that appears in so many later Lewis films.
Off-screen voices. The villain hears the hero riding in the distance, singing a song, long before he sees him. Like many Lewis off-screen voices, this has an eerie effect - even though the hero is a pure good guy.
Camera movement through walls. At the jail, there is a camera movement from the office to the cells. It goes through a dark area, which might well be a wall or a post. In later films, Lewis will move through walls much less ambiguously.
Staging through windows. We see the wedding feast through a window. And near the end, a very fast track shows people entering a house through several windows. This is the camera movement in Singing Outlaw that shows Lewis the enthusiast of exotic tracking. This movement is so fast, that it is hard to see and follow - a fault Lewis will correct in later films.
An arching tree branch. The sheriff's posse moves under a branch.
There are a couple of good panning shots, outdoors:
The hero rides up a diagonal hill.
Lewis pans across a huge landscape, in which the human figures are small. A posse is on the far right, then the camera crosses a river, and we see the hero in the far left of the pan.
The Spy Ring (1938) is an espionage thriller, with a US Army hero and background. The tale is set in peacetime. There are no war or combat scenes, and very little violence of any kind.
The film builds up to The Big Game, which everyone hopes The Hero Will Win. But as in such Lewis horse racing films as That Gang of Mine and The Fourflusher, unusual plot twists prevent either a simple victory or defeat. Even at this early stage, Lewis is violating standard Hollywood approaches to sports movies. (One has to note, that neither Lewis nor anyone else involved in making The Spy Ring invented this plot twist. It is present in Francis Van Wyck Mason's original short story.)
The only other polo film I've ever seen is the silent comedy-drama The Smart Set (Jack Conway, 1928). (Capsule review: The main asset of The Smart Set is the energetic mugging of its brash and likable comedy star, William Haines, who stars as a millionaire polo player. Jack Conway's direction is routine and lacks visual style. Much of The Smart Set would make passable light entertainment, but its racist comedy relief scenes make it impossible to recommend.) The elegant heroes of both The Spy Ring and The Smart Set oscillate between the polo grounds, and fancy clubs where dances are held. Both horses and upper crust Male Authority Figures also abound in both movies. (One hastens to add that there is no racism in Lewis' The Spy Ring whatsoever!) While the connections between The Spy Ring and The Smart Set are not close, they do have some broad similarities in their treament of polo. It seems likely that The Spy Ring reflects Hollywood traditions of depicting polo players in the movies.
However, a rich man's game like polo seems like a natural fit for the escapist fantasies of the 1920's. But polo seems out of sync with the poverty of the Depression and its common man heroes, by 1938 and The Spy Ring.
The outcome of the polo game, has the hero falsely viewed as a coward by his teammates. Nothing much comes of this - the hero clearly doesn't care - but it does anticipate in a mild way Lewis' later Cavalry Westerns, with their heroes falsely branded as cowards. (The accusations of cowardice derive directly from Francis Van Wyck Mason's story, where they are viewed far more seriously by the hero than in the film.)
Comic books, in particular, in the 1930's and early 1940's, were full of speculations about new weapons, and what effect these might have on the USA. With World War II just one year away in 1938, this was a highly relevant subject.
However, Lewis is still not very good at characterization in The Spy Ring. The hero is never really developed as a person. He has few specific personality traits or ideas. (He is upbeat, and smiles a lot, however, in the Lewis manner.) And Lewis does little with a supporting cast full of gifted actors: Jane Wyman, Robert Warwick and Leon Ames. Their characters are barely there. This is all so different from most of Lewis' films, which are notable for their well-developed characterizations. Still, The Spy Ring as a whole is a pleasing entertainment.
Hall was gigantic: 6'4" (1.93 meters) according to the IMDB. This is tall today, but it was huge back in the 1930's, when people were much shorter (probably due to poor nutrition). The Spy Ring emphasizes Hall's height, by casting him opposite every short actor in Hollywood. I'm not sure if this is really a good idea. Audiences might resent a man a bit who is always shown as bigger than everybody. Lewis used the opposite strategy years later for Chuck Connors on The Rifleman, who was 6'5" (1.96 meters). Connors was regularly cast against equally big actors such as Chris Alcaide and Cesare Danova.
We see an office at Army Intelligence headquarters, anticipating the offices at French police headquarters in So Dark the Night.
The hero goes undercover in his duties as an Army Intelligence officer. Unlike later Lewis heroes with undercover roles, he does not actually assume a new identity. He keeps his name and officer's rank, but conceals his Intelligence role.
Eventually, we also learn that villain Denton has changed his identity as part of his criminal schemes. Denton is one of a series of men in early Lewis who at first seem to be upper class males - but who eventually are revealed to be crooks who have changed their identity: see The Silver Bullet, Boss of Hangtown Mesa, Bombs Over Burma, The Falcon in San Francisco. As far as I can tell, this sort of character disappears in Lewis films made after The Falcon in San Francisco in 1945. There are still crooks in later Lewis who assume new identities as part of their schemes: see the phony buffalo hunter in Sheer Terror. But these men are not posing as members of the upper classes. Lewis still has big rich crooks, such as the monstrous mob lawyer in The Undercover Man (1949), and the elegant mobster in The Fat Man (1958?). These men are full of upper class mannerisms - but everyone knows they are mobsters. They do not have secret identities, hidden in the past.
Actually, the film's subject matter, elegant spies living the high life while they try to steal valuable government secrets, reminds one more of spy writer William Le Queux than of Oppenheim.
The most important shot is the one introducing the dinner dance. While there is an ambiguous shot in Singing Outlaw that may or may not show the camera moving through a wall, there is no ambiguity about this shot in The Spy Ring. It is definitely a through-the-wall camera movement: the first such shot in Lewis. And there's more! The shot continues as a lateral track through the dining room. Many house-plants form "foreground objects", masking the front of the shot in the Lewis manner. This also seems to be the first "lateral track with foreground objects" in Lewis. It is a bit different from later lateral tracks, in that it is not following someone walking. Also, the track in The Spy Ring is a bit unusual, in that the camera pans a bit while tracking as well, in order to keep the shot centered on a standing man.
Josef von Sternberg also liked plants in front of his lateral tracks, as did Murnau in his track-to-the-swamp at the start of Sunrise. Perhaps there is an influence here on young Lewis. The choice of plants is also consistent with all the shots in which trees and shrubs are used as foreground frames in Lewis. The shot also resembles the opening camera movement of Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932). Both start by going through walls. Both then show a man walking behind house-plants.
Lewis has a second through-the-wall camera movement, later in The Spy Ring. This one takes place in the Captain's bungalow.
The beautiful overhead shot, in which the hero's taxi arrives at the officer's club, is through palm fronds. This shot seems to be a pan. There are curvilinear forms on the ground, making this shot visually complex.
Another moving camera shot through foliage: the first balcony scene at the officer's club dance. The hero and heroine have moved outside to the balcony. We see them through hanging plant vegetation. The camera moves forward to them. The hanging leaves seem to move out of the way through their own acord - like the leaves at the end of the track-through-the-swamp at the start of Sunrise. This shot definitely seems like a Murnau moment.
Also notable: a shot parallel to a moving motorcycle, at the beach.
The hero drives his friend and fellow officer, to his friend's apartment building, near the start of the film. There are some simple camera moves in this scene, up and down the street. What is most notable here, are the two curving outdoor staircases, in front of the apartment. They make some striking compositions.
A pan during the nocturnal car chase follows a car along the road. Not long after, a second panning shot follows the car back down along the same road, in the opposite direction. This is an example of paired camera movements along a path / reverse path. Both camera movements are behind rows of tree trunks, making beautiful effects.
Mrs. Brown is first heard as an off-screen voice, a common Lewis strategy, before she becomes visible.
Early in the film, the hero checks out his appearance in the mirror. Lewis heroes like to groom in front of mirrors, and they usually like what they see! The Rifleman will comb his hair in front of a mirror in The Visitor.
There is also a nicely staged shot of the hero making a phone call in a mirror, while another officer is seen in the background.
1938 is before the official rise of film noir, whose start is often dated to 1940. Film noir Hollywood crime movies of the 1940's and 50's are full of mirror-shots: they are one of the characteristics of the genre. But here is Lewis in The Spy Ring (1938), making elaborate use of mirrors for both staging and suspense. Fritz Lang was using mirrors in his German films long before 1938. But still, in Hollywood a mirror-filled thriller like The Spy Ring seems a bit pioneering.
Throughout this scene, civilian Denton is telling the officer hero how fascinated he, Denton, is by militaristic life-styles. The hero responds that military life is great, and suggests half-humorously that Denton join the service. The dialogue is a form of male bonding, over an enthusiastic discussion of militaristic life-styles. Just as The Spy Ring contains a scene in which the villainess tells the hero she is sexually attracted to him becuase of his uniform, so does this scene employ militarism as a way of bonding between two men.
When the hero and his friend are chasing the bad guys in the car, there are frequent shots showing the men's identical profiles, in identical uniforms.
The scene anticipates hero Glenn Ford's interrogation of the mob bookkeeper in The Undercover Man. In both films a government agent is holding prisoner a lower-down from a crooked organization - and wants him to speak up and reveal what he knows. In both films, the agent pretends that the prisoner is going to get killed. This scares the prisoner into speaking up. In both films, the prisoner is not really a bad guy of a crook, just a low level employee. In both films, the prisoner is in clothes that proclaim he is a tough guy: a sharp chauffeur's uniform in The Spy Ring, a black leather jacket in The Undercover Man. And in both films the interrogation is treated as a bit of a comic escapade, although the comic aspect is more pronounced in The Spy Ring than in The Undercover Man. The prisoner in unharmed in both films, and even released and protected by the Feds in The Undercover Man.
There are signs that Lewis himself might have had second thoughts about this. Much later, in his major classic The Deserter (1960), thirst and a firing squad will be threats used by the villain, rather than the heroes, as they are in The Spy Ring. (He uses these threats not for interrogation, however, but to intimidate people.)
Also, unless I am forgetting something, Lewis never returned to this sort of interrogation technique in other films. Quite a few Lewis films have a subject of a person refusing to speak up, and reveal secret knowledge they have. But Lewis never again endorsed these sorts of dubious interrogation methods. For example, most of the plot of The Hiding Place (1959) has the police trying to get witnesses to speak up about the location of a bomb about to go off. The cops in The Hiding Place never resort to the sort of methods we see in The Spy Ring.
The discussion of letting a prisoner escape, then shooting him, returns in Border Wolves, but only as a nonsensical possibility raised by the sidekick as comedy relief.
Army dress uniforms are everywhere in The Spy Ring. They are part of the fascination Lewis characters have with uniforms and militarism. The Mata Hari female spy even tells the hero that she likes him because she has "a uniform complex".
At one point the hero slaps his gloves against his palm. This sort of officer's gesture with gloves will return much later in The Deserter. The sinister Army officer of that film will also use his gloves, albeit in a somewhat different gesture.
When he first enters the officer's club, a fellow officer pressures the hero to change out of his uniform, and into his polo outfit. This is another example in Lewis of men making other men change clothes.
There is also a uniformed chauffeur, a costume that will return in So Dark the Night and The Fat Man. The scene where the chauffeur orders a fancy meal anticipates the ordering sequence that ends Sidewinder. The meal includes pie and coffee, two Lewis favorites.
Francis Van Wyck Mason's novella "The Enemy's Goal", appeared in the pulp magazine Argosy, for the week of May 18, 1935 (Vol. 255, Number 5). Argosy was at one time a hugely popular pulp magazine, one of the best known of all the pulps. As its subtitle read, it published "Action Stories of Every Variety".
This change has a number of effects. The inclusion of polo makes more sense in the story than in the film. In the story, polo-playing is the hero's chief life-goal. One can see why the hero is playing the game. But in the film, it is sometimes hard to figure out why the hero is taking time off from his professional spy duties to play polo. It seems like a senseless distraction - basically, something we just have to accept for the sake of an entertaining movie. Mason's story also has much more informative detail on how the game of polo is played, than does the film.
Perhaps more significantly, the changes to the film mean that the film has roughly twice the plot of the original story. Most of the story's events have been preserved in the film: the polo, the adventuress' offer of Argentine ponies, what happens at the Big Game and after. But the film also has a whole new set of plot events: the gun, the killing of Lt. Scott, the hero's undercover assignment, the use of technology, the firing squad hoax and all the rest. This makes the film far more elaborate in plot than the story. Not all of this plot hangs together seamlessly - as we said, the polo scenes are not as logically connected to the new spy material as they should be - but it does make for a plot-rich film. The plot additions to the film tend to be personal story elements for Lewis too: guns, undercover work, technology used for detection, characters who refuse to speak up, all return in later Lewis films.
Also, the film offers an idealized version of (peacetime) military life, with brotherhood, uniforms, officer's clubs, heroism and congratulating commanders. Lewis and his characters were always fascinated by militarism. Here at the start of his career, Lewis presents a militaristic fantasy without irony. Later Lewis films will still have characters fascinated by militaristic life styles, but they will either associate such lifestyles with non-military organizations (Pride of the Bowery, A Lady Without Passport), or present a pacifist critique of how the military uses militarism to lure people into huge disasters (The Deserter). Even his Korean War film, Retreat, Hell!, which offers a sincere tribute to the Marine Corps, depicts the huge price the Marines have to pay in battle.
One can take too stern a tone with an escapist fantasy like The Spy Ring. Its vision of Army life is a fantasy that has little to do with reality - but it's a pleasant and largely peaceful one. After all, if all the world's armed forces did was play polo and wear spiffy uniforms to the Officer's Club, we would all be a lot better off!
The riders in the cover painting are wearing visored helmets, that cover their eyes. You also see these polo helmets in the film. Lewis occasionally shoots so that these helmets shade his heroes' eyes. But more often, he either finds a low camera angle that reveals his characters' eyes, or has the helmets worn fairly high, so that the visors no longer cover the eyes. The same is true of the big-visored officer's caps the soldiers wear with their Army dress uniforms. Eye-covering headgear is often considered a cool part of uniforms, outside of Hollywood. But it violates the first principle of film shooting: actors' eyes must ALWAYS be visible. This principle was established in the earliest silent days of movie making, and it continues to the present. The eyes convey to the audience what characters are feeling and thinking. Exceptions, such as the brief shot of the intimidating sunglass-wearing state trooper who corners the heroine in Psycho, are rare, and only serve to confirm the rule. Lewis tends to confine eye-shading through visors in The Spy Ring, to a few shots that indicate how cool his characters look in their snazzy uniforms. The bulk of the shots keep the heroes' eyes visible.
Third, the cover shows a conflict between two polo riders, who have converged on the same ball. The conflict is dramatic, and in accord with lowest common denominator cliches of drama, that "conflict is what interests an audience". But this is not how Lewis structures his film. Lewis instead emphasizes shots of men riding horses. The excitement of horseback riding, in a public event, is what fascinates Lewis. Similar excitement pervades his later horse race pictures, and his B-movie Westerns, which are full of spectacular sequences showing men riding at top speed through the countryside. In fact, for reasons I am unable to explain, the riding sequences in Lewis Westerns often look faster, more dynamic, and just plain more exciting than those of other directors.
In the story, the hero is #1, as captain of his polo team. In the film, he is no longer the captain of the team, being instead a more casual player. Still, he could easily have been made #4, instead of #3, as he is in the film. One might also note, that he is never seen carrying a phallic looking swagger stick, unlike the officer shown on the target range at the start of the film.
The hero has to do some detective work, to track down the real outlaw. This detective work is rudimentary compared to later Lewis heroes, but it still places the lead in the line of Lewis heroes who are admired for their skill and commitment as detective reasoners and sleuths.
The meeting with the judge uncovers personal secrets, also a Lewis tradition. Here these secrets are just in one scene, not throughout the film. Once again, this is simpler than later Lewis, but a nice start all the same. This scene anticipates the plot of The Spoiler.
Progress of the hero's trial is shown through newspaper accounts, like that of the hero to come of Invisible Ghost. There is also a funny Wanted poster of the two innocent men, something that also will recur in Lewis films like The Wyoming Story.
Soon, we see the Sheriff advancing on the heroes, also shot through the wagon wheel. The Sheriff moves from background to foreground, in the Lewis manner.
Later, there is another wagon-wheel set-up, showing the stage coach driver fixing a wheel. Here the camera moves around from behind the wheel to the front, in a way that anticipates Lewis moving camera shots from one side to another of rows of pillars.
There is a third set of wagon wheel shots, at the Hoot Owl camp.
The opening massacre is vividly staged, with the wagon train in a long single file, and the outlaw gang in a horizontal, side-by-side row. Lewis war films will typically center on massacres of US troops, such as Retreat, Hell! and 7th Cavalry. The Marine convoy in Retreat, Hell! is also in single file, and it too gets picked off one by one, through gun fire. The wagon train here is all civilians, however. It is also unusual in that a middle-aged woman is among the victims.
The geometric treatment of the wagon train and the attackers also anticipates the more complex geometric figures in the finale of 7th Cavalry.
The hero wears a fancy black gunslinger's outfit, with white accents. Except for the white accents, this is similar to the black clothes that will later be worn by Lewis villains. It is unusual to see a hero in such clothes. His horse is also black-and-white, like the one ridden much later by Chuck Connors in The Vindicators (1965). The hero also has huge black boots with giant spurs, although Lewis does not make any special point of displaying them. This costume is much sharper and more elaborate than the one worn by Baker in his previous outing, Singing Outlaw. It is also darker in color.
The hero's costume recalls that of pioneer singing cowboy Ken Maynard, in such films as Heroes of the Range (1936), directed by the Serial King, Spencer Gordon Bennet. Maynard also wore a black shirt with arrow pockets, white trim, fancy black boots and gun belt, and a large white ten gallon hat.
One difference: Maynard's costume does not have the fancy lace-up ties on Baker's shirt. Lace-up cowboy shirts recur in Lewis' Johnny Mack Brown Westerns, and in Gun Crazy. They also anticipate the leather vest ties that will later be worn by many Lewis gunslingers.
Maynard had a different style of singing than Bob Baker, as well. Maynard's voice is like that of traditional mountain singing, like the North Carolina mountain folk musicians featured in Songcatcher (Maggie Greenwald, 2000). He plays the fiddle, unlike Baker's guitar.
B-Movies like Heroes of the Range could well have served as the model for Lewis' Westerns with Bob Baker, being hour-long Westerns set in the Old West, with a singing cowboy in black-and-white clothes who gets involved fighting crooks undercover in new identities, and lots of exciting riding scenes.
The title Border Wolves is misleading, in that the film has nothing to do with the Mexican-USA border. The film's one Hispanic character, seen briefly, is a likable sort, but the film has little to do with any Mexican characters or border issues. The "wolves" of the title are a sinister criminal gang, but they are all non-Hispanic, white Americans of the most generic sort. In short, the film is full of Wolves, but has no Border.
By contrast, the Chinese cook is an important character. His depiction has strengths and weaknesses. On the negative side, he talks in the sing-song pidgin English that afflicts many Chinese characters in early Hollywood film, and his enthusiastic delivery is meant as humor. On the positive side, his character is good as gold, and he is an unusually sympathetic and active good guy, for a non-white character in this era. On the whole, this seems like a more positive than negative portrait. Lewis would soon make a film glorifying the Chinese people, Bombs Over Burma (1943), one almost entirely free of any stereotypes. Despite its problems with stereotyped dialogue, Border Wolves should be seen overall as a positive stage in Lewis' depiction of the Chinese.
The cook is one of many Lewis men who cook food, and serve it to other men. Most of these "men who cook" are white - for example, heroes Lucas and Mark in The Rifleman - and there is no association in Lewis between Chinese characters and cooking. Hero Bob Baker will cook for his sidekick in the next Lewis picture, The Last Stand.
The hero is introduced singing. This is a beautiful Lewis pan through tree branches. It also includes a fence in the foreground, and a hill in the background. The fence is sloping downward, and the hill upward, at the start of the shot. They form a giant V, turned on its side. The gap between the hill and the fence keeps getting bigger, during the first half of the shot. At the shot's midpoint, the heroes pass behind the trunk of the tree. Now the fence starts sloping upward, and the hill downward: a reversal of the opening. The two get ever closer together, like a V tilted on its side in the other direction. The tree branches get thinner and thinner here too. The second half of the shot is a mirror image of the first half of the shot.
Later Lewis films will regularly feature mirror-reverse camera movements, in which a hero first goes forward along a path, then returns in the path in the opposite direction. This shot in Border Wolves is different: the hero just keeps moving forward, in one direction - while everything else in the shot goes into a mirror image. Still, the shot is a creative example of Lewis' interest in mirror-symmetric camera movements.
There are several scenes of the heroes riding through forests at night. These often follow the heroes through pans. The forest scenes include regions of bright light, and darker areas in the forest. The scenes have a fairy tale quality, like the forest scenes at the end of Vampyr (Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 1932).
The hero and outlaws will imitate owls at night, making noises off-screen. This anticipates off-screen animal noise imitations in Day of the Hunter.
The hero sings a song in the stage coach, "Blaze Away, Cowboy" that celebrates a cowboy practicing with his gun. Is this an early example of the gun cult in Lewis? The rollicking song is accompanied by the rhythmic motions of the stagecoach, the stagecoach reins, and the other riders. The song unites most of the film's good guys into one happy expression of joy. At the end, the singing hero laughs and grins delightedly.
The sequence starts and ends with two beautiful camera movements, that show the stage coach driving on roads by a lake. The opening shot shows the stage coach turning the corner of a road - one of many corners in Lewis. The concluding shot has the coach passing behind some beautiful tall trees.
During the middle of the song, we see a fence in the distance, through the back door of the stagecoach. The fence has the low posts with wires running between, that will become a Lewis staple.
The musical numbers in Border Wolves also have the heightened, dream-like feel, that runs through this film.
I counted 413 separate shots in Border Wolves. (I'm new at this, and suspect this count is probably off a bit - but the real number is probably within the 400-425 range.) Border Wolves runs 53:55 (3215 seconds), not counting titles or end credits. This gives an Average Shot Length (ASL) of 7.8 seconds per shot. This is close to what David Bordwell says are the norms of Hollywood A-movie feature films for 1930-1960: they tend to have ASL's in the range 8-11.
With Border Wolves, the most extreme contrasts of shot length occur in the first two scenes. The opening massacre is nearly a montage sequence, made up of many short shots. There are 44 shots in the massacre sequence, which runs 1:57 (117 seconds). This gives the massacre an ASL of 2.5. I can't document it, but suspect that such fast cut scenes are unusual in Lewis' career as a whole.
Immediately following this, come the entrance of the hero, singing a song. This lyrical song number is in total contrast to the preceding massacre. The upbeat song consists of two long takes, which total around 80 seconds. It's as if Sergei Eisenstein had suddenly transformed into Vincente Minnelli. Lewis had worked as a film editor before becoming a director in 1937, and one suspects he was fully conscious of his switch in editing approaches. They seem to be a deliberate figure of style. They successfully convey a change of atmosphere and mood, and do a great deal to characterize the hero.
There is no evidence to suggest it, but it is possible that the opening massacre is a sequence taken from an earlier, bigger budget Western movie, directed by someone other than Lewis. Lewis could have shot and inserted a few views of his own characters into this sequence, such as the bad guy commanding the attack. This would explain why the massacre is so untypical of Lewis' cinema as a whole.
After these two scenes, Lewis avoids such extremes of editing speeds, in the rest of Border Wolves. Some scenes are cut at a more leisurely pace: the bathing scene has an ASL of 12.7 (14 shots in 178 seconds). Lewis heroes like to get cleaned up, and Baker's bath in the river is an early example. It also gives Baker a chance to appear with his shirt off, anticipating many Lewis heroes to come. This is one of several lyrical water scenes in Border Wolves: a Lewis favorite. We see an arching tree branch here, an image that also occurs elsewhere in Border Wolves.
By contrast, the exciting finale has an ASL of 5.2 (57 shots in 296 seconds). Lewis is speeding up his cutting, for a scene full of pep.
The Last Stand (1938) is the last of the four Westerns Lewis made with singing cowboy Bob Baker. It is a richly enjoyable work, with a good story and beautiful landscape photography.
I cannot figure out any relationship between the title The Last Stand, and the plot of the picture.
The Last Stand has one of the best constructed scripts of any early Lewis B-movie. It tells a logical, detailed, easy to follow and enjoyable story.
The Bob Baker Westerns had the same two leads, singing cowboy Baker and comic sidekick Fuzzy Knight. But Baker did not play the same character or same sort of character in each film.
Here Baker is playing a man trying to discover his father's killer. He joins forces with a local Cattlemen's Association, who are trying to discover some cattle rustlers. Baker suggests the killer and the rustlers are linked, and he goes after both groups.
Baker goes undercover as an outlaw, a fairly common gambit in 1930's and 1940's B-movie Westerns, to judge by the sample shown on the Western Channel. This was long before undercover assignments became common in film noir, with such modern day detective stories as T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947). The Western film genre was here first. Lewis will regularly feature law officers in undercover roles, both in Westerns and film noir.
Baker shows initiative in going undercover as an outlaw. After that, however, he just keeps learning things almost by accident. He finds the right gang of rustlers right away, and they just keep showing and telling our hero things about their rustling activities. So the hero is partly like later Lewis detectives, and partly unlike them. Like other Lewis detectives, he learns a steady stream of new information about the bad guys, throughout most of the picture. Unlike later Lewis sleuths, he does not have to do any real detective work, using his brain laboriously to uncover facts. The facts just keep falling into his lap.
Still, the steady flow of revelation about the bad guys' rustling throughout most of the film is most pleasing. Other Lewis films will have a similar steady uncovering of information.
The rustling is an elaborate criminal scheme, that takes much of the film to show in detail. Such elaborate criminal schemes are less frequent in Lewis' TV Westerns. In The Wyoming Story, the villain outlines to the hero his elaborate cycles of theft and killing. This is just a brief scene, and all dialogue, unlike The Last Stand. Still, the schemes in both films are elaborate, and wind up "full circle" back where they started, with people paying twice for the same product. Both schemes are repeated over and over by the bad guys, too, serving as a steady money maker for them.
When the hero and heroine are sitting romantically on the couch, the hero has a giant ten gallon hat sitting in his lap. It makes a striking and funny visual pun. It certainly suggests that the hero is sexually entranced.
At the start of the shot, we had a look at the hero's shiny black cowboy boots. Often, boots in Lewis signify meaningless bravado. But here they give the hero some romantic glamour.
At the film's end, there are jokes that suggest that the sidekick is jealous of the heroine and her romance with the hero. Further jokes suggest the three will now be a threesome. In some ways, these are just little satires on relationships in B-movie cowboy pics. But they also suggest, behind the veneer of joking humor, the interest in non-standard sexuality that will run through Lewis.
The strongest feature of The Last Stand is landscape. There are numerous shots through tree branches, sometimes arching over the image, sometimes making a tangle in front of everything. These branches are often combined with another great Lewis subject, lyrical shots of water. The Last Stand has a lake, a waterfall and a river. Both the lake and river are often combined with branches.
The brief, joyous song "Adios, O Kid from Laredo" is staged in one take, that also incorporates camera movement. The shot begins with a close-up of a Wanted poster showing the hero - a common Lewis image. We see a gun used as a hammer, tacking up the poster. Then the hero's voice is heard off screen, singing: a common entrance for menaces, less common for a hero in Lewis. The hammer tapping by Fuzzy persists through the song. The staging recalls in general terms the delightful "Blaze Away, Cowboy" song from Border Wolves, which also had rhythmic accompaniment from supporting characters while the hero sang, both aural and visual. Both songs end with delighted laughter from Bob Baker. The camera movement now moves more dramatically to the left, ending when the hero gets on his horse.
"Adios, O Kid from Laredo" is reprised briefly, in the final shot of the film. This too is a moving camera shot.
The stage coach robbery starts out with bad guys chasing the stage. This is shown in numerous camera movements, that sweep from right to left. These show Lewis' skill with dynamic riding sequences. Many include complex trees or tree branches, as foreground objects. These then climax in less mobile panning shots, that show the coach under arching tree branches. Most of these shots also show water in the background.
We also see the hero enter the chase, riding from the back of the frame to the foreground. He celebrates his arrival at the front by rearing his horse: typical Lewis high spirits.
No sooner have the bad guys robbed the stage, than the hero robs them. This is shown in a delightful shot, one of Lewis' 90 degree stagings: the robbers have their backs to the camera, while the hero swoops in on horseback 90 degrees to them, riding across the frame.
The house has a white picket fence around its yard. Such a fence will return in Arizona Cyclone.
The hero walks from the gate of the fence in the background, clear up to the camera in the foreground: one of Lewis' most extremes foreground-moving stagings. Later, the villain will make a parallel walk. Lewis likes such parallel motions.
After the hero leaves, he and the villain Evans walk along the fence, and the camera tracks with them. This is another of Lewis' start and stop camera movements, echoing the interior track at the Cattleman's association. The picket fence track stops twice, then starts again, climaxing with the hero mounting his horse and riding off.
Soon we see the villain moving back along the picket fence: one of Lewis reverse tracks along a path previously taken by a character.
Our first glimpse of these curtains are through a second doorway, one leading into the house. Lewis likes such two-level deep, door through door stagings.
The hero sings a song about the prairie. It is a good ballad. But actually, the Baker Westerns all seem to be shot in forested regions in California. The true prairie is a long way off!
Unlike Baker, Starrett rides a white horse. It is magnificent as the one later ridden by Baranca, in the Rifleman episode of the same name.
Starrett's costume and horse were already present in a non-Lewis Western he made, The Cowboy Star (David Selman, 1936). This movie was in fact shot before Lewis started directing in 1937. (The Cowboy Star also co-stars Iris Meredith, who will continue as leading lady in Lewis' Starrett movies. And it is shot against the same Western town set that will appear in Lewis' Texas Stagecoach.)
Starrett holds his cowboy hat in front of him, while standing. It forms a phallic symbol, and recalls a similar gesture by Bob Baker during The Last Stand.
Blazing Six Shooters is rich in shots under arching tree branches. The film opens with such a view. And complex photography of trees recurs throughout the film.
In front, there is a lamp with two curving lampshades. It too is highly complex, adding to the geometric composition of the shot.
In different scenes in Karsin's office, Lewis stages the characters so that they form different compositions using these trapezoids.
The tracks are frequently combined with another Lewis trademark: camera movement that goes through walls. Unlike an earlier, somewhat ambiguous "through the wall" tracking shot in the jail in Singing Outlaw, this is an unequivocal track that passes from room to room through a wall.
Lewis stages several lateral tracks at Karsin's. These shots also form some of Lewis' tracks that echo or reverse. The first track starts out at the right of the office, and tracks all the way to the left. It then reverses itself, and moves along the same path back to the far right of the office again. Then it moves through the wall to the next room. This is a classic example of a "paired tracking shot" in Lewis, that moves first along a path, then retraces itself along the reverse of the path.
Later shots in the film will also move along the same path in Karsin's office. These form examples of another Lewis strategy: to have tracking shots that echo each other.
The farm machine also contains a strange curved object, perhaps a seat. It later appears as a foreground framing object, as the hero and heroine ride out of the scene. The whole thing looks like a piece of avant-garde abstract sculpture.
Later in Blazing Six Shooters, there are several more wagon wheel shots. One is of an exterior; it is immediately followed by an interior shot, through the bars of a chair. The camera then moves up, over the top of the chair, to give us an unobstructed view of the room.
Blazing Six Shooters is a model example of the inverted detective story, one that perfectly exemplifies the form. Starrett solves the mystery through a relentless process of logic and investigation. He always reasons from evidence, never guessing or stumbling on anything through luck. In other words, like other Lewis heroes, he uses genuine detection to solve the mystery.
Lewis' films are unusual, for their adherence to sophisticated models of detection found in prestigious writers of prose mystery fiction. There is an inverted detective story here, and there will be a "dying message" mystery in Lewis' next film Texas Stagecoach.
Also, the uncle loses his temper at the start, and shoots off his gun with disasterous effect, causing his horses to stampede. This can be seen as a cautionary look at the whole "quarrels with guns" ethos.
A possible plot hole: it does not seem as if the uncle knew the hero well enough to remember him in his will. This seems excessive, although it hardly hurts the film.
The crooks are trying to pressure the good guys into selling their ranches. The crooks know what the ranch owners do not: there is valuable property hidden on the ranches. This is a small-scale version, of a plot that will be expanded in later Lewis films, to a full scale attempt by bad guys to take over a town. In Blazing Six Shooters, only two ranchers are targeted, while in later Lewis films crooks will target an entire town. In Blazing Six Shooters, a simple hidden asset is on the ranch (silver ore), while in later Lewis films the whole town is about to experience an economic transformation, such as the arrival of the telegraph or the railway. In Blazing Six Shooters, the crooks use theft and murder, while in later Lewis, the crooks use a reign of terror. Despite this smaller scale, Blazing Six Shooters is a highly satisfying viewing experience.
Don Juan opens with a complex long take. The camera moves up and down the neck of a guitar. It later whips over to the singers.
At the end, we see through another Lewis object: marimbas. These are being vigorously shaken. It is somewhat unusual to see a Lewis shot through a foreground object, in which the object is in rapid motion.
After the end, we see complex shots through another Lewis favorite: wash hanging on lines. This is one of the first - and most complex - such views through hanging laundry in Lewis.
Aside from its two good musical numbers and a few other interesting scenes, it is one of Lewis' lesser films. Visual style is weak, outside of the splendid songs. The characters are angry, abrasive, violent and generally unlikable. A rare for Lewis - and highly regrettable - racial slur, is also a strong minus here. However, the film also has some interesting social commentary. It also has an unusual detective sub-plot.
Texas Stagecoach has good guy small businessman, victimized by an evil banker. Both the sympathy for small business owners, and opposition to crooked financiers, run through Lewis' work as a whole.
The smooth talking banker gives a speech, to a cheering crowd of townspeople. In Lewis' Rifleman episode The Safe Guard, a good guy banker gives a similarly staged talk, to a group of cheering townspeople. Yet the one banker is as evil and crooked as the second banker is good and honest. The two scenes make an odd pair. There also had been an honest, sympathetic banker in Lewis' previous film, The Man from Tumbleweeds.
Texas Stagecoach is also an early example in Lewis, of denouncing jumping to conclusions. The film is full of warnings, about not believing ideas that are not yet proven. This anticipates Bombs over Burma, which preaches looking at both sides of an argument. It also anticipates many later Lewis films, in which detection and uncovering of truth is a slow and difficult process.
Soon, there will be another memorable traveling shot of the coach, this one through a rail fence.
It is followed by a shot of the other Sons of the Pioneers riding behind. In the left lower corner, we get a small arc of a rotating wagon wheel. The rotation seems to synchronize with the poetic movement of the song. It is one of Lewis' most striking images. This is the end of the number.
The song Texas Express alternates a lyrical opening and finale, with lively interludes. Lewis matches this, with beautiful shots of trees or fences in the lyrical sections, and comedy in the more rhythmic ones. Lewis tends to use long-held moving camera shots in the lyrical sections - while the comedy sections have faster cutting, almost montage. The cutting is on the rhythms of the song.
In the comedy sections, we once again see a Lewis stagecoach driver framed through his reins. This is lead singer Bob Nolan. His sidekick Pat Brady gets a rear view, and also displays his boots, as he clambers over the coach. The song also refers to the heroes' boots - Lewis films are filled with boots.
Lewis liked to stage views through windows. There is a striking comedy shot, of Pat Brady looking through the stagecoach window, at a horizontal angle from above. Brady's head and shoulders are stretched out parallel to the top and bottom of the frame.
After the song, there is a stagecoach race, once again showing Lewis' fondness for all kinds of horse races. This too involves lyrical photography of trees. We also see another Lewis favorite image, a small bridge.
The song centers on one of Lewis' favorite and most idealized subjects: men working to build infrastructure. Here they are building a road. Road building will return in Pride of the Bowery and Bombs Over Burma, as well as the road repair crew in the finale of Gun Crazy.
The song also conveys a powerful sense of male bonding.
Who staged this sequence, and the other songs in Lewis' B-Westerns? None of the credits for these films list any choreographer. Did Lewis stage these sequences entirely by himself? Are the movements the work of a professional dance director? I frankly don't know. There is plenty of credited musical talent on these films - so the musical "score" for the symphony of noises is likely done by these musical professionals. But the visuals and staging might or might not be entirely by Lewis himself.
Most of the shots are on tilted camera angles, something that is unusual in Lewis. The only other titled angles I can recall are in My Name Is Julia Ross, and in a street scene in So Dark the Night. Tilted camera angles are in other Hollywood films: they run through The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939) in the historical montage sections.
Other features of the song are much more Lewis-like:
Immediately after the song, Lewis shows us Starrett riding from one end of the town, to the other. The shot opens with a view through a wagon wheel sign, at the Wagon Wheel restaurant, no less! And ends with a shot through another wagon wheel. This same camera movement path is repeated both forward, and in reverse, elsewhere in the film, in the Lewis manner.
The barn scene contains one of the few viewer shocks or surprises in Lewis. Lewis tends to avoid this sort of thing. There are shock cuts to explosions (Arizona Cyclone) or firing weapons (The Vindicators) in a few Lewis films, but both of those are more style flourishes, rather than an actual plot development, as in Texas Express.
The sequence ends with an impersonation, also something of a rarity for Lewis. It anticipates a bit Boss of Hangtown Mesa, in which the bad guy forces the hero to swap clothes with him, and later takes over the good guy's identity.
What all this means is that The Man from Tumbleweeds is much more of a pure piece of movie storytelling than are many other early Lewis films. Aside from a lengthy (and dull) fist-fight scene that temporarily stops the plot early on, the flow of storytelling throughout the film is continuous and logically unified. Screenwriter Charles Francis Royal keeps the story going, and Lewis keeps embedding it in beautiful pictures that delight the eye.
The Man from Tumbleweeds is the Birth of the Queer Hero in Lewis. He we have a hero who advocates social change, and who is quietly marked as gay.
What is less common in The Man from Tumbleweeds are the many frames through which the camera shoots. There are shots through wagons and porches. Shots are bounded by giant rocks. We frequently see the town through boards at the top of the screen. These boards are not "explained" - they might be porches, but this is not sure. Lewis shows strong compositional skills with all these frames. They create "apertures" through which we see the characters. Such apertures were common in silent cinema: directors like Maurice Tourneur loved them.
The blacksmith shot that opens Duel of Honor has a board that blocks off the top of the image. Lewis explained to Francis M. Nevins in his book the interesting technical reasons for this board. However, the frames in The Man from Tumbleweeds seem just created to make lively compositions, not for any technical reasons.
A picket fence has a swinging gate.
The multi-paned window at the bank gets smashed, as in the memorable finale of So Dark the Night to come.
The outlaw's tough-but-decent sister is a striking and unusual character. She anticipates the similarly hard-boiled but idealistic burlesque dancer in The Undercover Man. Unlike the several dance hall women who bond with the hero in later Lewis pictures, however, the tough gal in The Return of Wild Bill is utterly "respectable". She is a sister of the monstrous, and white trash, outlaw, and very low class looking herself. But she is not herself involved with dance halls, or anything that could categorize her as a "loose woman".
When the tough gal is tied up, she rescues herself, by finding a way to cut through her ropes. This scene will be repeated in The Rifleman episode Sheer Terror. The heroine of Sheer Terror goes on to rescue the hero, who is about to be ambushed, just as in The Return of Wild Bill.
The bad guys use deceit, telling lies to set one honest rancher against another. This recalls Lewis' previous film, Texas Stagecoach.
The hero repeatedly talks about the need of the ranchers to stick together, and to learn the real truth behind the bad guys' lies. This is an early example of the Lewis theme of mutual aid. We see him talking to some ranchers one-on-one. But The Return of Wild Bill lacks any group scenes of the ranchers banding together, unlike Lewis films to come. Mutual aid is a good concept here, but still a bit under-developed, compared to later Lewis.
An interior camera movement combines two Lewis standards. There is a track through walls, going from room to room. And this is connected to a lateral track behind a lot of household objects in the foreground, such as chairs. It's a neat shot.
There is an earlier tracking shot, going behind one of the same chairs. These chairs have horizontal bars on their backs, unlike the vertically barred chairs through which Lewis typically shoots in other films.
A bad guy is introduced towards the end of the horseshoe game. He is first seen through one end of the portico. This is a variant on Lewis' strategy of viewing characters through doors or windows.
Boys of the City (1940) is the first of three East Side Kids movies credited to Joseph H. Lewis. Boys of the City is a terrible movie, far and away the worst picture I have ever seen by this director.
I am going to go out on a limb, and speculate about whether Boys of the City was actually really and fully directed by Lewis. Lewis did not deny to Nevins that he directed Boys of the City, and actually mentions directing the fire hydrant opening of the picture. One might speculate that Lewis did indeed direct the film, in the sense that he was the official contracted director, but that for some now obscure reason he had little actual creative input into the film.
I have no historical evidence at all to make such a claim. Yet, there are hardly any "Lewis shots" in this film. While there are both an indoor and an outdoor staircase at the creepy mansion, there is little creativity in filming such staircases. There is little staging through doors or windows, few creative camera movements, aside from some routine tracks down a dinner table, and little shooting through foreground objects. The subject matter of the film has little in common with other Lewis pictures, although the crooked judge perhaps anticipates the crooked judge in Boss of Hangtown Mesa.
Perhaps I am just rationalizing, because I don't want to see Boys of the City ascribed to Lewis. It has the only racism seen in any Lewis picture. The treatment of the black member of the East Side Kids is one racist stereotype after another. The Sinister Lesbian housekeeper (someone has been watching Rebecca, perhaps) is also a blot on film history, especially in the scene where she sexually harasses the heroine. None of this has any parallel in the rest of Lewis, as far as I can tell.
Some of the settings and props recall Lewis:
All of this makes a few shots in the picture more Lewis-like.
That Gang of Mine (1940) gets the East Side Kids involved with raising race horses, a favorite subject of Lewis. That Gang of Mine is a good movie, and one that shows unexpected emotional depth. Here we have a personal Lewis film, that manages to make something good out of a low budget.
There is a humorous conversation that includes a spoof challenge-to-a-duel. This anticipates Duel of Honor, and all the strange contests and gunfights in Lewis.
The treatment of the black characters is a huge step up, for Lewis, the East Side Kids movies, and for American films of that era as a whole. The black member of the East Side Kids is treated largely the same as the other Kids. They all make the same corny jokes, and participate in all the events shared by the team equally. The horse trainer is a person of skill, moral insight and respect.
The black characters here are folksy and Southern. They have plenty of what the film regards as "typical black" characterization, with a dialect line of patter, and a fondness for spirituals and dancing. It is unclear whether modern audiences will be comfortable with this, or not. There are also rare cases in the film where stereotypes persist: when the black Kid says he is afraid of the dark, for example. Still, it is clear that most of the negative elements that were used to demean black people in many pre-1940 Hollywood films have been stripped away. These characters are intelligent, articulate, skillful and morally decent.
Similarly, star Leo Gorcey gives competent performances in That Gang of Mine and Pride of the Bowery. Given a decent script, a gifted director, and a role close to his persona of naive slum kid, Gorcey could perform. Gorcey plainly had the skills necessary for a Hollywood film of the studio era: he could stay in character, deliver snappy lines of dialogue, and emote believably. He will never be mistaken for Olivier. But he had the professional acting skills to function competently, in typical Hollywood films of the classical era, that stress story, characters and relationships.
That Gang of Mine and Pride of the Bowery are not comedies. Nor are they the heavy-breathing crime melodramas of the Kids' earliest films, which got them involved with gangsters, reform schools, prisons and debates about why young people turn to crime. There is no crime in That Gang of Mine and Pride of the Bowery, and only modest amounts of comedy relief. Instead, they are light, low key dramas on pleasant subjects: horses in That Gang of Mine, the government-run Civilian Conservation Corps in Pride of the Bowery.
A camera movement goes past the Kids high up on a paint scaffold, moving around them in an arc.
The Kids' small stable near the start is filmed with a lateral camera movement through foreground objects.
The big stables are frequently filmed with camera movements that go up and down the row of stables. These shoot through the pillars in front of the stable.
A conversation at the early stable is filmed through a wagon wheel. It is like the wagon wheel shot in Boss of Hangtown Mesa, in that it separates the characters into groups, each seen through a different gap in the wheel. These wagon wheel shots use a fixed camera.
At the Turf Club restaurant, there is a moving camera shot through a ceiling fan.
At the stable, Knuckles and a crook walk, at the camera moves with them. The crook asks Knuckles to go in to the stable, where they can talk in private. We know that the bad guy has a crooked scheme to propose, which will anger good guy Knuckles. The two men disappear into the stable. The screen becomes utterly still and empty: just a shot of the stable door. No people, no motion, no background music. Then the two men explode in a fight out the stable door. The shot ends. The sheer stillness of the shot anticipates an equally still moment in the final shoot-out in A Lawless Street.
There is a nice shot, in which a view of one of the Kids is followed by a whiplash 90 degree pan, showing a deep perspective down another building.
There is a camera movement, which slowly moves past all the Kids' faces, while they stand still and peer intently. A similar camera movement showing the characters will appear in Bombs Over Burma.
There is a deep perspective shot down the covered porticos at the stables. It anticipates some perspective shots down porticos in Shotgun Man.
The peaked roofs of the stables are often in the background of the shots. The roof compositions seem a bit simpler than some of the elaborate peaked roof compositions in Lewis to come. As compensation, there are lots of different views of the roofs, adding creativity to the film.
The rival jockey wears black, like Lewis villains and gunslingers. He also has patches on his back pants pockets, like the rival in A Young Man's Fancy. The hero locks him in a room, and attacks him to whip him into good behavior, like the finale of Sidewinder. All three of these films deal with young people.
Pride of the Bowery (1941) is the third and last of Lewis' East Side Kids movies. In this one, the Kids join the Civilian Conservation Corps, and Mugs tries to become a boxer.
The camp buildings have peaked roofs, and often feature in the background of shots, a Lewis tradition. The buildings are long and narrow, recalling the stables in That Gang of Mine.
A long take camera movement shows the boxing promoter arriving at the camp. In the first half, the camera moves along with his car. In the second half, he leaves the car, and the camera moves even further to the left, while he talks to the Major.
However, Pride of the Bowery moves in directions that reflect Lewis personal traditions. The ranch in They Made Me a Criminal is a fictional place. But the Civilian Conservation Corps in Pride of the Bowery is a real government program of the New Deal era. It shows Lewis' interest in government institutions: the IRS will apear in The Undercover Man, and the INS in A Lady Without Passport. All of these can be categorized as "non-military government institutions that support the nation's infrastructure, and which are run on militaristic lines". As far as I can tell, Lewis' interest in such institutions is unique in film history. I don't know of any other Hollywood fiction films that show New Deal programs the way that Pride of the Bowery does.
The Corps members are shown building roads. This is also a major Lewis interest, appearing in Texas Stagecoach (made a year before Pride of the Bowery), Bombs Over Burma and Gun Crazy.
One might note that while the ranch in They Made Me a Criminal is designed to reform juvenile delinquints, that the Civilian Conservation Corps in Pride of the Bowery is designed to give jobs to the unemployed. The Kids in Pride of the Bowery are not playing criminals. They are just slum kids in need of employment.
Mugs both bonds and spars with the young camp member who is a leader. The bonding between a social outsider (Mugs) and a handsome hero type (not unlike Lucas in The Rifleman) is a Lewis tradition. However, in The Rifleman, we usually see things from Lucas' point of view. Here, the social outsider is the viewpoint character. The boxing between the two men is typical of the duels and contests that cement friendships in other Lewis tales.
One of the Kids becomes a student cook at the camp. This recalls the men in Lewis who cook and serve food to other men. There is an unusual time-lapse, showing the camp members arriving at the dining hall.
The Major in charge of the camp has a younger deputy who supervises road crews; both are uniformed. They resemble a bit the older man-younger deputy in the INS in A Lady Without Passport, and the Marshal and deputy in The Bullet.
The proprietor of the boxing arena anticipates the owner of the carnival in Gun Crazy. Both are the presenters of cheap looking, rowdy entertainment to the public, in which contests of skill on stage are a central attraction. Both men are dressed in flashy, low-bow loudly striped suits that nevertheless have a certain pizzazz. However, the boxing manager here is a much nicer person than his counterpart in Gun Crazy.
People have to sign up at the Camp for a six month stay, and later, a desperate Mugs sells his long-term boxing services to the boxing manager for money. This is a bit like the indentured servant in Pompey, and the sharecropper in The Fourflusher.
The small town is unusual looking. It is very different from the wholesome, charming small towns often shown in the movies. The businesses and stores are full of lettering and elaborate signs, in a way that recalls tough urban areas, such as Los Angeles' skid row area, Main Street. The presence of a large boxing arena also recalls Los Angeles' skid row district. The whole downtown area looks old and decrepit. Lewis makes these shots almost a documentary about the town, preserving its unique appearance on film.
When the bad guy is running away from Mugs, he turns a 90 degree corner, and runs down a side street. Such 90 degree angled streets are common in Lewis films.
One of the businesses we see on the street is a Chinese laundry. This anticipates Night of the Wolf. Both films' laundries have the name of their Chinese proprietor on their signs.
The first date is a lyrical scene, set near the edge of the lake. It recalls the lake where the hero first meets the heroine in Border Wolves, and anticipates lyrical river scenes in Shattered Idol and Old Tony. All of these films have very young men enjoying the lyrical, rapturous quality of the water areas.
Later we see a car driving along the edge of the lake, where the characters previously were on foot. It gives an odd effect. Lewis also finds slightly different perspectives from which to shoot the lake in these scenes, from the earlier walk.
At the finale, Danny and the bad kid have a big fight in the water, anticipating the finale of My Name Is Julia Ross, and its villain collapsing in the ocean.
Invisible Ghost (1941) is an early Lewis B-movie. It does not succeed as a unified whole, but is recommended viewing, for its interesting visuals and story elements.
The trailer (included on the DVD) has shots not included in the actual film, such as one showing the wife leaving the basement, and another showing the corpse come back to life. This makes an interesting addendum to the film.
The title is misleading: there are no ghosts, invisible characters, or anything supernatural in the film. Instead, it tells a story full of creepy events, set in a mansion where a series of murders is taking place. Lewis seems to share the rationalist attitude of most US popular culture of 1900-1965, with the supernatural being despised, and rarely making any sort of appearance other than in not-to-be-taken-seriously light comedies such as Topper or Casper the Friendly Ghost. I personally loathe the supernatural, and fully share this rationalist world view.
Invisible Ghost does not correspond to any Hollywood genre known to me. One supposes it was thought of as a "horror movie", but the film is longer on eerie atmosphere and odd turns of plot, than thriller or action sequences. It is not an "old dark house thriller", with people being chased around a mansion at night. The way the plot is kept boiling constantly, with a series of eerie but disparate and often disconnected events, anticipates William Castle thrillers to come, such as Homicidal (1961).
The first half of Invisible Ghost is full of strange plot revelations, about the past life events of characters in the mansion. In this it resembles A Lawless Street, another film in which the hidden past lives and personal secrets of characters are steadily exposed to the viewer. Both films also resemble each other in that there is no detective character uncovering these truths: they are just steadily revealed to the audience through the storytelling. After the first half of Invisible Ghost, the plot runs out of steam, and the film has nowhere to go.
In Eddie's Daughter, Eddie's wife has deserted him years ago for another man, just as in Invisible Ghost. (Trouble between husband and wives leading to separation years ago is a plot element that also returns in The Big Combo and A Lawless Street.)
Lewis would return to the subject of serial killers in Flowers by the Door, the Rifleman episode of his I like the least.
Another somewhat horror-oriented Rifleman episode, The Guest, shows a portrait of series hero Chuck Connors hanging on the wall in a creepy mansion, recalling the painting that plays such a prominent role in Invisible Ghost. Paintings will play a huge role in the film noir genre to come. 1941 was only the second year of film noir's existence as a genre, and Invisible Ghost can hardly be thought of as a film noir.
A subplot in The Visitor has a pair of killers smothering victims in bed. This is like the strangling of characters in bed in Invisible Ghost. The layout of the hotel in The Visitor has similarities to the house in Invisible Ghost, with an upstairs corridor with many bedrooms leading off it.
There is little actual detection in Invisible Ghost. The truth finally comes out at the end, when Lugosi goes into a trance state. This is an example in Lewis of truth about a mystery emerging from an altered state of consciousness.
Immediately before, there is a scene where a psychiatrist working for the police, tries to get the truth out of a suspect, testing him to see if he is mentally ill. This goes nowhere, because the suspect (the butler) is not guilty, is perfectly sane, and knows nothing about the murders. Lewis neither endorses nor attacks psychiatry in this film. Invisible Ghost was made the year before Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), an early example of Hollywood's relentless glorification of Freudian psychiatry in the 1940's.
I found the plot of Invisible Ghost easy to follow, but was confused by the causes of Lugosi's trances. When first watching the film, I thought Lugosi's attacks were simply triggered by seeing his wife wandering in the grounds. Fiction about mad killers often shows them triggered by something: see the parallel lines in Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) or the night and rain in Follow Me Quietly (Richard Fleischer, 1949).
However, the DVD sleeve suggests his wife is hypnotizing Lugosi into having the attacks. This is a possible alternative reading.
Neither interpretation really makes too much sense:
Even odder, when the wife dies at the end, Lugosi's trance stops, as if they were linked by psychical powers.
Invisible Ghost has odd class elements. Although the serial killer is mad and has no conscious control over his actions, his victims seem to be all working class characters, while he is rich and powerful. He perhaps relates to the wealthy crooks in other Lewis films who attack ordinary people, although those villains always work for gain. The villain of The Guest is also a rich man who attacks the working class hero of The Rifleman.
Paul's profession of civil engineer recalls other men who build things in Lewis: the telegraph line builders in Boss of Hangtown Mesa, the men surveying for the railway in Surveyors, the road builders in Pride of the Bowery and Bombs Over Burma.
Clarence Muse's performance as the butler is a model of dignity and sophistication. It is unusual to see a black character treated in non-stereotyped fashion in 1941. We see Muse giving orders to white servants in the kitchen, logical for his position as butler, but also atypical of Hollywood. He gets 4th billing in the cast, above many white actors - also unusual in 1941.
The whole subplot about Ralph seems to derive from Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy (1925). It is unusually explicit about Ralph having a sexual liaison with the lower class woman, something done to fulfill his "need for companionship", as he puts it. This is an example of a Lewis character with a strong need for some sort of forbidden sexuality, a theme that will run through his pictures.
Desires for forbidden sexuality link seemingly respectable upper crust characters with lower class people who can satisfy them:
This perhaps relates to hero Lucas McCain in The Rifleman, and his constant male bonding with social outsiders. The Rifleman is different, however, in several ways. The outsider characters in The Rifleman are usually members of minority groups who are discriminated against. Lucas is not slumming with these people: he is standing up with and supporting people who are social pariahs and victims of discrimination. There is also never an explicit sexual relationship between Lucas and these characters. Finally, Lucas' friends are usually men, while the forbidden sexual relationships listed above are all heterosexual.
John McGuire's performance is excellent. He manages to seem like two completely different people as the two brothers. His first brother seems like a sleazy womanizer, often smirking or viewing with alarm. The other brother seems far more polite, gracious, upbeat and intelligent. The designers also give him two completely different looks, having him in sportswear for the womanizer, and suits for the classy brother.
Lewis gets right down to business in the opening shot, with a camera movement that includes the mansion's huge staircase. Lewis loves staircases, and this one will be filmed with many variations in camera movement throughout the film. The staircase has an upper landing at the top, like Lewis staircases to come in A Lady Without Passport and The Trade.
Lewis employs different rhythms in staircase scenes. Lugosi, and the camera, descend slowly and menacingly. While the hero steps down at an accelerated pace, the camera dashing along. Rhythm will also appear in when the butler discovers the body, which is accompanied by a radio exercise program that uses rhythmic music.
The shed basement scene is shot in one long take. This is one of the virtuoso camera movements in Lewis. When the gardener descends to the basement room in the shed, light moves with him, making moving shadows on the wall - an unusual effect. The camera then moves over to the bed, to introduce a new character. Soon, the staircase will be seen in the mirror. This mirror shot is unusual staging. In addition to the staircase, the mirror also reflects two images of the gardener: the main reflection, and a narrow second reflection in the edge of the glass. Eventually, we see the gardener ascend the staircase - in the mirror. The whole shot is enormously complex.
The next shot shows the gardener at home with his wife at dinner. This scene too is one long take camera movement, although it is more conventional. It eventually ends with a moving-in to the husband, to emphasize his final words. A coffee pot is prominent on the sideboard, anticipating the coffee pot on James Craig's desk in A Lady Without Passport and the Marshal's coffee pot on The Rifleman. Later, there will be a funny joke about coffee, the butler and a cop.
There is a notable camera movement, that moves around the back of Lugosi while he is seated at his desk. This movement was cited with admiration by Robert Keser in his Lewis article. The movement is almost-but-not-quite a pure circular arc around Lugosi. Camera movements that circle around characters appear in other Lewis films. This movement then continues as a long take, with pans to the door and back.
When Clarence Muse is about to put the car away, Lewis moves in on him in a dramatic camera movement, which gains emphasis by moving into the giant car, as well. This moving-in tells us that Muse is learning about the strange goings-on in the woods: another Lewis moving-in that reveals a character's thoughts.
The death row scenes, which involve moving camera shots through bars, are outstanding. They combine two Lewis trademarks: shooting through bars, and camera movement. The prisoners are treated as "foreground objects in front of a lateral straight line track" in the second shot, also a Lewis trademark. The march to the death house is one of the funeral rituals that appear in Lewis.
Lewis will cut to a camera movement, showing the men's feet marching in unison. Such marches will often be associated with Western bad guys marching towards shoot outs in Lewis.
Camera movements pass through walls. The camera movement at the coroner's office has a stately quality that recalls Dreyer.
Lewis shoots as much as possible through doors, linking one room to another. This is a common strategy in his films.
The window shots, when Lugosi sees the woman on the ground below, emphasize the three vertical bars of the window. These anticipate shots in The Trade and The Deadly Wait, which also look down through windows and bars, to the outside ground below.
The curtains that pull open at the window to reveal the body, anticipate the door curtains in Night of the Wolf. Only one side of the curtains are opened in Invisible Ghost, while both sides are pulled open in Night of the Wolf.
Criminals Within (1941) is one of the worst films credited to Lewis' as a director. In Francis M. Nevins' book, Lewis said he was sure he had not directed Criminals Within. Nevins dug up a videotape copy of the film, and showed it to Lewis: the film lists its director as "Joseph Lewis" (the currently available DVD copy says the same thing). Lewis still denied he had anything to do with the film, and knew nothing about the film or why it was seemingly credited to him. No one has any historical information as to why this film is credited to Lewis on-screen.
I think this bad film show little sign of Lewis' direction, either in plot or visual style. And suspect the film was never directed by Lewis at all.
The chronology of Lewis' films does not provide an answer to whether Lewis is or is not the director of Criminals Within. According the the TCM database, Invisible Ghost was shot in late March 1941, Criminals Within in early May 1941, and Arizona Cyclone in late June 1941. So Lewis had time in his schedule between Invisible Ghost and Arizona Cyclone, when he theoretically could have filmed Criminals Within. He has no alibi!
A combination spy and mystery film with a military background, Criminals Within has many concrete problems that mark it as a failure:
There are a few features of Criminals Within that might show affinities with Lewis' work:
None of this adds up to a convincing "smoking gun" showing that Lewis actually directed Criminals Within.
In general, being a Lewis completist, and trying to see all his films pays dividends. Most little-known Lewis works are full of inventive plotting, staging and visual style. But the maybe-by-Lewis-but-probably-it's-not Criminals Within is an exception. Despite the few interesting touches listed above, it's a dismal viewing experience. Beware!
Criminals Within was released in the summer of 1941, roughly six months before Pearl Harbor. The United States was still at peace. There are foreign spies at work in Criminals Within but no war or battle scenes.
Movies as diverse as Dirigible (Frank Capra, 1931), Murder in the Fleet (Edward Sedgwick, 1935), Flight Command (Frank Borzage, 1940) and Lewis' own The Spy Ring (1938) showed the peace time Armed Forces as engaged in technological or research work, often top secret and high tech. Criminals Within follows in this tradition.
Arizona Cyclone has little more story than the above big rich crooks versus honest businessmen plot. Unlike the more richly structured Boss of Hangtown Mesa, there are no mystery elements, no changes of identity or undercover work. The freight transport business the hero runs in Arizona Cyclone is less visually and technologically interesting than the telegraph business the hero works for in Boss of Hangtown Mesa (the telegraph coming to town in Arizona Cyclone is completely off-screen, and is only mentioned in the dialogue). We also see fewer townspeople and businesses in Arizona Cyclone than is typical for Lewis: only the hero's freight business and the banker and the woman bank teller are well characterized.
The hero is pure and simple the manager of a freight company, as the dialogue repeatedly states. He spends most of his screen time supervising the loading and unloading of freight, driving freight wagons, negotiating business deals about freight, etc. It is very much a portrait of a small business manager.
Arizona Cyclone shows Lewis shooting through his repertoire of foreground objects: a wagon wheel, arching tree branches, grill work on a bank teller's cage, a blacksmith's, a fireplace, a cooking pot tripod, a triangle, reins of a horse.
At the final night time shoot-out in the street, a composition includes a glowing lantern.
The buildings tend to have peaked roofs. The bank lobby also has a peaked wall section behind the teller's cage - one of the few indoor peaked areas in Lewis.
The saloon has a staircase and swinging doors, but neither is used elaborately.
In keeping with the anti-gambling theme running through Lewis, the crooks here like to gamble in the saloon. One meeting of the crooks shows only their poker game, with the dialogue being voice-over only.
The shock cut to the explosion, after the sidekick takes his medicine, perhaps anticipates the shock cut in The Vindicators to the flaming arrow attack.
A camera movement follows down a bar as a man enters the saloon, then over beyond the bar to a table. When the crooked banker enters with such a movement, bad guys are soon shown following the reverse path to leave the bar: an example of Lewis' paired entrance and reverse exit camera moves.
At the end, the villain moves out to the left behind the bar, then moves back along the right in front of the bar. This is another example of paired camera movements: albeit short ones.
A camera movement goes through a wall at the bank, moving from the lobby to the banker's office.
When the bad guy advances on the hero in the bank for a possible shoot-out, the camera focuses on his holster as he moves forward. This is a static shot; later films will combine such holster close-ups with camera movement.
Bombs Over Burma (1942) is a spy drama, set in China during the Axis bombing. It shows the horror of bombing civilian populations.
The bombing is the only combat shown. The Chinese are shown fighting back by building roads, and running truck convoys over them. This includes the famous Burma Road, a vital supply line built by the Chinese to link China and Burma. This is an unusually constructive attitude: to oppose war and violence with building. It recalls the emphasis on building roads in Pride of the Bowery, and laying telegraph wires in Boss of Hangtown Mesa. It makes Bombs Over Burma one of the few war movies that suggests alternatives to fighting.
Tom gives an impressive speech on the bus about how the Americans and Chinese are helping each other. This is an example of the mutual aid among ordinary people, that is important to Lewis.
At the end, the people stand up against their oppressors, here a Nazi spy. This anticipates the finale of The Deserter.
The buildings serving as the bus depot have unusual architecture. One is an eight-sided tower, which seems vaguely Chinese - in real life, it is probably a Spanish-style building somewhere near Los Angeles. These buildings are not the peaked-roof complexes often found in Lewis. However, they seem somewhat related, in that they are interesting architecture in the background of a shot.
Lewis shoots the bus depot through the wire spokes of a wheel. This spoked wheel strongly resembles in form the wagon wheels Lewis often shoots through in his Westerns.
The characters make their entrance on the staircase at the depot.
The villain is suave and seemingly British upper class, like the bad guys in My Name Is Julia Ross and Eddie's Daughter. He only has one henchman, however, unlike the usual two in Lucas. The villain has a small back dispatch case, like the villain in The Guest, and the wire cutters used to cut its chain anticipate the wire cutters which sever the fence in Old Tony. His servant wields a knife, like many Lewis villains.
Tom Whitley (played by Dennis Moore), who seems to be an "American traffic expert", perhaps in China to assist with road construction, wears boots. He is one of the few sympathetic booted characters in Lewis.
Hero Slim is in a leather jacket, reflecting his job as bus driver. Leather jackets were just becoming popular as a fashion item for men in 1943, and this film is an early example.
The sleazy mechanic, who learns who is commiting the crime and uses this information to extract money from the villain, anticipates the drunk in The Wyoming Story.
In the classroom, we see Lewis' staging on right angles. The teacher is at her desk, the students are at their desks, 180 degrees to the teacher, and the toy vendor is facing 90 degrees to both the teacher and the students.
Such settings as the bus, and the monastery dining table, also keep the characters at regular angles to each other.
When Slim gives his big speech at the monastery to the heroine, first he is facing 180 degrees away from her, then he turns around, so both are looking in the same direction. Slim wears a gun, like gunslingers in Lewis Westerns, and the back view we get of him is similar to the rear views of many such gunslingers.
When the heroine enters the basket shop, there is a complex camera movement embodying several Lewis traditions. First, there are foreground objects (tea kettles), hanging in front of the heroine's path. Then we see the heroine go from outside to inside. Finally, the camera follows her around, till we see her through the double loop of a hanging basket. We often see Lewis characters through geometric objects such as wagon wheels, bars or metal work; this basket is one of the most complex such framing objects, with its double loops.
The heroine enters, then later leaves, the basement with the basket maker. These are an example of Lewis' paired camera movements, showing a character leave along the same path they entered. The camera movements include both a staircase, and foreground objects of hanging baskets.
There is a beautiful camera movement, showing the bus making its way down the road. Trees with arching branches appear in the foreground of the shot, in the Lewis manner. This is one of the most complex of Lewis tree shots, involving numerous different trees, and counterpoint between the road the bus takes and the path the camera takes. There will later be simple shots of the convoy, framed in arched branches.
Later, the hero, heroine and villain will be shown in a moving camera shot, walking behind a tangle of wiry bushes.
The Chinese road builders are shown in moving camera shots.
The staircase down the lower room of the monastery is simple in architecture, but spectacularly lit. It is virtually a light show, or work of light-art. There is a honeycomb grid of shadows on the wall, moving shadows from the slats of the door at the top, and other lighting effects. It has a candelabra standing in front, that serves as a foreground object in front of camera movement when people walk downstairs. The candelabra also has spirals in its metal work, another Lewis tradition.
Late in the film, Lewis has some fixed camera shots, showing the room below from the top of the stairs. These recall the shots from the staircase top in Invisible Ghost, which showed the hall below from a high angle.
Towards the end, the hero has to decide who is telling the truth: the heroine or the villain. The film veers off into detective work at this point, where he and the heroine struggle to establish the truth of what is going on. As always in Lewis, it is not easy to find truth, and it takes a huge effort and many steps, stops and starts to get at a real answer.
The hero is helped however, by a principle he enunciates: "Americans ... listen to both sides of an argument". This is a profound statement of the open-minded, democratic tradition.
The Silver Bullet (1942) is a B-movie Western, the second of three Lewis did with star Johnny Mack Brown. The Silver Bullet is a well-made film that combines the Western genre with two other of Lewis personal interests. It is a detective story, with the sleuth-hero trying to track down a professional killer. And it is a political film, with the hero's search taking him to a town in the midst of an election. The mix of Western, mystery and liberal political drama works wonderfully well, and The Silver Bullet is a Lewis gem that, while little-known today, has the potential to become a crowd pleaser. (Among other things, The Silver Bullet would make a good choice for college film courses, trying to show a B-movie Western in classes.)
Other genres play a role in The Silver Bullet as well. The film is a musical, with numbers performed by Nora Lou Martin and the Pals of the Golden West. This same singing group shows up in the companion film to The Silver Bullet, Lewis' next Western Boss of Hangtown Mesa. The two films have utterly different plots and characters, but they have much the same cast, and they are shot in the same Western town set.
And Fuzzy Knight gets his best comedy relief material of any of the Lewis pictures I've seen. While Knight in other pictures is often forced to make bricks without straw, trying to generate comedy out of whatever pratfalls and shtick he can muster, here he has some substantial subject matter to sink his teeth into. Knight's scenes take him into transgressive sexuality, comically but firmly: a Lewis tradition.
A giant, no holds barred fight between good guy and bad guy will appear much later, in Lewis' I Take This Woman (1962). Watching it, one immediately thinks, "It's like The Spoilers!"
This water subject will return in Lewis' last TV series episode, The Man from Nowhere (1966). There it will get an oddly revisionist treatment. In The Man from Nowhere, the water monopolist is not a big-money rancher, but a poor, vengeful woman farmer. And the small ranchers who oppose her resort to attacks of violence, in the manner of sinister Lewis villains and their reigns of terror. Meanwhile, the hero opposes both the monopoly and the terror, and advocates a legal settlement that will share the water with the small ranchers, instead. The Man from Nowhere is odd, in that it scrambles the characteristics of heroes and villains that runs through the rest of Lewis. It suggests that reality can be unconventional and complex, and that non-violence and negotiation are better than violent battles. Both sides in The Man from Nowhere regard themselves as good-versus-evil, which Lewis suggests is not so. And use this self-righteousness to support their intransigence and, in the ranchers' case, their use of violence.
Later, we see a different camera movement in the bank. While the first shot was a track, the second shot is a pan. It rotates from behind the teller's cage, and includes views through both teller windows. It looks a lot like the opening track, in that it occurs at a similar viewpoint from behind the cage, and also moves from right-to-left. But it is subtly different, being a pan instead of a track. The second shot ends with a two-level deep look through both a teller window and a door.
The first shot in the saloon is a left-to-right track through the entire saloon set. This shot subtly echoes the recently seen track through the entire bank set. The saloon track is a "lateral straight line track seen through foreground objects", one of the atomic ingredients of Lewis' cinematic universe. The foreground objects include ordinary foreground constructions such as a gambling table and card table. They also include some Lewis favorites from other kinds of Lewis shots, as:
The shot gains added complexity in that its first half follows the heroes as they move into the saloon - but they seat themselves at a table half way through the shot, which continues along without them. There is also a perceptible change of the speed of the track in the two halves of the shot, with a sort of pause or slowing down when the heroes sit down at the table.
Later shots also track down the saloon.
Much of the saloon fight is shown in a series of overhead camera views. These views are excellent for showing the progress of the fight. So they seem "logical" to viewers. However, these shots are not rationalized as Point of View shots. Lewis has just decided to elevate his camera. By contrast, the steep overhead views of the hallway in Invisible Ghost are shots taken from the top of the hallway staircase. Those shots sometimes include a person on the stairs, and sometimes not.
After the inquest, the hero and sidekick walk down the street, and a camera movement accompanies them. During this shot, the hero explains his genuine detective reasoning, reaching new insight about the mystery. Halfway down the shot, the pair pause in front of bales of hay. At the shot's end, they are in front of a restaurant window that also serves as a mirror, reflecting people riding in the street.
The hay shows up again, when the hero walks down the street for the final shoot out.
The hero keeps forcing men to roll up their sleeves, so he can check for a scar. This is similar to the way the bad guy of Boss of Hangtown Mesa orders the hero at gunpoint to take off his shirt.
The villain declares his intention of marrying the heroine, purely to achieve power. He explicitly denies that her prettiness matters to him.
Election posters with the villain's picture are everywhere. They resemble the Wanted posters, usually of sympathetic characters, that run through other Lewis films.
When I first saw Boss of Hangtown Mesa, I thought it was an inoffensive but poor film, one of little interest. In fact I fell asleep briefly in the middle of it.
But every time I saw it again, it seemed more and more interesting. Even though I've watched it several times, I'm looking forward to seeing it again. What changed my mind?
Mainly, Boss of Hangtown Mesa is unexpectedly complex in its treatment of several Lewis subjects.
A City. The Western town in Boss of Hangtown Mesa is elaborate. Trying to trace out its geography, the location of its various buildings, and where Lewis is staging scenes in the city, becomes an absorbing experience. Watching a film actively, asking questions like "where is this encounter shot?", adds a dimension to the viewing experience. This is not a gimmick - the use of a city as protagonist is a Lewis subject that runs throughout his films. It is thus a "legitimate" question to be asking here.
Changes of Identity. People changing identities, both crooks and good guys, is a common Lewis theme. Boss of Hangtown Mesa has one of the most complex such plots in Lewis - courtesy screenwriter Oliver Drake. Both the hero and villain change identities, and do so in complex, interlocking ways. Repeated viewings help highlight these plot developments, allowing one to savor their complexity and detail.
Undercover work. Plots in which characters go undercover, working their way into an organization under false pretenses, were apparently fairly common in B-movie Westerns. And also in detective comic books of the 1930's. In the later 1940's, undercover plots became a staple of film noir as well, in films like T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947). Once again, Oliver Drake has come up with an unusually complex plot. The hero here winds up undercover two levels deep. He is a good guy, pretending to be a bad guy, in turn sent in by the bad guys to pretend to be a good guy and infiltrate the telegraph company. Just as The Locket (John Brahm, 1946) is a film containing flashbacks within flashbacks, so does Boss of Hangtown Mesa contain undercover roles within undercover roles. This is unusual and striking. Repeated viewings of Boss of Hangtown Mesa help bring this into focus.
Building telegraphs. Boss of Hangtown Mesa contains documentary features, showing the construction of telegraph wires and poles. These scenes too benefit from repeated viewings.
Other features of Boss of Hangtown Mesa, from its detective work to its visual style, also come into focus more with multiple viewings.
The hero's comic sidekick is a traveling show medicine man, whose fancy wagon anticipates those of the itinerant pitchmen in The Hangman and Suspicion.
Despite the title, a crooked town boss is not the central character. In fact, the crooks here are a group of well-to-do businessmen in town, running a syndicate. They attack the telegraph company, for gain - but they are not really town bosses. They are similar to the later rich businessmen in Lewis who are completely corrupt, and who invent schemes to exploit others. But they have not yet instituted a reign of terror that attacks ordinary people, the way such Lewis villains in Arizona Cyclone, A Lawless Street, Terror in a Texas Town, The Wyoming Story, Squeeze Play, The Bullet do.
The crooks in Boss of Hangtown Mesa (and Arizona Cyclone) are hoping to exploit the telegraph when it comes through; the villain in Terror in a Texas Town wants to gain control of oil-rich land that has not been pumped; the crooked businessman in Squeeze Play wants to get even richer when the railroad comes through, and two of the town's richest men want to exploit the opening of a smelter which will soon bring back mining in A Lawless Street.
The bad guy soon also takes over the hero's identity, as well as his clothes, as part of a con scheme. This forces the hero into a new identity, too, so he will not be blamed for the villain's crimes. The change of identity is a common theme in Lewis.
The telegraph manager deduces that the bad guy is an impostor, by reasoning about the bad guy's knowledge. This is an example of the genuine detective work favored in Lewis films.
Later on, the villain buys a third set of fancy Western clothes. He has almost as many costume changes as the outlaw protagonist of Gun Crazy. Perhaps there is something about Lewis villains which encourages them to dress up in fancy clothes. His white Good Guy shirt has a lace-up front, also like the cowboy clothes worn by the hero of Gun Crazy.
The opening view of the town is from inside a blacksmith's. Lewis will use a similar inside-a-blacksmith view in Duel of Honor and Eddie's Daughter. In Duel of Honor and Eddie's Daughter, we see sparks from the forge; but in Boss of Hangtown Mesa, the blacksmith is working on wagon wheels (what else from a filmmaker nicknamed Wagon Wheel Joe?)
The crooks are all prominent business or professional men in the town. Once again in Lewis, the town itself and its businessmen are "characters" in the film.
In addition to the town, there is also a work camp, run by the telegraph company. The whole set-up is similar to The Pride of the Bowery, with a work camp, and a small town nearby. The workers in The Pride of the Bowery cut down trees, having them fall over; the workers in Boss of Hangtown Mesa do the exact opposite, erecting telegraph poles.
The villain enters the camp in a long take. First, he rides down a hill, with the camera fixed. Then he and the camera pan to the right, pausing when he talks to a man. Then the rightward pan continues, as he moves over to the building. End of long take.
When the villain leaves the camp a little later, the whole sequence is now shot in reverse: a pan from right to left, as the villain rides from the building to the camp edge, then a fixed camera while the villain rides back up the hill. This is an example of the "mirror image" takes of Lewis, which show someone entering and leaving, "in reverse".
The way the villain rides down the hill exemplifies another Lewis trademark: a character moving from the back of the screen to the front, or vice versa. When the villain starts out, he is way in back of the screen. Then he rides down the hill into the foreground. The reverse happens when he exits, in the second shot.