Joseph H. Lewis (April 6, 1907 – August 30, 2000) was an American B-movie film director whose stylish flourishes came to be appreciated by auteur theory-espousing film critics in the years following his retirement in 1966. In a 30-year directorial career, he helmed numerous low-budget westerns, action pictures, musicals, adventures, and thrillers. Today he is remembered for mysteries and film noir stories: My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) and So Dark the Night (1946) as well as his most highly regarded features, 1950's Gun Crazy, which spotlighted a desperate young couple (Peggy Cummins and John Dall) who embark on a deadly crime spree, and the 1955 film noir The Big Combo, with its stunning cinematography by John Alton. Life and career Born in Brooklyn, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Ernestine (née Miriamson) and Leopold Lewis. His father was an optometrist. He grew up on the Upper East Side of New York City and attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and when his brother, Ben, moved to Hollywood in 1927, he decided to follow with the hope of becoming an actor. Ben found him a job as camera assistant and, subsequently, young Joseph became an assistant film editor just as the film industry was converting to sound. He began his directorial career (1937–40) by turning out low-budget B-Westerns starring Bob Baker, Charles Starrett, and Bill Elliott. Film editors referred to Lewis as "Wagon-Wheel Joe," because of his tendency to use wagon wheels in the foreground to create interesting visual compositions. Lewis was equally comfortable working in different genres: horror (Bela Lugosi, The Invisible Ghost), comedy (The East Side Kids, That Gang of Mine), detective mystery (Tom Conway, The Falcon in San Francisco), costume adventure (Larry Parks, The Swordsman), and musicals (Benny Fields, Minstrel Man). Lewis's creative compositions for Minstrel Man won him the assignment of staging the musical sequences for The Jolson Story. Today, Lewis is primarily known for his work in film noir during the 1940s and early 1950s. Gun Crazy is a dark romance about gun-obsession, notable for its use of location photography and, for film students and buffs, a particularly arresting shot which lasts for ten minutes, as the audience suddenly becomes a passenger in the getaway car following a bank robbery committed by the young leads. Toward the end of Lewis's career, he worked in television, directing mostly westerns: The Rifleman, Bonanza, The Big