Joseph H. Lewis – R. Emmet Sweeney

BAYOU BREAKOUT: CRY OF THE HUNTED (1953)

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 27, 2015

After a career of making B-pictures for Columbia and Poverty Row, Joseph H. Lewis signed a contract with MGM in 1950. His calling card was Gun Crazy (1950), a daring crime film whose location photography and long-take heist sequence created a buzz in Hollywood, if not at the box office. MGM executive Dore Schary screened the film at his home, and brought Lewis into the fold. They sold him on the idea of making a documentary portrait of Cuban immigrants, “no actors, done with all portable equipment”, but this bold experiment never materialized. The idea was recycled into the Hedy Lamarr vehicle A Lady Without Passport (1950), which was Lewis’ directorial debut for MGM. Their artsy hire became just another contract director. But Lewis was used to working miracles off of threadbare scripts – he earned the nickname “Wagon Wheel Joe” on B Westerns by continually bisecting his compositions with wheel spokes. One of the most delirious examples from this period is Cry of the Hunted (1953), about the manhunt of an escaped prisoner through the Louisiana bayou, that Warner Archive has just issued on DVD. Lewis takes every opportunity to ratchet up the intensity: he pushes into extreme close-ups to emphasize flop sweat, lenses a fog-choked hallucination brought on by swallowing swamp water, and captures intense on-location footraces up the Angels Flight funicular in Los Angeles and long take brawls through the Louisiana Bayou. The characters don’t have time to take breaths, and in its svelte 80 minutes, neither does the viewer.

Cry of the Hunted was shot in September of 1952 in Los Angeles and the Louisiana bayou, an ambitious schedule for a B picture. But even MGM’s B films were done at budgets higher than Lewis was used to. He recalled to Peter Bogdanovich in Who the Devil Made It: “At Metro, I found when I had a sequence to shoot with fog in it, they wanted to give me two huge stages and build a whole swamp set, put a boat in there and everything. I knew what that meant: you’d fog up the scene and after you made a shot, you’d have to wait for a half hour of forty-five minutes until the huge fans blew out all the old smoke. Right? Well, that was the Metro way. I wasn’t about to do that – I wanted to do it on the outside, which we did eventually.” Lewis was always trying to get outside and onto the streets and the dirt – thinking it was cheaper to find something ready-made than have it constructed. This was not quite the MGM way, and this made him an odd fit at the company, and he often regretted signing the deal.

The screenplay by Jack Leonard is fairly elemental. Jory (Vittorio Gassman), a petty Cajun criminal, has been imprisoned for driving the getaway car at a robbery. Lt. Tunner (Barry Sullivan) had been tasked with getting Jory to talk and incriminate his heist-mates. When Jory busts out of jail, he lams it for Louisiana. It is up to Tunner and his rotund partner Goodwin (a sardonic William Conrad) to wade through the swamps and the quicksand to find Jory and bring him back to justice.

The energy lags anytime there is a scene indoors, whether it’s at the prison Warden’s office handing Tunner his detail or it’s the Lieutenant at home, making nice with his improbably perky wife (she mixes him martinis for his manhunt picnic basket). These are script pages to plow through, an assignment to complete. But the film comes alive outside. The first galvanic scene is Jory’s escape, which happens during a car accident when they are transferring him back to jail. After being harangued in the backseat by Goodwin’s threatening banter (William Conrad plays his cop as a smiling sociopath), he springs loose on a Los Angeles street following a head on collision. Lewis seems to feel as suddenly free as Jory, capturing Gassman hoofing it towards the Angels Flight funicular with the piston-like form of Tom Cruise. The funicular was a transport from Downtown to the working class neighborhood of Bunker Hill. The history and various incarnations of Angels Flight were dissected in Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, a history of the city on-screen. This instance is particularly notable, for Lewis jams a camera into one of the cars as it travels up, and shots Conrad (or his stand-in) as they race up a staircase across the way.

The scenes shot on the Louisiana Bayou are less urgent and more atmospheric – sweaty, sticky sequences where everything seems to be sinking into a bog. Lewis’s use of extreme close-ups becomes even more prominent, pushing his camera straight into the sweat ridges on male foreheads. Forward motion becomes impossible through the thick swamp, dotted as it is by quicksand, crocs, and disfigured Cajun soothsayers who scream for their lost loved ones (“Raul! Raul!”, she yells, to no response). Tunner even hallucinates being choked by the fog (and by Jory), a fever dream of elongated giant shadows towering over him and his hospital bed – it’s an impossibly strange bit of surrealist cinema for a MGM programmer. With all of this insanity, the easy thing for Tunner and Jory to do would be to sink and disappear, but they keep fighting until the swamps threaten to consume them. They are ready to be devoured until a miraculous last act of heroism by the previously self-serving Goodwin. It’s an improbable end to a story that seemed destined to dissolve in the muck, but that’s Hollywood for you. And that’s Joseph H. Lewis for you as well, finding visual intensities from script inanities.

JOSEPH H. LEWIS AND SO DARK THE NIGHT (1946)

January 24, 2020January 24, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

July 20, 2010

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“Do you miss it – directing?

-I miss it only when I see things on the screen that make me want to vomit.”

Peter Bogdanovich interviewing Joseph H. Lewis, Who the Devil Made It

I should let this magical quote stand on its own, but I’m a writer, so I’ll write. Last week, TCM devoted a night to the films of Joseph H. Lewis, including some rare items surrounding his acknowledged masterpiece, Gun Crazy (1950). The tastiest morsel was So Dark the Night (1946) (made soon after the modest success of the equally awesome, but better known, My Name is Julia Ross (1945)). A rural psychological thriller, it’s an extreme example of Lewis’ idiosyncratic visual sense (the son of a NYC optometrist, he grew up with lenses). As he went on to tell Bogdanovich: “What interested me most was telling the story through the eyes of a camera. I didn’t like words – wherever I could, I cut words out, and told it silently through the camera.”

So Dark the Night is structured around his silent, highly expressive storytelling (major spoilers ahead!). Famed Paris detective Henri Cassin (Steven Geray) takes a break from sleuthing to soak in the rustic charms of the country town of St. Margot. He’s welcomed as a celebrity by the Michaud family, who operate the inn he’s vacationing at. Daughter Nanette (Micheline Cheirel), with dreams of city life, begins flapping her eyelashes in his general direction. Lewis first frames her as a pair of hands fidgeting with a sheet on a laundry line, who then pulls down to reveal her eyes and arched brows. Then she scoots to the right, her beaming mug filling half the frame (with a limited budget for sets, Lewis is big on close-ups). Cassin was also bifurcated upon introduction, shot from the legs down as he strolls around an idyllic urban street. His full body isn’t shown until he kneels to chat with a shoeshine boy. Both are visually split, a motif that continues throughout, and which pays off thematically in the bravura twist ending.

But back to the flirtation. Cassin returns her interested gaze in a medium shot, Nanette reciprocates, and then Lewis cuts to a montage of the detective’s chrome car. There are close-ups of the bulbous headlights, the erect front grille, the sloped handle, and the ornate hubcap – a burst of pure visual metaphor that is shocking in the context of a Hollywood thriller. Cassin is reduced by Nanette into images of luxury, industry, sex…as well as escape.

The sequence continues with an extraordinary tracking shot, following Cassin as he traverses Nanette’s gaze and crosses into the inn itself. Jean-Pierre Coursodon rhapsodizes about this shot in his (out of print) AMERICAN DIRECTORS. He translated this bit himself in the comments section of DaveKehr.com:

“The camera moves across the courtyard, reaches the corner of the house, and continues tracking inside the inn’s main room without a cut, as though it had moved in right through an invisible wall. By removing the fourth wall — in deliberate disregard of realism — Lewis suggests that, together with the protagonist, , we are entering a stage upon which a drama will soon be enacted…”

In this one scene, Lewis sets up the central romance, undercuts said romance with images of division and materialism, and displays a self-reflexive theatricality that foreshadows the action to come. This, my dear readers, is masterful filmmaking.

Soon the plot machinations do their work, and Cassin has two corpses on his hands in a seemingly unsolvable case. Through it all, Nanette is repeatedly composed inside the inn’s window frame, and Cassin is seen cut-up behind his bed’s headboard. There is also some balletic action with push-ins and pull-outs, with the camera repeatedly pulling away from Cassin, and moving forward to Nanette’s boyfriend, who’s eager to quash the detective’s amorous dreams. Not to mention his ominous use of downward tilts, which reveal a third dead body and a knocked out guard in succession (which rhyme with Cassin’s initial bow down to the street urchin).

All of it effortlessly builds up to the moment when Cassin solves the case – and implicates himself as the only possible suspect, despite lacking any memory of the crime. He is, of course, schizophrenic, hence the dense visual patterns that sliced him up. The extraodinary final images explode the cataract of split compositions that Lewis had been creating throughout, as Cassin is shot by the police through the pane of glass that previously showed Nanette whole. He staggers up to the pane, and in the reflection sees a flashback of himself as he existed before the murders. With a fireplace poker he smashes the whole edifice down, and with it the motifs Lewis had been building the whole film. Coursodon reads even more into it:

“the climactic scene in which the the protagonist eradicates both his reflection and the recalled image of his former self by smashing the window in a gesture of revulsion [recalls] Oedipus’ blinding of himself after finding out the truth.”

This mythical interpretation of Cassin’s final act gibes with Coursodon’s reading of the tracking shot as announcing a theatrical space. Cassin’s extreme rationality solves the case, but destroys his life. His final words: “I caught him, I killed him” are a kind of perverse triumph of the mind over its own physical limitations. And no-one got more delight, or more success, out of creatively overcoming the limitations of low budgets than the self-described “artist without a diploma”, Mr. Joseph H. Lewis.