My Name Is Joseph H Lewis

48 MY NAME IS JOSEPH H LEWIS PAUL KERR RE-PLACES THE AUTHOR Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/24/4-5/48/1616593 by guest on 30 September 2021 DESPITE THE RECENT PUBLICATION of John Caughie's 1 John Caughie (ed) excellent anthology, Theories of Authorship1, auteurism has been con- Theories of spicuously absent from the agenda of Screen2 in particular and film Authorship, London, British studies in general of late. But auteurism refuses to go away. It crops up in Film Institute and Festival retrospectives, in the programming of repertory cinemas, as the Routledge & organising principle behind cinema seasons on television, in educational Kegan Paul, 1981. See also Stephen syllabuses and among the assumptions of articles in Screen itself. Indeed Jenkins (ed) Fritz there remains, as Caughie argues, a reluctant sense in which while it is Lang: The Image assumed that authorship (in both its traditional humanist 'exception to and the Look, London, British the Hollywood rule' and its post-structuralist 'subject's construction of Film Institute, and by a reading' guises) is an inadequate critical concept, it is difficult - 1981. Jenkins if not altogether impossible-to entirely dispense with it. Caughie's conceives of 'Lang' neither anthology itself collects much of the best writing on the relation between biographically nor texts and authors but is quick to acknowledge the relative absence of structurally, since work on the relation between authors and contexts. Understandably the former assumes a dubious of the liberal extensions of auteurism to embrace non-directorial romantic artist personnel and similarly sceptical about the contextualising work done on behind every Hollywood genres and Hollywood as industry3, Caughie admits that his aspect of'his' work, while the book latter 'implies that such a structure exists as something has very little to say on the place of the author within institutions (industrial, to be grasped.' Instead, Jenkins cultural, academic), or on the way in which the author is constructed by and addresses 'Lang' as for commerce. Partly this reflects a dissatisfaction with most of what has a 'space where a been written, which has tended to remain within the romantic concept of the multiplicity of artist, with its concentration on questions of artistic freedom and industrial discourses intersect, an interference, and with its continual desire to identify the true author out of unstable, shifting the complex of creative personnel. At the same time, questions of the author's configuration of relation to institutional and commercial contexts are increasingly being discourses recognized as crucial... 4 produced by the interaction of a specific group of films (Lang's This article attempts to sketch out-if not yet to fill in-some of the gaps filmography) with discussed by Caughie concerning the place of the author within those particular, institutions. historically and . socially locatable The title of this piece has both a playful and a polemical purpose. Play- ways of reading/ ful because it marries the title of Joseph H Lewis' first major success, My viewing those Name Is Julia Ross, with an echo of the first clause of John Ford's films', p 7. famous statement 'My name is John Ford. I make Westerns.' Unlike Ford, Lewis-in spite or perhaps because of the cult status of some few 49 of his films-is not familiar enough to assume such an easy equivalence 2 See, however, Steve Neale's with a directorial oeuvre, let alone to conjure up a conventional genre, article 'Authors nor can his name even be relied upon to guarantee recognition among and Genres' in readers of specialist journals like Screen. And this, to risk repeating Screen vol 23 no 2, myself, is important. There is no obvious genre that Lewis can claim to pp 84-89. have made his own-as Ford could modestly associate himself with the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/24/4-5/48/1616593 by guest on 30 September 2021 Western. Lewis began and ended his career with Westerns, but in 3 Caughie, op cit, p between was a decade or more in which he made none at all and it is that 14. decade, in which he essayed the musical, the comedy, the war film and the crime thriller, with which I am primarily concerned here, and in 4 ibid, p 2. which Lewis made his name as a director. Indeed, if it can be said that Lewis made any categorisable and consistent type of film at all in those Paul Kerr, 'Out Of years then the critical consensus can suggest only two coherent candi- What Past? Notes on the B Film dates for such continuity. First, that they are all 'Lewis' films, a formula- Noir', Screen tion which simply elides the problem by transforming the auteur canon Education nos itself into a virtual genre; and second, that they are all 'B' films destined 32/33, Autumn/ for the bottom half of Hollywood's double bills. Winter 1979/80, pp 45-65. There is, however, a third and rather more contentious case to be made for Lewis: indeed, a number of critics have already argued that the bulk A number of such of his 1945-1955 output falls into the category now known as film noir. textual analyses This may, of course, be no more than a symptom of the very real diffi- are referred to in culty auteurists have experienced attempting to define and describe the footnotes to this article. See these films. Nevertheless, their eccentricities, their excessiveness, their below. expressiveness as texts of and for their time, combined with their cen- trality in, their representativeness of a particular professional strategy at a specific moment and mode of the American cinema's, and indeed the American film industry's, development is what interests me now. This article grew out of a paper I presented at the 1980 Edinburgh Film Festival which included a pretty comprehensive retrospective of Lewis' films. That retrospective itself says a great deal about Lewis' standing in 1980 though the conclusions reached by .the various contri- butors to the event all share the conviction that Lewis is and was something of an unsuitable case for the Edinburgh treatment. It is also signifi- cant that the Edinburgh Retrospective, unlike many of its predecessors, did not transfer to the National Film Theatre in London or inspire a tie- in publication. On the other hand, this article itself is a part of the expanding Lewis bibliography. The draft presented in Edinburgh was itself derived from an earlier article published in Screen Education1* and this case study of Lewis, however schematic, presents an opportunity for amending the more obvious weaknesses and filling in some of the more gaping omissions of that previous piece. What it does not attempt is textual analysis-not because this is not considered crucial in relocating authors in institutions, but because there are several very useful examples of such analyses already available.6 What follows can be divided into three relatively distinct parts: first, a claim for the surprisingly continuous results of, but historically and institutionally extremely diverse reasons for, expending energy in famil- 50 iarising exhibitors, audiences and critics with Lewis' name; second, a See Janet Staiger's sketch of the landmarks in the industrial terrain in which Lewis operated overview of the and a discussion of the ways in which 'he' achieved some of the 'effects' shift to independent for which he has since been celebrated; and third, a survey of the history production in this of attempts to construct Lewis as an author within the critical and issue otScreen. academic institutions. In 1942 the United States government reached a temporary settlement Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/24/4-5/48/1616593 by guest on 30 September 2021 8 Edward with the major studios in the so-called Paramount Case and, for the 'big Buscombe, 'Walsh five' vertically integrated majors at least, the twin practices of block and Warner Brothers' in Phil booking and blind selling were either effectively curtailed or banned out- Hardy (ed) Raoul right.7 For the first time all their products had to be sold to exhibitors Wahh, Edinburgh individually and this included 'B' films which were even, occasionally, Film Festival, 1974. See also now subject to press previews and trade shows. Relatively rapidly B Steve Jenkins' films were encouraged to become increasingly competitive, compul- article 'Edgar G sorily and compulsively different, distinctive. What had previously, per- Ulmer and PRC: A Detour down haps, been a rather static aesthetic and occupational hierarchy between Poverty Row', in Bs and As became suddenly more flexible. No longer could a company Monthly Film like Columbia guarantee outlets for its films in blocks-it had to sell Bulletin July 1982, vol 49 no 582, p them singly and it could consequently no longer rely on its own 'trade 152. name' to attract exhibitors or assure quality. Rather paradoxically perhaps, one of the avenues this opened up among the 'ambitious Bs' involved the contravention of current formulas and standard stylistic practices (too often referred to as the Classic Hollywood style), as indul- gence in excess, individuality, idiosyncracy, virtuosity as if for its own sake. Within these differences, however, residues of Hollywood's cine- matic standardisation remained. First, of course, the constraints within which such 'experiments' took place were real and tight; secondly, the conventions against which such reactions were expressed remained relatively common among a large number of different film-makers wishing to 'make a name for themselves'; and thirdly, in order for a director like Lewis to differentiative his work from that of his contemporaries he would be obliged to standardise his own style wherever possible, for pur- poses of recognition-and reward.

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