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 One on how to shoot the M-1 rifle was shown well into the 1960s. 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), war picture (
Russ Tamblyn,
Retreat, Hell!), 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 Valley,
Gunsmoke, and the pilot for
Branded. He also directed the 1961
CBS crime adventure-drama series
The Investigators. Lewis suffered a major heart attack at the age of 46, but continued working until his 59th birthday in April 1966, at the end of the 1965–66 TV season. He later lectured at film schools and fan gatherings as well as at retrospectives such as the
Telluride Film Festival, along with European venues in France, Germany and other locations. In 1997 he became the recipient of the
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Nearly five months after his 93rd birthday, Lewis died at his home in
Los Angeles County's seaside community of
Marina del Rey. Active until the end, he made his final public appearance five weeks earlier to introduce a screening of
Gun Crazy at the
University of California at Los Angeles. He was married to Buena Vista Lewis; they had one daughter, Candy Lewis Sangster. ==Selected filmography==