I agree with JPC about Lewis and "The Big Combo" (while disagreeing
about Chabrol), except that I don't think it's incredibly greater than
some of his other bests, just the best, though one shouldn't mention its
two gay characters without mentioning the cunnilingus scene, which
presumably got by everyone at the time. Its greatest scene, though, the
final scene in the fogged-in airport. is an equivalent to the archetypal
Lewis scene that appears in at least three other films and one TV show,
characters lost in a swamp, and is a great use of John Alton's
considerable and distinct talents as a cinematographer: very little
light, space rendered as mystery. Lewis's theme, indeed, or one of them,
is spatial dislocation or "lost-ness."

About obscure Lewises, his first, "Courage of the West," is pretty good,
with a self-cosnciously virtuoso camera. It's very much a first film in
the sense you get of a young director luxuriating in his discovery of
cinema, if not exactly on the "Citizen Kane" level, to put it mildly.
Some of the later early westerns are not as good. More early
obscurities: Joseph H. Lewis directed at least three Bowery Boys
pictures, which I've seen only on TV; I remember them mostly as not very
good (and one has a pretty stupid racist moment involving a black boy
who "sure do love" watermelon), but at least two have terrific boxing
scenes, with characteristically intense Lewis close ups.

A great later one that no one has mentioned yet is "Cry of the Hunted,"
one of the lost in the swamp films.

- Fred C.