It is 41 years since Lewis Allen, who has died aged 94, directed his last feature film; after that he disappeared into television at a time when the traffic was mostly the other way. His name probably rang a few bells when it came up on the small screen after "anonymously" directed episodes of The Big Valley, Perry Mason, The Fugitive, Mission Impossible and Bonanza.
Yet it was the same Lewis Allen who made several interesting films in the 1940s and 1950s, including a number of shockers, in both senses of the word. His first feature, and arguably his best, was The Uninvited (1943), a supernatural thriller about a brother (Ray Milland) and sister (Ruth Hussey) who rent a haunted house on the Cornish coast and get a young medium (Gail Russell) to exorcise the spirit. Allen brilliantly creates an intangible presence of evil, effectively suggesting horror rather than depicting it. The critic James Agee wrote: "It seems to me harder to get a fright than a laugh, and I experienced 35 first-class jolts, not to mention a well-calculated texture of minor frissons." The Uninvited was that rare species, a serious Hollywood ghost movie, rather than the usual comic thriller. It also had a haunting hit theme song, Stella by Starlight.
Two years later, Allen tried to repeat its success with another old-dark-house picture, The Unseen, again starring the dark-haired beauty Gail Russell. Unfortunately, the film was haunted by its predecessor, and the title described its fate.
There followed a few movies in which Allen displayed a lighter touch, such as Those Endearing Young Charms (1945), a wartime romance that depended on the charms of Laraine Day and Robert Young. But, of all Allen's films, the most interesting and the most preposterous was Desert Fury (1947), in which there is more than a hint of homosexuality. In this garishly Technicolored melodrama, Lizabeth Scott falls for gambler John Hodiak, who is obsessed by her mother (Mary Astor, at her vixenish best), while his sidekick (Wendell Corey) is obsessed by him.
Allen shot his next film, So Evil My Love (1948), starring Ray Milland and based on a Victorian murder case, in England, the country of his birth.
Allen was a Shropshire lad, the son of a clothing manufacturer. After serving four years in the British Merchant Service, he became an actor and then a theatrical manager, first for Raymond Massey and then for the Gilbert Miller Organisation. He eventually took to directing plays in London and New York, including the first US production of JB Priestley's I Have Been Here Before (1938).
In 1941, after directing a London production of The Women, Clare Boothe's all- female play of love and bitchery, he settled in Los Angeles, where Paramount put him under contract, allowing him to become an apprentice film director for three years before The Uninvited.
Most of his 18 pictures were made for Paramount, two of which featured the studio's resident star Alan Ladd, in conventional heroic mode in Chicago Deadline (1949) and Appointment with Danger (1951), the latter co-starring Phyllis Calvert as a nun, in one of her very few Hollywood roles.
One of Allen's absolute duds was Valentino (1951), which was even more fictionalised than Ken Russell's 1977 version of the life of the supreme Latin lover of the silent screen. Not only was it shaky on period detail, but Anthony Dexter, who was chosen from 2,000 actors, while bearing a resemblance to the star, had no charisma, and had to utter lines such as: "Love is a language spoken by the heart not the tongue."
Allen's talent was better displayed in Suddenly (1954), with Frank Sinatra playing a cold-blooded psychopathic killer hired to assassinate the US president as he is passing through a sleepy Californian town. Allen kept the tension mounting until the believ able but predictable climax. Because of the subject, the film was withdrawn from US screens for some years after the Kennedy assassination.
For A Bullet for Joey (1955), Allen brought two of the cinema's most notorious gangsters face to face. However, Edward G Robinson was on the side of the law this time, while George Raft gave his well-worn interpretation of a tough guy. But both stars were past their best; the only unfamiliar thing about the film was the Canadian setting.
For his penultimate movie, Allen returned to Cornwall, the setting of his first triumph, with Another Time, Another Place (1958), this time actually filmed on location. It starred an overwrought Lana Turner suffering a nervous breakdown after her married lover (Sean Connery) is killed. Television claimed Allen after Whirlpool (1959), a made-in-Germany drama with Juliette Greco, then at her peak.
Allen, whose first wife Dorothy Skinner, a London literary agent, died in 1969, is survived by his second wife, Trudy, and a son.