He grew up on the Upper East Side of New York City and attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx[1] and when his brother, Ben, moved to Hollywood in 1927, he decided to follow with the hope of becoming an actor.

Film editors referred to Lewis as "Wagon-Wheel Joe," [citation needed] because of his tendency to use wagon wheels in the foreground to create interesting visual compositions.

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), and musicals (Benny Fields, Minstrel Man).

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.

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.