Lewis Allen (25 December 1905 – 3 May 2000) was a British-born director whose credits included classic television series and a diverse range of films.
His credits include directing the U.S. premieres of J.B. Priestley's Laburnum Grove (1935) (131 performances) and The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1937) with Cedric Hardwicke.
He made a highly auspicious debut with The Uninvited, an atmospheric and memorable ghost story set on the misty coast of south-west England, starring Ray Milland and Gail Russell.
Allen again worked with Russell twice, in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1945), a comedy, and on The Unseen (1945), a film with a similar supernatural theme which is often considered the unofficial follow-up to The Uninvited.
[7] For that studio he directed a romantic comedy The Perfect Marriage (1947) with David Niven and Loretta Young; The Imperfect Lady (1947) with Ray Milland and Teresa Wright and Desert Fury (1947), a noir-ish Western drama starring Lizabeth Scott and Burt Lancaster.
[2] In 1948 Allen returned to Britain to film So Evil My Love, a lavishly mounted, melodramatic period thriller set in Victorian London, which reunited him with Milland, playing an out-and-out bad lot ruining the lives of Ann Todd and Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Allen later said that he found Milland a pleasure to work with, and the two teamed up again in Sealed Verdict (1948), a topical drama dealing with the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the American-occupied zone of post-war Germany.
In 1954 he directed the tense and claustrophobic Frank Sinatra vehicle Suddenly which became, alongside The Uninvited, his most widely known and highly regarded film.
Later TV credits included Arrest and Trial, Burke's Law, The Rogues, The Big Valley, The Long, Hot Summer, A Man Called Shenandoah, Court Martial, The Fugitive, The Invaders, The F.B.I., My Friend Tony, The Guns of Will Sonnett, The Survivors, Paris 7000, Dan August, Cannon, Mission: Impossible, Griff, Little House on the Prairie, and The Oregon Trail.