Most of the features that make Lewis» directorial work such a remarkable exception to the dominance of a realist aesthetic in Hollywood filmmaking are brilliantly apparent in The Errand Boy, including the foregrounding of sound manipulation (most blatant in the sequence involving the post-synchronisation of the song «Lover» for a musical film, and in the tape manipulation of Kathleen Freeman's reaction to having been left by her
driver in the back seat of a convertible receiving a car wash) and the placement of actors in a shot so as to highlight the presence of the camera (as when Morty, an undirected and oblivious extra in a film - within - the - film
cocktail -
party scene, keeps looking
at the camera from the background of a shot in which other extras, in their roles as
party guests, intermittently block him from the camera).