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His last film was the comedy Johnny Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1944), made in 1944 by the King Brothers and released through Monogram Pictures.

After directing a handful of abysmal "B" pictures, he found himself bankrupt by the mid-1940s. He and his wife Mia May, a former actress who starred in many of his early films, struggled to run a restaurant for much of the remainder of their lives; in a bittersweet tone of irony, they called their establishment "The Blue Danube." One of Germany's most celebrated early directors, May never regained the fame he had enjoyed in Weimar Germany.

His movie Confession (1937) is considered especially interesting in that it is an exact copy of German director Willi Forst's Mazurka (1935), right down to the last fade and dissolve, with every shot timed to run exactly the same length, and using the same music as Forst's film.

His first two films in the US, Music in the Air (1934)--produced by Erich Pommer and scripted by Billy Wilder and Robert Liebmann-- and Confession (1937), were flops.

In 1933 he and wife Mia May, along with many others in the German film industry, emigrated to the US, where he was able to establish himself as director, mostly for Universal Pictures, although his work was mainly on what would be regarded as B movies.

During the early years of sound film he worked as a producer for Erich Pommer at Ufa, then for different production companies in Germany, Austria and France, directing a series of multilingual versions in German and French; among them is Her Majesty Love (1931), generally considered to be among the best films of the Weirare era.

In 1928 he gave his opinion on what makes a movie successful: "I have taken the trouble from the beginning to create a movie that appeals to the whole world, which raises the absolute claim of movie art but at the same time comes up to the justified wishes of the public on thrill and entertainment. In my opinion, the conditions for a successful movie are: You take thrilling action, add a little mixture of humorous scenes as well as intense sensation. But you avoid spoiling this mixture with too much sensation because each sensation which is there only for its sake and does not follow on from the logical action of the movie has lost its legitimacy and will be found a nuisance":.

Was in the middle of shooting Der Farmer aus Texas (1925) in 1924 when he received word that his daughter, actress Eva May, had committed suicide. Ever the professional, before he left to make funeral arrangements and comfort his wife, he made sure that the shooting would proceed on schedule when he was gone, and only when he was satisfied that the production would continue smoothly did he finally leave.

Towards the end of the 1920s, he moved away from adventure films and produced more realist works, notably Homecoming (1928) and Asphalt (1929).

After the end of World War I May-Film leased the double glasshouse studios at 5-7 Franz Joseph-Strasse (belonging to Deutsche Vitascope) in 1919 for 600,000 marks, which became known as the May-Atelier. He also built a film studio in Woltersdorf, a village northeast of Berlin in Brandenburg. There he went on to produce and direct a series of popular and exotic adventure films, among them the monumental three-hour-long Veritas vincit (1919), the eight-part 1919-20 series "Die Herrin der Welt" ("The Mistress of the World"), as well as the two-part adventure film Mysteries of India, Part I: Truth (1921) / Mysteries of India, Part II: Above All Law (1921) (" (The Indian Tomb") starring Conrad Veidt and written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. These featured Mia May in leading roles and she regularly worked under her husband's direction in a number of melodramas like The Tragedy of Love (1923) with Emil Jannings.

In 1917 he gave Fritz Lang one of his earliest breaks in the film industry as screenwriter on Die Hochzeit im Excentricclub (1917) ("Wedding in the Eccentric Club") and Lang also worked on other May films at this time.

In 1915 he founded his own film production company, May-Film GmbH, and began to produce a successful series of crime films, whose detective hero went by the name of Joe Deebs. Some of these were directed by May himself, others by Harry Piel; Max Landa and later Harry Liedtke played the title role.

When World War I broke out in August 1914, he had to return to his native Vienna to do his military service, and on his return to Berlin he and Ernst Reicher split up. Reicher leased the studio at 9 Franz Joseph-Strasse from Continental and continued to make the "Stuart Webbs" films with his Reicher & Reicher company until 1918. May's last film at Continental was Der geheimnisvolle Nachtschatten (1914), which he produced in December 1914, with Harry Piel directing.

As Joe May, he made ten films for Continental-Art Film GmbH in Berlin; the first, In der Tiefe des Schachtes (1912) ("In the Depths of the Pit"), was released in November 1912, followed by Vorgluten des Balkanbrandes (1912) ("The Balkan Traitors"), starring Ernst Reicher. In the spring of 1914 May directed the first three of the Stuart Webbs films, a popular series in which Reicher played a gentleman detective modeled on Sherlock Holmes.

A businessman and operetta director, Joe May, one of the founders of the German cinema, started directing films in 1911 and started his own production company a few years later. He gave famous German director Fritz Lang his start in films, employing him as a screenwriter in his early films. After the Nazi takeover, May fled to the United States where he directed several excellent action films for Universal, but never could quite break into the ranks of the "A" picture directors. May never bothered to completely learn the English language and was never popular with his casts and crews due to his dictatorial nature.

Became one of the most important German movie directors in the 1910s and early '20s.

His teenage daughter Eva May (born 1902 in Vienna) tried to build her own career as an actress but committed suicide in 1924 after the end of her third marriage.