THE HISTORY OF B-MOVIES
The term 'B-movie' was coined in the early 1930s to distinguish the
low-budget productions (usually lasting between 50 and 80 minutes)
made by
the eight major studios from their more expensive 'A-movies'. It extended
to
the total product of the so-called Poverty Row companies, such as
Republic
and Monogram, which only made cheap pictures. In downtown cinemas
'A-movies'
were exhibited on their own; B-movies were released in double bills
or as
support to 'A movies'. Their natural home was the backstreet cinema
and the
small-town movie house, providing the value-for-money fare demanded
by
Depression audiences with time on their hands but little money with
which to
kill it. They were rarely shown to the press.
As a cultural phenomenon the B-movie lasted for less than 40 years.
Its life
was extended for a while by the post-war popularity of the drive-in
cinema,
but it finally succumbed to television and the inexorable disappearance
of
locally owned independent movie houses.
Fairly rapidly 'B-picture' became a pejorative term. 'B-movie dialogue'
meant a string of clichés. 'B-movie plots' were predictable dramas
retreading familiar stories. There is some justice to this. Most B-movies
are bad and forgotten. But at their worst they have an unpretentious,
sometimes camp, charm. At their best they are as different from smooth
A-movies as the great pulp writers like David Goodis and Horace McCoy were
from the respectable best-selling novelists of the day.
Provided they delivered the generic goods, telling fast-moving stories in
the form of westerns, horror flicks, thrillers, adventure yarns, slapstick
comedies, swashbucklers and romantic melodramas, the B-movie-makers could
inject social criticism, satire, surreal comment, and look with a less
varnished eye on American society. Val Lewton's low-budget unit which made
subtle horror movies at RKO in the 1940s is now as highly regarded as Arthur
Freed's big-budget unit that produced musicals at MGM.
The B-movie stars were more often on their way down than on their way up.
Richard Arlen, Chester Morris and William Boyd are among the many who
descended in the 1930s. John Wayne, rescued from a decade of B-Westerns by
Stagecoach , and Jack Nicholson, a leading figure in Roger Corman's
exploitation company, are rare cases of B-movie leads graduating to
superstardom.
For the most part the B-movie had its own dramatis personae, ranging from
the unpampered faces of singing cowboys and their gingham-clad consorts to
the sexual challenge of Evelyn Ankers, the Forties horror queen, and Marie
Windsor, the B-movie femme fatale picked by Kubrick for his B-movie The
Killing .
Charles McGraw is now celebrated as the tough lead of a dozen classic
B-thrillers rather than for his supporting performances in costume epics.
Numerous directors who emerged into the mainstream multi-million dollar
movie world looked back affectionately to the freedom they enjoyed (though
not the small cheques they received) working on Poverty Row. One of the
greatest cinematographers, Robert Alton, who won an Oscar for An American in
Paris , preferred to work on low-budget movies shot on tight schedules
because of the challenge they presented. |
