20 Movies | Thursdays in July
By the mid-1930s, the Great Depression had caused movie attendance to fall precipitously. To lure people back to theaters, Hollywood altered its business model. Double features became the new norm, a way of offering more product for one ticket. Filling the second slots—or “lower” halves—of the new double bills were quickly and cheaply made films without major stars, usually running just over an hour in length. These were known as B movies—in the original sense of the term—and they became an economic mainstay of film distribution until double billing waned in the late 1940s. The strategy worked. Attendance rose sharply and by 1944, for various reasons, about two-thirds of the American population was going to the movies every week.
Small, low-budget movies were already being produced by Poverty Row studios, but very quickly almost all the major studios formed their own B units, as a way to ensure a constant supply of product for their theaters and to groom contract talent in front of and behind the camera—not to mention finding roles for their now-fading older stars. The vast majority of B movies were genre films that followed specific formulas audiences loved and even expected: whodunits, old-dark-house mystery/horror tales, gangster, prison and straight horror pictures, and hordes of comedies, musicals and cheap westerns.
Because B movies were less prestigious and lacked the star power of major productions, they have often been overlooked or undervalued in film appreciation and scholarship. Watching a B movie, audiences tend to enter a different mindset. One is willing to forgive the cheap sets, sometimes merely functional acting and directing styles, and often preposterous plotting—if the film delivers its expected ingredients cleverly, briskly and entertainingly. The 20 B films in this TCM spotlight (including eight TCM premieres) come from nine different studios from the majors to Poverty Row, illustrating a range of talents and production values. A typical MGM or Warner Bros. B movie would be a solid “A” in the hands of Monogram, for instance. Yet all 20 do have one thing in common beyond their short running times: they exceed expectations to deliver, on their own terms, eminently interesting and satisfying audience experiences.
Among the titles from major studios, Warner Bros.’ British Intelligence (1940) is a diverting spy thriller set in London during World War I but made to rally support for World War II. Strikingly, the film was produced in late 1939 and released in January 1940, long before the United States entered the war. Boris Karloff is excellent as an aging butler and spy, though for which side remains a surprise. He tangles with Margaret Lindsay, whose allegiance is also in question, and the steady supply of other spies and double agents results in an enjoyably convoluted story enhanced by fine acting, editing, scoring and brisk pacing across 61 minutes. Warner Bros.’ Find the Blackmailer (1943), on the other hand, is an amusing mystery comedy starring Jerome Cowan as a private eye. It was obviously made as a way to capitalize on The Maltese Falcon (1941), in which Cowan played the ill-fated Miles Archer. Find the Blackmailer plays almost as if Archer is alive and well and still “just dumb enough” to bumble through a mystery. The film even boasts a black bird—a live, talking one—which serves as the story’s MacGuffin.
RKO is also represented by two titles. Passport to Destiny (1944) gives Elsa Lanchester the chance to carry an entire film with gusto, playing an intrepid London charwoman who is so fed up with Hitler’s blitz that she decides to go to Berlin to kill him. The light fantasy and comedy of that premise is enhanced by priceless plotting that shows Lanchester walking—and cleaning—her way across France, Belgium and Germany to Berlin, where she tries to look up Hitler in the phone book and gets a job as a cleaning woman in his chancellery, all within about 15 minutes of screen time. Lanchester’s sheer earnestness is endearing, and the story even works in photos of her character’s dead husband—in the form of Lanchester’s real husband, Charles Laughton. This delightful piece of wartime propaganda was screened for combat troops around the world, according to a title card at film’s end. RKO’s Curtain Call (1940) is just as funny and witty as it delivers a story that is surprisingly similar to The Producers 27 years later. Alan Mowbray and Donald MacBride play Broadway producers who force a temperamental, prima donna actress (wonderfully played by Helen Vinson) to take the lead in the worst play ever written. They expect her to refuse, in which case they can release her from her contract. But she claims to love the play, and now the producers have to invest in it for real!
Paramount’s The Preview Murder Mystery (1936), an exceptional whodunit starring Reginald Denny, Gail Patrick and Rod La Rocque, is set almost entirely in a movie studio and was directed by Robert Florey, one of the finest of all directors of B movies. (He also directed several A-level films in his career.) In addition to having at his disposal an intriguing story setup, in which cast and crewmembers of a film are being murdered, Florey and cameraman Karl Struss (Sunrise, 1927) make full, inventive and stylish use of the studio settings and equipment, resulting in one of the most interesting and unpretentious depictions of moviemaking in a film of this era.
MGM’s Murder in the Private Car (1934), starring character actors Charlie Ruggles and Una Merkel (with Walter Brennan in a tiny bit part), is sort of an old dark house mystery set on a train, culminating in a breathless action sequence in which a runaway train packed with explosives hurtles through the countryside toward an oncoming locomotive. The astonishing rear projection holds up beautifully after almost 90 years, making this combination of suspense and comedy (a gorilla shows up at one point) almost absurdly entertaining. A year later, MGM produced Absolute Quiet (1936), a so-called “programmer” that was polished enough to play on either half of a double bill, even though its cast, as in most Bs, was entirely composed of character actors: Lionel Atwill, Irene Hervey, Wallace Ford, Raymond Walburn and future star Louis Hayward. The film emphasizes character more than plot with a story similar to that of The Petrified Forest (1936), which opened just two months earlier, and Lionel Atwill excels in one of his favorite roles, a more complex and sympathetic character than usual for the actor. A third MGM offering, Within the Law (1939), is fascinating for the way it is clearly testing Ruth Hussey to see if she can carry an entire film—in this case an old property that had already been filmed four times, including as Paid (1930) starring Joan Crawford. Hussey aces the test, positively shining in the role of an innocent young woman wrongfully sent to prison who then studies the law so that she can deploy shady, yet legal, scams upon her release. A year later, Hussey would appear in The Philadelphia Story and receive an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Another young actress in Within the Law, Rita Johnson, was also being tested and makes a very strong impression, but her career never blossomed like Hussey’s.
Lionel Atwill plays another relatively unmenacing fellow in Universal’s Secret of the Blue Room (1933), an old dark house mystery in which guests who spend the night in a certain room keep winding up dead. A close remake of the 1932 German movie, Geheimnis des blauen Zimmers, this film was shot in just six days yet is quite stylish, with a standout cast including Gloria Stuart, Paul Lukas and Edward Arnold performing on the same sets used for The Old Dark House (1932) itself. Dead Man’s Eyes (1944), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Jean Parker, is the third of six Universal mysteries based on the popular Inner Sanctum radio series, with an ironic, truly bonkers storyline involving eye transplants and murder that feels akin to The Twilight Zone.
Columbia’s Convicted Woman (1940) has frequent B leading lady Rochelle Hudson wrongfully accused of theft and sent to a prison with awful conditions. As she hardens into bitterness and a new warden tries to reform the prison, reporter Glenn Ford (clearly being groomed by Columbia with this little film) helps save the day. The same studio’s Prison Ship (1945), starring Nina Foch and Robert Lowery, is a piece of wartime propaganda with some brutal scenes. It feels a bit like a Val Lewton horror film, with only a few sets that are darkly lit as a way of disguising their cheapness, though they are used very effectively to generate suspense and an intense atmosphere of creepy mystery. Meanwhile, all through these years and beyond, Columbia was turning out dozens of hugely popular Blondie comedies starring Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake, which were instrumental in keeping the studio afloat through some rough periods. The first of the series, Blondie (1938) is an utterly delightful treat.
The seven Poverty Row films in this spotlight demonstrate that low budgets do not automatically translate to low quality. Monogram’s ambitious Beggars in Ermine (1934), for instance, stands out with another superlative Lionel Atwill performance. He plays the sympathetic owner of a steel mill; when his company is stolen out from under him by a rival who also orchestrated an “accident” that left Atwill without legs, Atwill spends the next 15 years—while confined to a wheelchair—using his business acumen to exact meticulous revenge in a way that only a B movie could dream up, and which director Phil Rosen makes surprisingly believable and poignant. Monogram’s Murder by Invitation (1941), starring Wallace Ford and Marian Marsh and again directed by Rosen, is a fun old-dark-house mystery complete with secret doors and sliding panels—common elements of the genre. Be sure to catch the movie’s sidesplitting and self-referential final line of dialogue. With The Strange Mr. Gregory (1945), Phil Rosen once more makes the audience believe an absurd story, in this case a magician going to extreme lengths to win over a married woman. (Hypnosis is just for starters.) Edmund Lowe is masterfully creepy as the magician, and the attractive production values are especially impressive for Monogram.
Convict’s Code (1939) is yet another tale of an innocent person wrongfully jailed, a la Within the Law and Convicted Woman, this time as told by Monogram. As expected, production values are lower than in the other two films, but Convict’s Code surprises all the same as a compelling little revenge tale, with Sidney Blackmer an enjoyably smarmy villain. Monogram’s Isle of Missing Men (1942), a strikingly weighty and intelligent film for the studio, offers a mature, romantic story of betrayal, deception and escape from a penal colony on a Pacific Island. The entire cast is excellent. Helen Gilbert dazzles as Diana, credibly able to charm any man, Alan Mowbray lends wonderful dimension as a doctor and veteran Viennese director Richard Oswald—who had a major film career in Germany before fleeing the Nazis for America and B movies—conjures a steamy, intense atmosphere.
Another notable German director who escaped the Nazi regime, Frank Wisbar, made several films for PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), which ranked well below Monogram in the pecking order of Poverty Row studios. Wisbar’s Lighthouse (1947), a film-noir-tinged melodrama with similarities to The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), accomplishes a startling amount with very little. Much of the 62-minute film consists merely of two or three people talking in rooms (mainly John Litel, Don Castle and stunning June Lang), but the palpable undercurrents of jealousy, anger and sexual heat simmering beneath the surface make this a gripping tale.
Republic Pictures, known for low-budget, fast-moving westerns, action films and serials, turned out an atypically lyrical stunner in 1945 called Identity Unknown, which plays as sort of a B movie version of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Richard Arlen stars as an amnesiac soldier returning from World War II. Four dog tags were found in the combat zone near him; with the assumption that one of them is his, Arlen travels around the country to the homes of the four dead soldiers to see if anyone will recognize him. As he meets parents, widows, siblings and children of the deceased, the film turns into an episodic piece of Americana that poignantly depicts various strains of sadness, longing and heartache that those on the home front were enduring. (The film was released while the war was still happening.) Aside from Arlen, Cheryl Walker shines as a young war widow working the swing shift on a factory line, and seven-year-old Bobby Driscoll, soon to star in The Window (1949) and Treasure Island (1950), registers touchingly in one of his earliest films. The decency of the various characters positively jumps off the screen, making Identity Unknown yet another surprising, little-known B film that exceeds expectations.
