B Movies (Transition in The 1950s) - Mutating Genres

Mutating Genres

Ida Lupino, well known as an actress, established herself as Hollywood's sole female director of the era. In short, low-budget pictures made for the production company she ran with her husband Collier Young, The Filmakers, Lupino explored virtually taboo subjects such as rape in 1950's Outrage (released by RKO) and 1953's self-explanatory The Bigamist (an entirely independent project). Her most famous directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), was another RKO release. Often referred to as the only classic film noir directed by a woman, it made a virtue of its small budget with an unusually intense focus on its three lead characters.

That same year, RKO put out another historically notable film made at low cost and with an only faintly starry cast: the 85-minute-long Split Second comes to a head in a desert ghost town about to become a nuclear blast site, making it perhaps the first example of an "atomic noir." The most famous such movie, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), independently produced by Victor Saville and his Parklane Pictures company, typifies the persistently murky middle ground between the A and B picture. Film historian Richard Maltby identifies it as a "programmer capable of occupying either half of a neighbourhood theatre's double-bill budgeted at approximately $400,000. distributor, United Artists, released around twenty-five programmers with production budgets between $100,000 and $400,000 in 1955. For UA, these movies served to spread the overhead costs of their distribution operation rather than to make profits in themselves." The film's length, 106 minutes, is A level, but its star, Ralph Meeker, had previously appeared in only one major film. It is based on an unequivocally pulpy source, one of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels, but is directed in a self-consciously aestheticized fashion by Robert Aldrich. The result is a brutal genre picture that chillingly evokes contemporary anxieties about what was often spoken of simply as the Bomb.

The fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, along with less expressible qualms about the effects of radioactive fallout from America's own atomic tests, energized many of the era's genre films. Science fiction, horror, and various hybrids of the two were now of central economic importance to the low-budget end of the business. Most down-market films of the type—like many of those produced by William Alland at Universal (e.g., Creature from the Black Lagoon ) and Sam Katzman at Columbia (e.g., It Came from Beneath the Sea )—provided little more than simple diversion. But these were genres whose fantastic nature could also be used as cover for mordant cultural observations often difficult to make in mainstream movies.

Two well-financed films of 1951, The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still, are often mentioned as vanguard examples, but scholar Richard Hodgens argues that they are beasts of a different sort: The Thing "proved that some money could be made by 'science fiction' that preyed on current fears symbolized crudely by any preposterous monster." Its fellow traveller was a thriller with a simplistic moral: "Earthlings, behave yourselves." The era's most provocative and unsettling fantasies were made for B-level money. Director Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), produced by Walter Wanger for $300,000 and released by Allied Artists, treats conformist pressures and the evil of banality in haunting, allegorical fashion. Even the majors' genre mills at times came out with challenging films. Produced on a "trifling budget" by Katzman, The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957), "uses the physical transfer of the life force from one class to another as a metaphor for economic expropriation." Among the most disturbing was The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), written, directed, and produced by Bert I. Gordon. A "King Kong for the atomic age", it is both a monster movie that happens to depict the horrific effects of radiation exposure and "a ferocious cold-war fable spins Korea, the army's obsessive secrecy, and America's post-war growth into one fantastic whole."