United States Pictures

United States Pictures (also known as United States Productions) was the name of the motion picture production company belonging to Milton Sperling who was Harry Warner's (of the Warner Bros. studio) son-in-law.

Sperling was a highly experienced screenwriter and producer with 20th Century Fox and other studios who had just returned from his World War II service in the U.S. Marine Corps Photographic Unit. Warner Bros. offered Sperling an independent production company that would use Warner Bros. studio resources and financing to make motion pictures that would be released by the studio. In the post World War II era, the Hollywood major studios were finding the idea of purchasing completed motion pictures from independent film production companies more economical than producing the films themselves (although United Artists had done this decades earlier, acting as a distributor for independent films since its establishment in 1919).

Beginning with Fritz Lang's Cloak and Dagger (1946 film), followed by Raoul Walsh's Pursued, Sperling's United States Pictures made a total of 14 films. The last two, Samuel Fuller's Merrill's Marauders (film) (1962) and Ken Annakin's Battle of the Bulge (film) (1965) were filmed in the Philippines and Spain respectively. Sperling found that the Filipino and Spanish governments and film companies thought they were dealing with a branch of the United States Government due to the name of the company and provided superb cooperation.

The pre-1960 United States Pictures catalog is now owned by Republic/Paramount Pictures, with Lionsgate handling home video rights under license from Republic, and television syndication by Trifecta Entertainment & Media. Warner Bros. retains the rights to the 1960s films by the company.

The United States Pictures marked with an (*) signifies Milton Sperling contributed to the screenplay.

  • Cloak and Dagger (1946 film) - directed by Fritz Lang
  • Pursued (1947) - directed by Raoul Walsh
  • My Girl Tisa (1948) - directed by Elliott Nugent
  • South of St. Louis (1949) - directed by Ray Enright
  • Three Secrets (1950) - directed by Robert Wise
  • The Enforcer (1951 film) - directed by Bretaigne Windust & Raoul Walsh (uncredited)
  • Distant Drums (1951) - directed by Raoul Walsh
  • Retreat, Hell! (1952)- directed by Joseph H. Lewis*
  • Blowing Wild (1953) - directed by Hugo Fregonese
  • The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (film) (1955) - directed by Otto Preminger*
  • The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) - directed by Budd Boetticher
  • The Bramble Bush (1960) - directed by Daniel Petrie*
  • Merrill's Marauders (film) (1962) - directed by Samuel Fuller*
  • Battle of the Bulge (film) (1965) - directed by Ken Annakin*

Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states and/or pictures:

    “Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.”
    —Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)

    “The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
    —Maya Angelou (b. 1928)

    “It may be said that the elegant Swann’s simplicity was but another, more refined form of vanity and that, like other Israelites, my parents’ old friend could present, one by one, the succession of states through which had passed his race, from the most naive snobbishness to the worst coarseness to the finest politeness.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    “In some pictures of Provincetown the persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the ankles, so much being supposed to be buried in the sand.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)