Category: Poverty Row
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In the trenches: deep in the heart of Hollywood the rough and tumble world of bargain basement noir thrived for a while
Joan Blair, John Hubbard, “Whispering Footsteps” (1943). Script’s running too long? Grab a handful of pages, rip them out, shoot the sucker! I’m on a Poverty Row tear these days. As you probably know, many of the films made there aren’t quite as polished as the gems turned out by Paramount, Warner Brothers or 20th Century…
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Alton and Mann: A Partnership in Post-War Noir
Dennis O’Keefe, Marsha Hunt, Claire Trevor, “Raw Deal” (1948). They made only a handful of films together, but John Alton and Anthony Mann’s work threw a new light on film noir, police procedural dramas and documentary filmmaking Silhouettes, fog, great pools of inky blackness — that’s a king-sized portion of the visual drama in store…
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Three Films that Set a Noir Mood: How John Alton Helped Define the Light and Shadows of Film Noir
Lynn Bari, Cathy O’Donnell, “The Spiritualist” (1948). ‘It’s not what you light, it’s what you don’t light.’ — John Alton As legend has it, in the summer of 1923…
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Poverty Row Noir II: Scheming Communists Walk Among Us … and So Does a Future Sitcom Dad
Hugh Beaumont, Frances Rafferty, “Money Madness” (1948). Ward Cleaver as a psychotic killer? Say it ain’t so! Like many up and coming Hollywood actors, Hugh Beaumont appeared in noir B-pictures before he became better known as an all-American TV dad, and he played some pretty despicable characters, too. But more about that later. From the…
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It Came from Poverty Row: Hollywood’s B-Movie Factories Mined Noir Gold
Ann Savage, Tom Neal, “Detour” (1945). Hitchhiking on the road to hell. So many westerns were filmed at the small, independently owned studios near the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Gower St. in Hollywood that people began calling it Gower Gulch. From the 1930s to the ’50s it was the epicenter of low-rent film production and the gaggle of…