James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

In contrast to Lang, most of the house directors and technicians who worked at Republic, Monogram, PRC, and the other Poverty Row companies were held to budgets of under $200,000which meant that they were given extremely short shooting schedules and only a minimum supply of film stock. They often recycled their sets, their costumes, and even their charactersin part because the most profitable B pictures functioned much like the comic strips in the daily newspapers, showing the continuing adventures of Roy Rogers, Boston Blackie, the Bowery Boys, Blondie and Dagwood, Charlie Chan, and so on. Even a major studio like MGM was equipped with a so-called B unit that specialized in these serial productions. At MGM, however, the Andy Hardy, Dr. Kildaire, and Thin Man films were made with major stars and with what some organizations would have considered A budgets. 11

The A versus B system remained more or less in place until the late 1940s, but as historian Lea Jacobs has shown, the distinction between the two grades was ambiguous and never dependent on money alone. During the period in question, the vertically integrated studios engaged in a system of "block booking" and "blind selling," whereby ordinary exhibitors were required to accept a certain number of A or B films in advance, without regard to title. The major producer-distributors could therefore use their own theaters to determine how long a given film would be in first-run and in which category it would play. If an A picture did poorly on its initial showing in the big city, it could be immediately assigned B-picture status, and if certain B features had sufficient production values and favorable reviews, they could be marketed as "A's.'' This last arrangement was especially useful in the case of "intermediates," which cost between $250,000 and $500,000. Such films could not make a profit, Jacobs observes, unless "some exhibitors were persuaded (or coerced!) to pay a percentage of the gross rather than the flat rental fee usual for westerns and other B pictures."

The distinction between A and B was further complicated by the fact that low-budget pictures could sometimes get expensive advertising and high-profile critical attention that raised their cultural capital and their drawing power. Jacobs cites the example of John Ford's Informer (1935), which is often described as a B movie, even though its $243,000 budget was only slightly less than that of the average RKO release of its day. A shadowy, fog-shrouded picture about Irish revolutionaries (Raymond Durgnat calls it a film noir), The Informer deliberately eschewed stars and spectacle; nevertheless, it had a great many "artistic" qualities, and it received a gilt-edged marketing treatment, premiering at Radio City, attracting the attention of major newspapers and magazines, and ultimately winning several Academy Awards.

In purely budgetary terms, many of the thrillers that historians describe as B or "underground" pictures were actually "intermediates" like The Informer, specifically designed to gain a certain amount of critical attention and larger profits from percentage-deal bookings in the cities. These productions typically offered a good deal of sex and violence, along with implicit claims to artistic significance and social realism, usually signified by a mixture of expressionist and documentary techniques. They were shot on dark streets or on inexpensive sets, but they also featured well-known actors from the second tier of the Hollywood star system. Sometimes they had enough impact to become "sleepers" and make a good deal of money. One of the most successful instances of the strategy is T-Men (1947), a police procedural about government undercover agents working to crack the "Shanghai Paper Case." This film was distributed by Eagle-Lion, a newly formed company owned by J. Arthur Rank and headed by Brian Foy, who had formerly been in charge of the B-picture unit at Warner. It used the sound stages and physical plant of PRC, one of the leading producers of cheap genre movies in Hollywood, and it employed director Anthony Mann and photographer John Alton because they were both veterans of low-budget action pictures at Republic. T-Men was nevertheless provided with a $450,000 budget and a reasonable chance to compete in the A-picture marketplace. Alton, who had always regarded himself as an artist rather than a Hollywood roughneck, responded with a dynamic, wide-angle photography that made especially effective use of expensive locations and night-for-night situations in Detroit and Los Angeles. His brilliant imagery was enhanced by Mann's direction and by the surprisingly tough performance of Dennis O'Keefe, who also specialized in light comedy and low-budget musicals. As a result, the film attracted the interest of critics and trade reporters. Life magazine gave T-Men a full-scale ''Movie of the Week" analysis, and commentators in Newsweek and other journals praised it for injecting "realism" into a formulaic plot. (This realism consisted largely of devices borrowed from the successful postwar productions of Louis de Rochemont at Twentieth-Century Fox: newsreel-style narration, location photography, and official cooperation from a U.S. government agency.) Ultimately, the film made $1.6 million at the box officea profit that would have been impossible under B-picture rental arrangements. 13

T-Men arrived at the very end of the double feature era, when movie attendance was shrinking, when the studios were reorganizing, and when independent production companies were becoming an industry trend. For a while, its success helped to secure a place in the marker for atmospheric, medium-budget thrillers that slightly raised the level of screen violence and perversity. RKO had long specialized in such films, and in the early 1950s Republic and Monogram (which changed its name to Allied Artists) tried to follow suit. Not surprisingly, Mann and Alton were soon hired by Dore Schary at MGMwhere, together or separately, they made such modest but technically sophisticated films as Border Incident (1949), Side Street (1949), and Mystery Street (1950). From that point onward, they were free of Poverty Row, and their pictures were seldom rented at a flat rate. Much the same thing could be said of the roughly contemporary work of Samuel Fuller, Jacques Tourneur, and Joseph H. Lewis, who are often inaccurately described as B-picture auteurs. When critics analyze Lewis's career, for example, they barely mention his Bowery Boys films at Monogram in 1940 to 1941, his war movies and westerns at PRC in 1942 to 1944, or his contribution to the Falcon series at RKO in 1945; instead, they concentrate on My Name Is Julia Ross (1946), Gun Crazy (1950), and The Big Combo (1955). These last films were mid-level productions from the era when the Poverty Row system was changing or dying out, and they were all reviewed in the national press. 14Strictly speaking, they belong not to the world of B pictures but to the more amorphous realm of what Manny Farber described as "faceless" or "half-polished" melodramas, most of which did not become objects of critical fascination until long after they were released.

To see what film noir on a Poverty Row budget looked like, one needs to search out a truly obscure picture such as The Argyle Secrets (1948), an antifascist crime drama written and directed by Cyril Endfield and produced by the Film Classics Studio. The acting, set design, and photography in this movie are not much better than in the standard offering in a Saturday matinee, but the plot is reminiscent of Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon, with a couple of scenes from Thirty-Nine Steps tossed in for good measure. Throughout, the dialogue and narration are clever, and the action always moves swiftly. One episode is particularly memorable for its perversity: the protagonist (William Gargan), a tough newspaper reporter searching for the meaning of a rich man's last words, is captured by a gang of villains like the one in The Maltese Falcon and subjected to a slow, methodical beating. The torture scene is rendered in the form of an expressionist dream sequence, with the faces of the gang superimposed over the reporter's body and their voices speaking in rhythm with the sound of blows. Soon afterward, the bruised and bloody reporter awakens in a strange bedroom, where he is confronted by a femme fatale (Marjorie Lord). This lady offers him a chance to escape his captors by feigning an attack on her, and he willingly complies, taking an evident sexual pleasure in the job. "It was a funny experience, choking a woman deliberately," he says in his offscreen narration. "I squeezed pretty hard, scuffing bruises at her throat to make it look good. I got so mixed up I didn't know what I was doing, and I stopped once and kissed her pretty hard." Here and elsewhere, one gets the feeling that a movie designed for provincial audiences has been invaded with the dark ironies of big-city entertainment. Even so, The Argyle Secrets received no important bookings, and it was given only one reviewin Variety, which described it as "okay supporting material" for double features. It therefore dropped from sight and has seldom been revived. 15