Hollywood's Poverty Row 1930-1950 (1973), Gene Fernett.

Gene Fernett's book on Poverty Row movies is a little unfocused, mainly because his sources were so varied:  he interviewed Ted Lydecker, who was employed in building miniature sets for landscape effects.  He also interviewed sound engineers, a couple folks who worked at Monogram, Technicolor and a stuntman.  Sources on low-brow popular culture are often hard to come by, but it seems Fernett was taking a rather eclectic route anyway -- and then the poor fellow was crippled by a stroke, leaving the work of finishing the book to be done with the assistance of others.  

Fernett gets off to a brilliant start discussing theatres.  Who owned the theatres, the variety in quality in theatres and what kind of people went to these movies is crucial to understanding why B-movies even really existed for as long as they did.  He also adds colour to the story of B's by talking about low-brow favourites like Judy Canova, the "queen of the hillbillies".  While serials and westerns have been covered thoroughly, I have yet to come across much on the white-trash thrills early B's had to offer.  Hollywood's Poverty Row ends by returning to the diminished role of theatres after the war and the role of monopolization of companies.  The new appeal of television meant movie ticket sales dwindled.  B-actors and content could now been enjoyed from the couch!

Ad for Quaker Oats Puffed Wheat, Toronto Star 1945.  Somehow celebrating cereal blown out of guns for QUAKER Oats just seems wrong!

Slight Case of Murder (1938), Lloyd Bacon.

Dead End Kid Bobby Jordan using the piano as a bottle opener

Another Warner/First National attempt to capitalize on Edward G Robinson's gangster persona by spoofing the genre.  Little Giant (1933) was an earlier attempt by Warners to do the very same thing with Robinson but Slight Case of Murder is a gut-buster, far funnier than Little Giant.  The script is brilliant - based on a failed (!) play by Damon Runyan.  This one has been recognized for its great use of language, especially slang and idiomatic phrases as Robinson's family and crew try to go "legit" after Prohibition is repealed.  I could have sworn the dialogue was written for Bugs Bunny there were so many jokes flying by at top speed.  

Robinson plays a beer-running crook who tries to sell his goods honestly but still finds himself nearing bankruptcy.  With his creditors on his tail, the family escapes to a rental property in the country only to find three or four "stiffs" in the kitchen, shot by persons unknown.  Trying to host a party, impress future in-laws and "mentor" a grubby reform school urchin all at the same time competes with their efforts to get classy. The whole film is well-cast and Ruth Donnelly, who plays Robinson's wife Nora, is particularly good, lapsing from nouveau riche lady of the house back to aging moll in a state of constant exasperation.

A skunky bottle:  slight case of the guh-guh-guh gags

The Devil Doll (1936), Tod Browning.

Devil Doll robbing the banker's wife

What Mrs Doubtfire was missing: revenge killings with tiny, tiny shivs!  Lionel Barrymore plays an escaped prisoner who attempts to clear his name by harassing the men who had him imprisoned.  He does this by taking over a scientist's lab and notes on how to shrink people to 1/6th their size, then using his mind to control the otherwise insensible creatures.  Oh, and he's dressed like an old French woman!  Pretty kooky, but Tod Browning has the ability to string you along through the ridiculous.  I don't know what is creepier-- shrunken, immobile French prostitutes or Barrymore's wig sizzling in the fire!

I Killed That Man (1941), Phil Rosen.

Convicted murderer makes a confession to a crowd of reporters.

A Monogram with a bit of jump in its pancake, care of the King Brothers!  This movie is no visual masterpiece.  We have "Chinese fire drill" style fight scenes (complete with a one-take failed-to-connect roundhouse punch) and good ol' reliable shadows from prison bars (yawn) for stylistic flair.  But the story is fast paced and the actors are likeable.  Minutes before his execution, a prisoner confesses that yes, he is guilty... but that he committed the murder on behalf of a powerful man who paid him to do so.  Before he can identify this man, the convict is himself killed by a poisoned dart!  District Attorney Roger Phillips, played by Ricardo Cortez, confines everyone in the room and attempts to identify the guilty party.  He is aided by his girlfriend, "girl reporter" Joan Woodbury who manages to poke just about everyone in the eye with her kooky hat feather.  

Director Phil Rosen was a workhorse director who ended his long career cranking out "quickies" or "little pictures," as B's were sometimes called.  In 1948 he collapsed while filming The Sins of the Fathers for Quebec Productions, in an attempt to start a B-movie industry in Canada.  The Montreal Gazette reported that he returned to filming the next day, "with the aid of a wheelchair and an attending nurse"!  

Cortez and Woodbury do a little Thin Man sparring but without the sex or cocktails.  Hat feather not shown.

From slot machine titans to B-movie movers and shakers: the fabulous King Brothers!

Independent producers Maurice, Frank and Herman Kozinsky (or Kozinski) -known in the business as the King Brothers- had wild ideas, took crazy risks but also rejected glitz and glam in favour of the average American experience.   And they made out like bandits.  "We keep very close to the people," stated Frank King an interview with Murray Schumach for the New York Times.  "We go to movies in poor areas and in middle-class neighbourhoods.  The trouble with Hollywood is that too many people who make pictures don't see what the average American likes."  Writing in 1962 after the Kings had spent over twenty years in the entertainment industry, Schumach had to conclude something had to be working since "they had yet to make a loser."

Arriving in California with pockets jangling from profits made in the slot-machine business, the King Brothers took their first stab at producing movies with Paper Bullets (1941).  And who did they choose to work with?  Monogram Studios, which recognize their ability and gave them plenty of leeway.  In 1944, when the script When Strangers Marry became available for filming, Monogram President Steve Broidy handed it to the King Brothers.  "I felt they had the talent and the know-how to do that type of picture," Broidy said.  While Monogram kept final cut, Broidy left the Kings otherwise fairly free.  "We gave them a lot of latitude," said Broidy. Odds are, if you catch a Poverty Row movie that's half decent the King Brothers were probably involved.

Made for a shockingly low sum (between $20,000 and $30,000, about half of what it cost to make an ultra-low grade Republic western)  Paper Bullets had not been a winner, but one of its cast members was Alan Ladd.  When his star rose, the movie was re-released as Gangs, Inc. (this time with PRC) and new posters were cranked out with Ladd front and centre.  The King Brothers struck gold again with Dillinger (1945), one of Monogram's highest grossing movies.

Always hatching new ideas, the King Brothers' career in the business is characterized by slightly risky decisions that in the end seemed to have been timed perfectly.  In 1947, they toyed with the idea of tackling anti-Semitism, a topic not popular a few years before but just ripe for discussion after the war.  The project, a treatment of Arthur Miller's novel Focus, was eventually shelved.  In 1949 during a box-office slump, they floated the concept of allowing theatregoers to see movies and buy popcorn on credit.  The Kings could not let an opportunity to take a jab at industry hot shots pass by.  "The big theatre owners are lazy," Frank is quoted as saying. "They sit back on their haunches and sigh for the war days of big crowds and big money.  But they don't go out after business.  Meanwhile grosses keep dropping."  Despite the sluggishness, the King Brothers had another hit the next year with Gun Crazy, today a beloved part of the noir canon.

During the later 1940s, the King Brothers worked more frequently on the Allied Artists side of Monogram and were among the first producers to work with professionals whose lives had been devastated by the HUAC committee.  They chose Edward Dmytryk, who had served time for his role as one of the Hollywood Ten, to direct Mutiny in 1951.  Dmytryk had started his career in B's with the Kings, and in his biography described one of the brothers King as "a decent man and as good a B director as I've known."  In 1957 the King Brothers production The Brave One was awarded with an Oscar.  The script had been written by Dalton Trumbo, who had also been blacklisted.  "If a good story comes to us, we don't care who wrote it," commented Maurice.

I'll keep my eyes out for images of the King Brothers, as I only have epithets like husky, stocky and loquacious from newspaper clippings to go by.  Oh, they were in the marines and came from the Lower East Side, did you know?  Tough, clever guys.  "Nobody discovered us," said Morris (Maurice) in a 1945 interview.  "We discovered ourselves.  We didn't come into this business paupers and we won't go out of it paupers."