The 1950s mark a significant change in the definition of the B movie. The transformation of the film industry due to court rulings that brought an end to many long-standing distribution practices as well as the challenge of television led to major changes in U.S. cinema at the exhibition level. These shifts signaled the eventual demise of the double feature that had defined much of the American moviegoing experience during Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. Even as the traditional bottom-of-the-bill second feature slowly disappeared, the term B movie was applied more broadly to the sort of inexpensive genre films that came out during the era, such as those produced to meet the demands of the burgeoning drive-in theater market.
In 1948, a Supreme Court ruling in a federal antitrust suit against the leading Hollywood studios, the so-called Big Five, outlawed block booking and led to the divestiture of the majors' theater chains over the next few years. After barely inching forward in the 1930s, the average U.S. feature production cost had essentially doubled through the 1940s, reaching an average $1million by the turn of the decade (the increase from 1940 to 1950 was 150percent in simple terms, 93percent after adjusting for inflation).[1] With audiences draining away to television and other economic pressures forcing the studios to scale back production schedules, the Golden Age–style double feature began disappearing from American theaters.
At the beginning of the 1950s, most U.S. movie houses still programmed double features at least part of the time.[2] The major studios promoted the benefits of recycling, offering former headlining movies as second features in the place of traditional B films.[3] Their longer running time appears to have both accommodated and hastened the progressive abandonment of the traditional "variety program" of newsreel/cartoon/short preceding the feature presentations at many theaters. With television airing many classic Westerns as well as producing its own original Western series, the cinematic market for B oaters in particular was drying up.
The first prominent victim of the changing market was the Poverty Row studio Eagle-Lion, which released its last films in 1951. By 1953, the old Monogram brand had disappeared, the company having adopted the identity of its higher-end subsidiary, Allied Artists. The following year, Allied released Hollywood's last two B series Westerns, starring Wayne Morris: The Desperado in June and Two Guns and a Badge in September.[4] Non-series B Westerns would continue to come out for a few more years, but Republic Pictures, long associated with cheap sagebrush sagas, was out of the filmmaking business by the end of the decade. In other genres, Universal maintained B series featuring Abbott and Costello (through 1955), Francis the Talking Mule (through 1956), and Ma and Pa Kettle (through 1957).[5] Allied Artists kept its Bomba, the Jungle Boy series going through 1955; Allied's Bowery Boys finished their run in 1958—the end of the longest feature series in movie history (48 films, altogether) and the last B series from one of Hollywood's Golden Age studios.
The most B oriented of the Big Five, RKO Pictures, weakened by what one studio historian describes as its "systematic seven-year rape" by former owner Howard Hughes, abandoned the movie industry in 1957.[6] Hollywood's A product was getting longer—the top ten box-office releases of 1940 had averaged 112.5minutes; the average length of 1955's top ten was 123.4.[7] In their modest way, the B's were following suit. The age of the hour-long feature film was now past; at 69minutes, Two Guns and a Badge was about as short as Hollywood features ran. In sum, the Golden Age–style second feature was dying. B movie, however, continued to be used in a broader sense, referring to any low-budget genre film featuring relatively unheralded performers ("B actors"). The term retained its earlier suggestion that such movies relied on formulaic plots, "stock" character types, and simplistic action or unsophisticated comedy. At the same time, the realm of the B movie was becoming increasingly fertile territory for experimentation, both serious and outlandish.
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 1950s 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.[8]
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 [and] budgeted at approximately $400,000. [Its] 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."[9] The film's length, 106minutes, 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.
Rocketship X-M (1950), produced and released by small Lippert Pictures, is cited as possibly "the first postnuclear holocaust film." It was at the leading edge of a large cycle of movies, mostly low-budget and many long forgotten, classifiable as "atomic bomb cinema."
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 [1954]) and Sam Katzman at Columbia (e.g., It Came from Beneath the Sea [1955])—provided little more than simple diversion.[11] 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."[12] 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.[13] 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."[14] 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 [that] spins Korea, the army's obsessive secrecy, and America's post-war growth into one fantastic whole."[15]
The Amazing Colossal Man was released by a new company whose name was much bigger than its budgets. American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1956 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff in a reorganization of their American Releasing Corporation (ARC), soon became the leading U.S. studio devoted entirely to B-priced productions. American International helped keep the original-release double bill alive through paired packages of its films: these movies were low-budget, but the economic model was different from that of the traditional B movie—instead of a flat rate, they were rented out on a percentage basis, like A films.[16]I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) is perhaps the best known AIP film of the era. Guided by experienced genre writer-producer Herman Cohen, the movie starred a twenty-year-old Michael Landon. As its title suggests, AIP sought audiences not only with fantastic genre subjects, but also with new, teen-oriented angles. One exemplary film, Daddy-O (a.k.a. Out on Probation; 1958), sported the tagline "Alive!! With the Beat and the Heat of Today's Rock-N-Roll Generation!" If Hot Rod Gang (1958) worked, then why wouldn't hot rod horror? Result: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959). AIP is credited with having "led the way...in demographic exploitation, target marketing, and saturation booking, all of which would become standard procedure for the majors in planning and releasing their mass-market 'event' films" by the late 1970s.[17]
At least in terms of content, the majors were already there, putting out low-budget "J.D." movies such as Warner Bros.' Untamed Youth (1957), starring Mamie Van Doren, and MGM's High School Confidential (1958), with Van Doren and Russ Tamblyn. In Bill Osgerby's description, these films "purported to preach against the 'evils' of juvenile crime, yet simultaneously provided young audiences with the vicarious thrills of delinquent rebellion", a gambit as old as St. Augustine, if not the Hollywood hills themselves.[18]Variety's review of the Van Doren vehicle Girls Town (1959) declared, "The screenplay of the film is as flimsy as a G-string, and designed for somewhat the same purpose. It includes all the staples of the exploitation film—a drag race, a necking party, the flip and shallow conversation of a segment of youth, the slight and unconvincing nod to conventional morality at the ending."[19]
In 1954, a young filmmaker named Roger Corman received his first screen credits as writer and associate producer of Allied Artists' Highway Dragnet. Later that year, he independently produced his first movie, The Monster from the Ocean Floor, on a $12,000 budget and a six-day shooting schedule.[20] In 1955, Corman produced and directed the first official ARC release, Apache Woman, one of five movies he had a hand in directing that year. Within a few months he would direct Day the World Ended, half of Arkoff and Nicholson's first twin-bill package, and one of the first AIP films, It Conquered the World. Corman would go on to direct over fifty feature films through 1990. As of 2007, he remained active as a producer, with more than 350 movies to his credit. Often referred to as the "King of the B's", the historically sensitive Corman has said that "to my way of thinking, I never made a 'B' movie in my life", as B movies, in the classic Hollywood sense of the term, were dying out by the time he began making pictures. He prefers to describe his metier as "low-budget exploitation films."[21] In later years Corman, both with AIP and as head of his own companies, would help launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, and Robert De Niro, among many others.
New trends in exhibition
An ad for The Tingler (1959), focusing on William Castle's Percepto gimmick. "GUARANTEED: 'The Tingler' will break loose in the theatre while you are in the audience. As you enter the theatre you will receive instructions how to guard yourself against attack by THE TINGLER!"
In the late 1950s, William Castle was even better known as a B filmmaker than Corman. A long-time director and producer of mostly low-end movies for Columbia, including several entries in the studio's Whistler detective series, he left in 1957 to establish the independent Susina Productions with writer Robb White. Castle was the great innovator of the B-movie publicity gimmick. Audiences of Macabre (1958), an $86,000 production distributed by Allied Artists, were invited to take out insurance policies to cover potential death from fright. With this film and his next collaboration with White, House on Haunted Hill (1958), another Allied release, Castle "combine[d] the saturation advertising campaign perfected by Columbia and Universal in their Sam Katzman and William Alland packages with centralized and standardized publicity stunts and gimmicks that had previously been the purview of the local exhibitor."[22] Castle and White's 1959 creature feature The Tingler, distributed by Columbia, featured his most famous gimmick, Percepto: at the film's climax, buzzers attached to select theater seats would unexpectedly rattle a few audience members, prompting either appropriate screams or even more appropriate laughter.[23]
The growth of the drive-in theater market was one of the major spurs to the expansion of the independent low-budget film industry. As of January 1, 1945, there were 96 drive-ins in the United States; a decade later, the number had passed 3,700.[24] Unpretentious pictures with simple, familiar plots and reliable shock effects—that is, B pictures in both production values and aesthetic spirit if not by the older, more precise industrial definition—were ideally suited for auto-based film viewing, with all its attendant distractions. The phenomenon of the drive-in movie became one of the defining symbols of American popular culture in the 1950s. Over the course of the decade, many local television stations began showing B genre films in late-night slots, popularizing the notion of the midnight movie. In the spring of 1954, Los Angeles TV station KABC expanded on the concept by having an appropriately offbeat host introduce the films: on Saturday nights, The Vampira Show, with Maila Nurmi as the titular MC, screened low-budget horror and suspense movies, including at least one that would become a cult classic—Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour, produced in 1945 for $117,000. Variations on the Vampira format were soon running at stations around the country.[25]
Increasingly, American-made genre films were being joined by overseas movies acquired cheaply and, in the case of foreign-language films, dubbed for the U.S. market. Between 1951 and 1955, small Lippert Pictures and low-budget British studio Hammer Film Productions had a distribution deal that brought such pictures as Stolen Face (1952) and Spaceways (1953) across the Atlantic to a few American screens.[26] In 1957, Hammer initiated its trademark star pairing of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee with The Curse of Frankenstein, made on a budget of $400,000 or less.[27] The film was shot in Technicolor as "a crucial element in avoiding the supporting-feature fate of Hammer's previous American releases...and to add an extra emphasis to the unprecedented levels of onscreen gore that the film offered as its major attraction."[28] Warner Bros. handled the film's global distribution.[29] It grossed over $3million around the world in its first year, and its influence on B-budget horror productions such as Corman's Poe adaptations for AIP and Italian films of the early 1960s would soon be evident (see 1960s B movies).[30] Hammer, which had made a deal with Universal to ensure that the American major wouldn't sue for copyright infringement of its 1930s Frankenstein classics, ultimately acquired remake rights to a number of Universal properties. This led to Hammer's Dracula (1958; released in the U.S. as Horror of Dracula), made for £81,412 ($228,768),[31] and The Mummy (1959), both distributed very profitably by Universal.
Promoter Joseph E. Levine was the crucial U.S. figure in exploiting the opportunities offered by foreign genre production. In 1956, low-budget producer Richard Kay acquired a Japanese creature feature, Godzilla, for $30,000. Levine financed the shooting of new footage with American actor Raymond Burr that was edited into the film—the total cost to the U.S. partnership was less than $100,000. The Americanized version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, was distributed on the East Coast by Levine's Embassy Pictures.[32] Levine himself came up with a string of taglines: "Fantastic beyond comprehension, beyond compare—Astounding beyond belief!", "Terror staggers the mind as the gargantuan creature of the sea surges up on a tidal wave of destruction to wreak vengeance on the Earth!", and many more.[33]Godzilla, King of the Monsters! was a B-market hit, grossing over $2million in its original run.[34] In 1959, Embassy acquired the worldwide rights to a cheaply made movie starring an American-born bodybuilder as one of the original superheroes. Steve Reeves had appeared in all of two films previously; his debut was in the independent production Jail Bait (1954), directed by Ed Wood On top of a $125,000 purchase price for his import, Levine then spent $1.5million on advertising and publicity, a virtually unprecedented amount.[35]The New York Times was nonplussed: "Hercules, an Italianmade spectacle film dubbed in English, is the kind of picture that normally would draw little more than yawns in the film market. It would have, that is, had it not been that promoter Joseph E. Levine has launched the movie throughout the country with a deafening barrage of publicity. The exploitation film, which has been taken over by Warner Brothers for distribution, opened yesterday at 135 theatres in the New York area alone."[36] Levine counted on opening-weekend box office for his profits, booking the film "into as many cinemas as he could for a week's run, then withdrawing it before poor word-of-mouth withdrew it for him."[37] The strategy was a smashing success: the film earned $4.7million in domestic rentals alone. Just as valuable to the bottom line, it was even more successful overseas.[35] Within a few decades, Hollywood would be dominated by both movies and an exploitation philosophy very like Levine's.
↑ Loy (2004), pp. 9–10; Reid (2005), pp. 53–54. As was not uncommon in series Westerns, Morris didn't play precisely the same character in the six B oaters he starred in for Allied Artists in 1953 and 1954. Even leaving aside the plots, the series nature of the films is evident from the credits: Vincent M. Fennelly produced all six pictures. Lewis D. Collins and Thomas Carr split directorial duties equally, each taking three. Daniel P. Ullman wrote four of the films. Three cinematographers each shot two of the films—in all three cases, one for each of the two directors. IMDb.com Power Search performed 12/30/06.
↑ See Finler (2003), pp. 357–58, for top films. Finler lists The Country Girl as 1955, when it made most of its money, but it premiered in December 1954. The Seven Year Itch replaces it in this analysis (the two films happen to be virtually identical in length).
↑ See, e.g., Eddie Muller, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), p. 176.
↑ See Buhle and Wagner (2003), pp. 74–80, for Alland's efforts to make message-laden genre films. For the political implications of the Katzman-produced Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), see pp. 81–82.
↑ Corman (1998), p. 36. In fact, it appears that Corman made at least one true B picture—according to Arkoff, Apache Woman, to his displeasure, was handled as a second feature (Strawn [1974], p. 258).
↑ Segrave (1992), p. 33. Many general film history sources, in describing the growth of the drive-in market, claim that there were approximately 300 U.S. drive-ins in 1946 (e.g., Finler [2003], p. 19). Segrave's January 1, 1946, figure of 102 is much better supported, with clear reference to contemporary Film Daily reports. A number of sources, including several online, cite a figure of 155 drive-ins for 1946. As Segrave shows, this is properly identified as the figure for January 1, 1947.
↑ The Vampira Show is often described as having screened primarily or exclusively horror movies; as a complete listing of the films shown during its run reveals, suspense pictures often appeared: The Vampira Show—KABC-TV 1954–55Archived 2006-08-18 at the Wayback Machine . See Movies at Midnight—WTMJ-TV 1954Archived 2007-04-22 at the Wayback Machine for an unhosted example whose premiere predates that of The Vampira Show by a couple of months; part of the Milwaukee Horror Hosts website. Retrieved 11/14/06.
↑ Allison (2006), p. 9. Note that Allison incorrectly identifies Levine's company as Trans World Films, which was actually the movie's West Coast distributor.
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Cook, David A. (2000). Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN0-520-23265-8
Corman, Roger, with Jim Jerome (1998). How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, new ed. New York: Da Capo. ISBN0-306-80874-9
Denisoff, R. Serge, and William D. Romanowski (1991). Risky Business: Rock in Film. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction. ISBN0-88738-843-4
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Hirschhorn, Clive (1979). The Warner Bros. Story. New York: Crown. ISBN0-517-53834-2
Hodgens, Richard (1972 [1959]). "A Brief, Tragical History of the Science Fiction Film", in Focus on the Science Fiction Film, ed. William Johnson. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, pp.78–90. ISBN0-13-795161-2
Kinsey, Wayne (2005). Hammer Films: The Bray Studios Years. Richmond, UK: Reynolds & Hearn. ISBN1-903111-44-7
Lasky, Betty (1989). RKO: The Biggest Little Major of Them All. Santa Monica, Calif.: Roundtable. ISBN0-915677-41-5
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Maltby, Richard (2000). "'The Problem of Interpretation...': Authorial and Institutional Intentions In and Around Kiss Me Deadly", Screening the Past (June 30) (available onlineArchived 2012-05-05 at the Wayback Machine ).
McCarthy, Todd, and Charles Flynn, eds. (1975). Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System—An Anthology of Film History and Criticism. New York: E.P. Dutton. ISBN0-525-47378-5
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Roger William Corman is an American film director, producer, and actor. Known under various monikers such as "The Pope of Pop Cinema", "The Spiritual Godfather of the New Hollywood", and "The King of Cult", he is known as a trailblazer in the world of independent film. Many of Corman's films are low-budget cult films including some which are adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
A B movie, or B film, is a type of low-budget commercial motion picture. Originally, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, this term specifically referred to films meant to be shown as the lesser-known second half of a double feature, somewhat similar to B-sides in the world of recorded music. However, the production of such films as "second features" in the United States largely declined by the end of the 1950s. This shift was due to the rise of commercial television, which prompted film studio B movie production departments to transition into television film production divisions. These divisions continued to create content similar to B movies, albeit in the form of low-budget films and series.
American International Pictures is an American film production company owned by Amazon MGM Studios. In its original operating period, AIP was an independent film production and distribution company known for producing and releasing films from 1955 until 1980, a year after its acquisition by Filmways in 1979.
The Fast and the Furious is a 1954 American crime drama B movie starring John Ireland and Dorothy Malone, co-directed by Ireland and Edward Sampson.
The Trip is a 1967 American psychedelic film released by American International Pictures, directed by Roger Corman and written by Jack Nicholson. It was shot on location in and around Los Angeles, including on top of Kirkwood in Laurel Canyon, the Hollywood Hills, and near Big Sur, California, over three weeks in March and April 1967. Peter Fonda stars as a young man who experiences his first LSD trip.
Samuel Zachary Arkoff was an American producer of B movies.
The double feature is a motion picture industry phenomenon in which theatres would exhibit two films for the price of one, supplanting an earlier format in which the presentation of one feature film would be followed by various short subject reels.
The term midnight movie is rooted in the practice that emerged in the 1950s of local television stations around the United States airing low-budget genre films as late-night programming, often with a host delivering ironic asides. As a cinematic phenomenon, the midnight screening of offbeat movies began in the early 1970s in a few urban centers, particularly in New York City with screenings of El Topo at the Elgin Theater, eventually spreading across the country. The screening of non-mainstream pictures at midnight was aimed at building a cult film audience, encouraging repeat viewing and social interaction in what was originally a countercultural setting.
The beach party film is an American film genre of feature films which were produced and released between 1963 and 1968, created by American International Pictures (AIP), beginning with their surprise hit, Beach Party, in July 1963. With this film, AIP is credited with creating the genre. In addition to the AIP films, several contributions to the genre were produced and released by major and independent studios alike. According to various sources, the genre comprises over 30 films, with the lower-budget AIP films being the most profitable.
Beach Party is a 1963 American film and the first of seven beach party films from American International Pictures (AIP) aimed at a teen audience. This film is often credited with creating the beach party film genre.
In the Year 2889 is a 1969 American made-for-television horror science fiction film from American International Pictures about the aftermath of a future nuclear war. The film stars Paul Petersen, Quinn O'Hara, Charla Doherty, Neil Fletcher and Hugh Feagin. AIP commissioned low-budget cult film auteur Larry Buchanan to produce and direct this film as a color remake of Roger Corman's 1956 film Day the World Ended.
The Pit and the Pendulum is a 1961 horror film directed by Roger Corman, starring Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, and Luana Anders. The screenplay by Richard Matheson was loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story of the same name. Set in sixteenth-century Spain, the story is about a young Englishman who visits a forbidding castle to investigate his sister's mysterious death. After a series of horrific revelations, apparently ghostly appearances and violent deaths, the young man becomes strapped to the titular torture device by his lunatic brother-in-law during the film's climactic sequence.
James Harvey Nicholson was an American film producer. He is best known as the co-founder, with Samuel Z. Arkoff, of American International Pictures.
Zmovies are low-budget films with production qualities lower than Bmovies.
The B movie, whose roots trace to the silent film era, was a significant contributor to Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. As the Hollywood studios made the transition to sound film in the late 1920s, many independent exhibitors began adopting a new programming format: the double feature. The popularity of the twin bill required the production of relatively short, inexpensive movies to occupy the bottom half of the program. The double feature was the predominant presentation model at American theaters throughout the Golden Age, and B movies constituted the majority of Hollywood production during the period.
The 1960s and 1970s marked the rise of exploitation-style independent B movies; films which were mostly made without the support of Hollywood's major film studios. As censorship pressures lifted in the early 1960s, the low-budget end of the American motion picture industry increasingly incorporated the sort of sexual and violent elements long associated with so-called ‘exploitation’ films. The demise of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1968, coupled with the success of the exploitation film Easy Rider the following year fueled the trend throughout the subsequent decade. The success of the B-studio exploitation movement had a significant effect on the strategies of the major studios during the 1970s.
Cinematic exhibition of the B movie, defined as a relatively low-cost genre film, has declined substantially from the early 1980s to the present. Spurred by the historic success of several big-budget movies with B-style themes beginning in the mid-1970s, the major Hollywood studios moved progressively into the production of A-grade films in genres that had long been low-budget territory. With the majors also adopting exploitation-derived methods of booking and marketing, B movies began to be squeezed out of the commercial arena. The advent of digital cinema in the new millennium appeared to open up new opportunities for the distribution of inexpensive genre movies.
Alex Gordon was a British film producer and screenwriter.
The Beast with a Million Eyes is a 1955 independently made American black-and-white science fiction film, produced and directed by David Kramarsky, that stars Paul Birch, Lorna Thayer, and Dona Cole. Some film sources have said that the film was co-directed by Lou Place. The film was co-produced by Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff. and was released by American Releasing Corporation, which later became American International Pictures.
Apache Woman is a 1955 American Western directed by Roger Corman and starring Lloyd Bridges. It was Corman's second film as director, following Five Guns West. It was one of four Westerns he made for American International Pictures, the other being Five Guns West, The Oklahoma Woman (1955) and Gunslinger (1956). Corman says Apache Woman and Oklahoma Woman were from ideas by AIP whereas the others were his ideas. This was the first film from Golden State Productions, a company headed by Alex Gordon.
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