 International Pictures logo in the opening screen credits of Tomorrow Is Forever . | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | |
| Founded | 1943 in Hollywood, California, United States |
| Founders | |
| Defunct | July 30, 1946 |
| Successor |
|
| Products | Motion pictures |
International Pictures was an American film production company that existed in the 1940s. It merged with Universal Pictures to become Universal-International on October 1, 1946.
The company was formed in 1944. It was headed up by Leo Spitz, an executive at RKO, and William Goetz, vice president in charge for production 20th Century Fox. [1]
In October 1943, Goetz announced International would start off making four films with an overall budget of $4.2 million, the films including Belle of the Yukon , The Woman in the Window and Casanova Brown . [2]
In January 1944, International signed an agreement with RKO Pictures to provide four films for distribution. [3]
Following the merger, Spitz and Goetz became head of production at Universal-International.
United Artists acquired the film library after the merger with Universal.[ citation needed ]
William Joseph Shields, known professionally as Barry Fitzgerald, was an Irish stage, film and television actor. In a career spanning almost forty years, he appeared in such notable films as Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Long Voyage Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Sea Wolf (1941), Going My Way (1944), None but the Lonely Heart (1944) and The Quiet Man (1952). For Going My Way (1944), he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and was simultaneously nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was the older brother of Irish actor Arthur Shields. In 2020, he was listed at number 11 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
Universal City Studios LLC or Universal Studios, doing business as Universal Pictures or simply Universal is an American film production and distribution company owned by NBCUniversal, which is a division of Comcast.
Major film studios are production and distribution companies that release a substantial number of films annually and consistently command a significant share of box office revenue in a given market. In the American and international markets, the major film studios, often known simply as the majors or the Big Five studios, are commonly regarded as the five diversified media conglomerates whose various film production and distribution subsidiaries collectively command approximately 80 to 85% of U.S. box office revenue. The term may also be applied more specifically to the primary motion picture business subsidiary of each respective conglomerate.
Edward Dmytryk was a Canadian-born American film director and editor. He was known for his 1940s noir films and received an Oscar nomination for Best Director for Crossfire (1947). In 1947, he was named as one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of blacklisted film industry professionals who refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in their investigations during the McCarthy-era Red Scare. They all served time in prison for contempt of Congress. In 1951, however, Dmytryk testified to the HUAC and named individuals, including Arnold Manoff, whose careers were then destroyed for many years, to rehabilitate his own career. First hired again by independent producer Stanley Kramer in 1952, Dmytryk is likely best known for directing The Caine Mutiny (1954), a critical and commercial success. The second-highest-grossing film of the year, it was nominated for Best Picture and several other awards at the 1955 Oscars. Dmytryk was nominated for a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures.
Matthew Reginald Sheffield Cassan was an English-American actor.
Charles Vidor was a Hungarian film director. Among his film successes are The Bridge (1929), The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942), The Desperadoes (1943), Cover Girl (1944), Together Again (1944), A Song to Remember (1945), Over 21 (1945), Gilda (1946), The Loves of Carmen (1948), Rhapsody (1954), Love Me or Leave Me (1955), The Swan (1956), The Joker Is Wild (1957), and A Farewell to Arms (1957).
Jon Hall was an American film actor known for playing a variety of adventurous roles, as in 1937's The Hurricane, and later when contracted to Universal Pictures, including Invisible Agent and The Invisible Man's Revenge and six films he made with Maria Montez. He was also known to 1950s fans as the creator and star of the Ramar of the Jungle television series which ran from 1952 to 1954. Hall directed and starred in two 1960s sci-fi films in his later years, The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965) and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966).
William B. Goetz was an American film producer and studio executive. Goetz was one of the founders of Twentieth Century Pictures, and later served as vice president of 20th Century Fox after the studio's merger with the Fox Film Company. At Universal-International, he served as the head of production from 1946 until 1953.
Edward Small was an American film producer from the late 1920s through 1970, who was enormously prolific over a 50-year career. He is best known for the movies The Count of Monte Cristo (1934), The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), The Corsican Brothers (1941), Brewster's Millions (1945), Raw Deal (1948), Black Magic (1949), Witness for the Prosecution (1957) and Solomon and Sheba (1959).
Royden Denslow Webb was an American film music composer. One of the charter members of ASCAP, Webb has hundreds of film music credits to his name, mainly with RKO Pictures. He is best known for film noir and horror film scores, in particular for the films of Val Lewton.
Can't Help Singing is a 1944 American musical Western film directed by Frank Ryan and starring Deanna Durbin, Robert Paige, and Akim Tamiroff. Based on a story by John D. Klorer and Leo Townsend, the film is about a senator's daughter who follows her boyfriend West in the days of the California gold rush. Durbin's only Technicolor film, Can't Help Singing was produced by Felix Jackson and scored by Jerome Kern with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg.
Arthur Lange was a United States bandleader and Tin Pan Alley composer of popular music. He composed music for over 120 films, including Grand Canary and Woman on the Run. Lange shared an Oscar nomination with Hugo Friedhofer for the film The Woman in the Window. He was nominated four times for Oscars, but did not win any.
Henry Levin began as a stage actor and director but was most notable as an American film director of over fifty feature films. His best known credits were Jolson Sings Again (1949), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and Where the Boys Are (1960).
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.
Pine-Thomas Productions was a prolific B-picture unit of Paramount Pictures from 1940–1957, producing 81 films. Co-producers William H. Pine and William C. Thomas were known as the "Dollar Bills" because none of their economically made films ever lost money.
William A. Berke was an American film director, film producer, actor and screenwriter. He wrote, directed, and/or produced some 200 films over a three-decade career.
RKO Radio Pictures Inc., commonly known as RKO Pictures or simply RKO, was an American film production and distribution company, one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928. RCA executive David Sarnoff engineered the merger to create a market for the company's sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone, and in early 1929 production began under the RKO name. Two years later, another Kennedy concern, the Pathé studio, was folded into the operation. By the mid-1940s, RKO was controlled by investor Floyd Odlum.
It's a Pleasure! is a 1945 American Technicolor Comedy-drama musical film directed by William A. Seiter and starring Sonja Henie, Michael O'Shea and Marie McDonald.
Myrna Dell was an American actress, model, and writer who appeared in numerous motion pictures and television programs over four decades. A Hollywood glamour girl in the early part of her career, she is best known today for her work in B-pictures, particularly film noir thrillers and Westerns.
Leo Spitz was an American film executive, best known for running International Pictures with William Goetz. When International merged with Universal Studios to form Universal-International in 1946, Spitz and Goetz ran the studio together. From 1950 to 1956 he owned a home in Palm Springs, California. He was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.