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Edgar Georg Ulmer was a Jewish-Moravian, Austrian-American film director who mainly worked on Hollywood B movies and other low-budget productions, eventually earning the epithet 'The King of PRC', due to his extremely prolific output for the Poverty Row studio. His stylish and eccentric works came to be appreciated by auteur theory-espousing film critics in the years following his retirement. Ulmer's most famous productions include the horror film The Black Cat (1934) and the film noir Detour (1945).
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Poverty Row is a slang term used to refer to Hollywood films produced from the 1920s to the 1950s by small B movie studios. Although many of them were based on today's Gower Street in Hollywood, the term did not necessarily refer to any specific physical location, but was rather a figurative catch-all for low-budget films produced by these lower-tier studios.
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Leroy Robert White, better known as Lee "Lasses" White or Leroy"Lasses" White, was an American vaudeville pianist, songwriter and entertainer who became an actor of the stage, screen and radio. He became famous doing minstrel shows during the early part of the 1900s, and wrote one of the first copyrighted twelve-bar blues, "Nigger Blues". After spending some time on radio, White entered the film industry in the late 1930s. During his eleven-year career he appeared in over 70 films.
The Little Accident is a 1930 American pre-Code comedy film directed by William James Craft and written by Gladys Lehman and Gene Towne, based on the 1927 novel An Unmarried Father by Floyd Dell and the 1928 play Little Accident by Dell and Thomas Mitchell. The film stars Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Anita Page, Sally Blane, ZaSu Pitts, Joan Marsh, and Roscoe Karns. The film was released on August 3, 1930, by Universal Pictures. It was remade by Universal in 1939 as Little Accident, and by RKO Radio Pictures in 1944 with Gary Cooper as Casanova Brown.
Marcel Le Picard (1887–1952) was a French cinematographer known for his work on American films. He shot around two hundred films between 1916 and 1953. He did much of his prolific work for low-budget studios such as Republic Pictures, Monogram Pictures and Producers Releasing Corporation.
References
- 1 2 Isenberg, Noah William (2014). Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins. Univ of California Press. pp. 124–125. ISBN 978-0-520-23577-9.
- ↑ "Minstrel Man". British Board of Film Classification . September 24, 1944.
- 1 2 3 "PRC's 'Minstrel Man' Reaching Epic Stage," Variety, March 1, 1944
- ↑ "'Minstrel Man' Resumes After Four-Week Layoff," Film Daily, March 8, 1944
- ↑ "The 17th Academy Awards | 1945". Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 23 March 2020.