Producers Releasing Corporation (generally known as PRC) was the smallest and least prestigious of the 11 Hollywood film companies of the 1940s.[1] It was considered a prime example of what was called "Poverty Row": a low-rent stretch of Gower Street in Hollywood where shoestring film producers based their operations. However, PRC was more substantial than the usual independent companies that made only a few low-budget movies and then disappeared. PRC was an actual Hollywood studio – albeit the smallest – with its own production facilities and distribution network, and it even accepted imports from the UK. PRC lasted from 1939 to 1947, churning out low-budget B movies for the lower half of a double bill or the upper half of a neighborhood theater showing second-run films. The studio was originally located at 1440 N. Gower St. (on the lot that eventually became part of Columbia Pictures) from 1936 to 1943. PRC then occupied the former Grand National Pictures physical plant at 7324 Santa Monica Blvd.,[2] from 1943 to 1947. This address is now an apartment complex.[citation needed]
PRC produced 179 feature films[3] and almost never spent more than $100,000 on any of them; most of its films actually cost considerably less. Only the 1944 musical Minstrel Man had enhanced production values; it showed such excellent progress during filming that its planned $80,000 budget was nearly tripled.[4]
History
The company evolved from the earlier Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC), begun in 1939 by exhibitor Ben Judell (Benjamin Nathaniel Judell; 1890–1974), who had hired producer Sigmund Neufeld and his brother, director Sam Newfield, to make the studio's films. After the collapse of PDC, Judell became an independent producer and the company was reorganized as Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) under former Pathé executive O. Henry Briggs. Briggs was succeeded in January 1941 by George R. Batcheller Jr.,[5] son of former Chesterfield Pictures president George R. Batcheller. The studio relied on Sam Newfield to direct most of its early features; Newfield actually adopted two other names ("Peter Stewart" and "Sherman Scott") to create the illusion that the PRC had an entire staff of directors.[6]
Most of PRC's movies were made within the genres of other studios of the 1940s, but on much lower budgets, and each generally took a week or less to shoot. They included westerns, action melodramas, and horror movies. A low-budget feature from a major studio would cost between $300,000 and $500,000 to produce, but a PRC feature of the early 1940s cost $70,000 or less; a PRC western cost $20,000 or less.
Author Don Miller, in his 1973 book B Movies, devotes two chapters to PRC. He usually comments on how very cheap the studio's early productions were, but does offer kind words for certain pictures: "Most of the remainder of the 1942 PRC product dealt with gangsters, crime, or whodunit puzzles, reliable standbys of the indie companies catering to action and grind theater houses. Baby Face Morgan played it for laughs, with Richard Cromwell as a rube posing as a tough racketeer. Robert Armstrong, Chick Chandler, and Mary Carlisle lent strong support, and while it never scaled any heights it was a passable spoof of the genre."[7]
Growth and recognition
In 1943, Robert R. Young, a railroad magnate who also owned American Pathé's film processing laboratory,[8] acquired the studio, and the films generally became more substantial. PRC grew in standing, with the company securing big-city exposure and critical praise for many of its features. The executive in charge of production was now Leon Fromkess.
The Benny Fields musical Minstrel Man was a watershed event: it was the first elaborately mounted PRC picture, and the first to receive Academy Award nominations (Ferde Grofé and Leo Erdody for best musical score, and Harry Revel and Paul Francis Webster for best original song). Theater chains that formerly would not play PRC pictures were now showing Minstrel Man first-run across America, opening the door for PRC to book more of its features into first-run situations. The children's fantasy The Enchanted Forest, filmed in Cinecolor, was a surprise hit for the studio, and led to several major studios filming their own movies in the process.[9]
Austrian director Edgar G. Ulmer directed three film noir classics for PRC: Bluebeard (1944), Strange Illusion (1945), and Detour (1945). All three — especially Detour — have acquired reputations as artistic achievements.
PRC was purchased by Pathé Industries, and the films were now labeled "The New PRC Pictures." The company continued to flourish within its own element until after World War II. Two new detective series were launched: Hugh Beaumont as Michael Shayne (five entries) and William Wright or Alan Curtis as Philo Vance (three entries), as well as a comedy series, The Gas House Kids, an attempt to create its own version of The Bowery Boys (three entries).
PRC also engaged in transactions with other studios. Its 1944 exploitation filmHitler's Madman (1944), directed by Douglas Sirk, was topical enough to be picked up by MGM for distribution. The 1946 thriller The Brute Man had been filmed by Universal but two factors clouded its release: its star, acromegaly victim Rondo Hatton, had just died; and Universal was then undergoing a corporate shakeup and discontinuing all B-picture production.[10] Universal, preferring not to publicize a deceased star and no longer bothering with low-budget films, sold The Brute Man to PRC.
Since PRC's inception, the studio had always produced inexpensive westerns, and there was a definite market for them. Among PRC's westerns were the Lone Rider series starring operatic and Broadway star turned singing cowboy George Houston; a Billy the Kid film series with the lead alternating between Buster Crabbe and Bob Steele; and The Frontier Marshals, similar to Republic Pictures' and Monogram Pictures' cowboy trio series.[11]Buster Crabbe was PRC's leading western star until he quit in 1945, alarmed by the budgets sinking to new lows. He was succeeded by singing cowboy Eddie Dean in the first B-western series filmed in Cinecolor. Dean was sometimes co-starred with Lash LaRue, who went on to his own starring series. The PRC westerns were so popular that they actually outlasted the studio, which was absorbed by Eagle-Lion. Although the studio's feature films would now bear the Eagle-Lion trademark, the low-budget westerns continued to be marketed with the PRC logo into 1948.
Eagle-Lion took over the distribution arm of the company in 1946; the production arm (and with it the entire company) followed suit shortly thereafter. PRC's final release was The Gas House Kids in Hollywood on August 23, 1947.
Legacy
Madison Pictures Inc. released PRC's products for both television showings and theatrical re-releases until 1955. Madison, formed in late December 1945, was headed by Armand Schenck, a former supervisor of PRC's branch operations[12] and previously an executive with Commonwealth Film Corporation and later Pathé Laboratories, a subsidiary of Pathé Industries. Madison was bought by United Artists.[13]
As early as 1950, the CBS Television network was screening PRC films on television for the bargain-basement price of $1,750 per title.[14] Many PRC films are now in the public domain and appear on budget DVDs. Eighty-one films from the PRC library were acquired by National Telefilm Associates; they are currently owned by TV syndicator and video dealer Films Around The World, Inc. Strange Holiday, originally released by PRC, is now owned by Paramount Pictures.
Republic Pictures Corporation was an American film studio corporation that originally operated from 1935 to 1967, based in Los Angeles, California. It had production and distribution facilities in Studio City, as well as a movie ranch in Encino.
Monogram Pictures Corporation was an American film studio that produced mostly low-budget films between 1931 and 1953, when the firm completed a transition to the name Allied Artists Pictures Corporation. Monogram was among the smaller studios in the golden age of Hollywood, generally referred to collectively as Poverty Row. Lacking the financial resources to deliver the lavish sets, production values, and star power of the larger studios, Monogram sought to attract its audiences with the promise of action and adventure.
Alfred "Lash" LaRue was a western motion picture star of the 1940s and 1950s.
Eagle-Lion Films was the name of two distinct, though related, companies. In 1944, UK film magnate J. Arthur Rank created an American distribution company with the name to handle his British films. The following year, under a reciprocal distribution arrangement with Rank, the U.S. company Pathé Industries, which already owned the small Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) studio, established an Eagle-Lion Films production subsidiary, while Rank's American business dropped the name. PRC, with its existing distribution exchanges, handled releases in the U.S. When PRC shut down in 1948, its distribution exchanges were assumed by Eagle-Lion Films. In 1950, Pathé merged Eagle-Lion with an independent reissues distributor, Film Classics, to create Eagle-Lion Classics. The latter was acquired by and merged into United Artists a year later. Rank also released films in the United Kingdom through Eagle-Lion Distributors Limited.
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.
Al St. John was an early American motion-picture comedian. He was a nephew of silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, with whom he often performed on screen. St. John was employed by Mack Sennett and also worked with many other leading players such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Mabel Normand. His film career successfully transitioned from the silent era into sound, and by the late 1930s and 1940s he was working predominantly in Westerns, often portraying the scruffy comedy-relief character "Fuzzy Q. Jones". Among his notable performances in that role are in the "Billy the Kid" series of films released by the Producers Releasing Corporation from 1940 to 1946 and in that company's "Lone Rider" series from 1941 to 1943.
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.
Oath of Vengeance is a 1944 American Western film directed by Sam Newfield. Shot at Corriganville Movie Ranch, the film was released by Producers Releasing Corporation as one of the studio's Billy the Kid film series.
Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion is an American half-hour black-and-white television series about the French Foreign Legion starring Buster Crabbe in the title role. Crabbe's real-life son Cullen Crabbe played the Legion mascot, with cowboy sidekick Fuzzy Knight playing himself as Legion comedy relief. The series premiered on NBC on 13 February 1955 and ended its first run with the 65th episode shown on 7 December 1957. It was shown for many years in syndication on American television under the title Foreign Legionnaire.
Grand National Films, Inc was an American independent motion picture production-distribution company in operation from 1936 to 1939. The company had no relation to the British Grand National Pictures.
Pathé Exchange, commonly known as Pathé, was an American film production and distribution company, largely of Hollywood's silent era. Known for its trailblazing newsreel and wide array of shorts, it grew out of the American division of the major French studio Pathé Frères, which began distributing films in the United States in 1904. Ten years later, it produced the enormously successful The Perils of Pauline, a twenty-episode serial that came to define the genre. The American operation was incorporated as Pathé Exchange toward the end of 1914 and spun off as an independent entity in 1921; the Merrill Lynch investment firm acquired a controlling stake. The following year, it released Robert J. Flaherty's groundbreaking documentary Nanook of the North. Other notable feature releases included the controversial drama Sex (1920) and director/producer Cecil B. DeMille's box-office-topping biblical epic The King of Kings (1927/28). During much of the 1920s, Pathé distributed the shorts of comedy pioneers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett and innovative animator Paul Terry. For Roach and then his own production company, acclaimed comedian Harold Lloyd starred in many feature and short releases from Pathé and the closely linked Associated Exhibitors, including the 1925 smash hit The Freshman.
Eddie Dean was an American Western singer and actor. His smooth baritone impressed both Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, who considered Dean the best cowboy singer of all time.
Wild Horse Phantom is a 1944 American Producers Releasing Corporation Western film of the "Billy the Kid" series directed by Sam Newfield.
Fugitive of the Plains is a 1943 American Producers Releasing Corporation Western film of the "Billy the Kid" series directed by Sam Newfield. In April 1947 PRC re-released the film as a "streamlined" (edited) "Bronco Buckaroo" version re titled Raiders of Red Rock.
The Billy the Kid series of 42 Western films was produced between 1940 and 1946, and released by Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation.
Edward Francis Finney (1903–1983) was an American film producer and director. He is best known as the man who introduced cowboy singer Tex Ritter to the moviegoing public.
Chesterfield Motion Picture Corporation, generally shortened to Chesterfield Pictures, was an American film production company of the 1920s and 1930s. The company head was George R. Batcheller, and the company worked in tandem with its sister studio, Invincible Pictures Corporation, which was led by Maury Cohen. The production company never owned its own studio and rented space at other studios, primarily Universal Pictures and RKO.
Maury Cohen, also known as Maury M. Cohen, was an American film producer most active during the 1930s. He owned one of the Poverty Row studios, Invincible films, which specialized in making low-budget feature films. After leaving film in the early 1940s, Cohen founded and ran the historic dance club in Los Angeles, the Hollywood Palladium.
Billy the Kid Outlawed is a 1940 American Western film directed by Sam Newfield and written by Oliver Drake. It stars Bob Steele as gunfighter "Billy the Kid", Al St. John as his sidekick "Fuzzy" Jones and Carleton Young as Jeff Travis, with Louise Currie and John Merton. The film was released on July 20, 1940, by Producers Releasing Corporation.
References
↑ Motion Picture Herald, "Raw Stock Allotments Unchanged by WPB", July 24, 1943, p. 44.
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