B Crumble & The Stinkers: The British Post-War B-Movie - A Re-Assessment

It is a necessary truism that, in life, the passage of time inevitably leads the individual to re-evaluate certain things which were once beliefs, set in stone. Was the Graham Williams era of Doctor Who over-reliant on self-aggrandising comedy? (No, it was not.) Did Pink Floyd's records after Syd went mad have any merit whatsoever or were they all just a load of tuneless hippy drivel? (The former, mostly, though not exclusively.) When did everything start to go to Hell in a hand cart? (It was probably when some oaf thought it was a good idea to introduce Freddie Flintoff to Paddy McGuinness.) How does Piers Morgan sleep at nights? (... No, this blogger still doesn't have an answer to that.) The latest such, potentially Earth-shattering, question this blogger has had to address is 'were there any good British B-movies of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s'? Because, if you listen to many people who claim that they know what they're talking about, the answer will be a big negative. 

This blogger is of a certain age, dear blog reader. You may have noticed. He was a child who had his imagination fired into orbit by television. Hence, the reason for this blog's existence. Had he been born a decade earlier than 1963, it would likely have been the cinema which dominated his worldview and his more fanciful notions in those important formative years. As this blogger wrote in a couple of decades ago in A Vault Of Horror concerning his discovery of horror movies during the 1970s: 'Being twelve, I couldn't satisfy my new found addiction with a splatter movie at the local ABC (that interesting diversion was yet to come). My initial access, therefore, was entirely through television.' This blogger has, previously, mentioned that the first four movies he was taken to see as a youngling were The Aristocats and Yellow Submarine (both at the Haymarket Odeon) and Bedknobs & Broomsticks and Diamonds Are Forever (both at the Byker Apollo) during the 1970 to 1971 period. He still stands by those as a pretty decent entry point to the medium. Cinema, however, was then what it remains for this blogger to this day, a 'once every few months' treat rather than a 'we come along on Saturday morning, greeting everybody with a smile' weekly occurrence as it was for many of this blogger's older brothers' generation. That situation could have be different had a cinema within two minutes walking distance of The Stately Telly Topping Manor, The Gloria, not been turned into a bingo hall at just about the time this blogger reached an age where going to the flicks regularly was something he would've been interested in. 'Bingo and rock are pushing out X-ratings,' indeed.

The fact that by then the British film industry was, if not on its deathbed then, at the very least, coughing up blood and looking not-at-all well didn't help matters. That situation, of course, would get worse in the following years. Prime example (and, a bit of social history): On 17 October 1973, in response to the escalating Yom Kippur war, OPEC, the Arab oil producing countries, cut production and quadrupled the world price of oil. This, effectively, ended the relative affluence on which, as Ian MacDonald wrote in Revolution In The Head, 'the preceding ten years of happy-go-lucky excess in the West had chiefly depended.' It's a far less sentimental suggestion for 'the day that the 1960s (conceptually) ended' than some symbolic musical event, but it's probably a more realistic one. The resulting financial crisis in Europe sent inflation spiralling. It was the moment when, almost overnight, The Swinging Sixties turned into the 'sober and soon-to-be-unemployed' Seventies and all but destroyed what was left of the British film industry. As a bizarre coincidence, on that same day England's football team - needing a win to progress - drew with Poland in a World Cup qualifier at Wembley. This failure to reach the final stages of a tournament that England had actually won eight years previously may seem insignificant in the great scheme of thing. But, just as that famous 'some people are on the pitch' victory over West Germany in 1966 appeared to encapsulate the spirit of an era - when England (and, specifically, London) was on top of the world - so the gloom which settled over the country during the winter of 1973-74, with its three-day weeks, power cuts and 'cod war' with Iceland, was inextricably tied to the failing fortunes of Sir Alf Ramsey's ageing side. So, you see dear blog reader, all this malarkey really was Norman Hunter and Peter Shilton's fault. Don't let anyone tell you differently.

This blogger has recently been re-reading The British B Film, by Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane, first published in 2009. This excellent book's initial release was the first sign of a flowering interest in British 'second feature' movies that, steadily, became more observed in the years since. With companies like Network, Renown Films and Odeon Entertainment eagerly searching the back catalogues of studios such as Merton Park and Butcher's for product and the unexpected, but very welcome, success of the dedicated 'heritage' Freeview channel Talking Pictures, it has become easier than ever to see many films which, for a long time, had been gathering dust on a shelf in some archive or other. In 2008 the journalist, broadcaster and cultural historian Matthew Sweet (a Facebook fiend of this blogger, as it happens), who has done as much as anyone to rekindle interest in this much-neglected aspect of British film production, made an acclaimed documentary for BBC Four. The focus of Truly, Madly, Cheaply!, was across a board spectrum of many types of B-movies from the 'quota quickies' of the 1930s, through the science-fiction, horror and teen-beat dramas of the 1950s and onto the horror-and-sexploitation cross-pollination of the late 1960s and beyond. Published a year after Matthew's documentary, The British B Film was claimed to be 'the first book to provide a thorough examination of the British B-movie, from the war years to the 1960s.' The authors - Chibnall, the Professor of British Cinema at De Montfort University and McFarlane, a Visiting Professor at the University of Hull - drew on phenomenal archival research, contemporary trade papers and interviews with numerous key filmmakers to map the B-movie phenomenon as artefact, as industry product and as a reflection of their times and location.

Of course, there is an element of theoretical McLuhanism in all of this sudden interest in the neglected and forgotten (it's not what you say that's important, Marshall McLuhan always reckoned, rather it's the way you say it). And, additionally, a rather faux naïf assumption on the part of many commentators that things can be neatly fitted into specific boxes. For example, Milligan, Sellers, Secombe and Bentine's early foray into film - Maclean Rogers' 1952 stuttering transfer of Goonery to a visual medium Down Among The Z-Men - or John Paddy Carstairs' 1953 pre-St Trinian's malarkey, Top Of The Form are as much a part of the story of the British B-movie as, for example, Three Steps In The Dark, Stryker Of The Yard or Noose For A Lady, all from that same year.

Chibnall and McFarlane's story begins in September 1960, when two films were shooting, simultaneously, at Pinewood. One was the Twentieth Century-Fox production of Cleopatra, eventually directed by Joseph Mankiewicz after Rouben Mamoulian had walked away from the, already way over-budget, project. It, of course, starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the world's most famous celebrity couple. The other film was Alfred Shaughnessy's thriller The Impersonator, starring the American actor John Crawford, Jane Griffiths, John Salew and Patricia Blake. The media were not interested in the slightest in The Impersonator (although it did, apparently, get some quite good contemporary reviews from critics like Penelope Gilliatt and Dilys Powell). Its stars were hardly household names, its modest budget of twenty three thousand knicker indicated an 'unimportant' - and worse in the eyes of many of the more sneering commentators, 'British' - film and its genre, the crime thriller, was often ignored by critics on general principle. By contrast Taylor and Burton and their tempestuous romantic and marital entanglements, brought the world's press rushing to Iver Heath, camera bulbs a-flashin'. Playboy even published photos of Liz as the Queen of the Nile almost-but-not-quite-in-The-Nip. These reasons - and the fact that the protracted shoot and costly shutdowns due to Liz's various health issues almost bankrupted Fox - ensured that Cleopatra (at the time the most expensive movie ever made) remained in circulation (via television and then video and DVD) long-after it finally reached cinemas in 1963. Eventually, it even made a profit. The Impersonator on the other hand, in many ways a superior film, quickly disappeared from circulation - and was forgotten. In The British B Film, Chibnall and McFarlane describe The Impersonator as 'exceptionally proficient' which is not, as you might think, damning it with faint praise. The release of The Impersonator was also part of the final phase of the story of British B-movies: 'When the curtain comes down - as it literally does - in the last frames of The Impersonator, it signals a wider finality,' the authors note. 'The black-and-white British 'B' film, which has supplied thirty years of indigenous supporting-feature entertainment and just about out-lived its American counterpart, is coming to a close.'

If one has an issue with Matthew Sweet's documentary - and it's a very minor one - it is that viewers coming fresh to this arena of British movie production could take away from Truly, Madly, Cheaply! the notion that most British B-movies were cheap and nasty 'genre' films - Trog, Harrison Marks' notorious nudie-flick Naked As Nature Intended or David MacDonald's endearingly daft Devil Girl From Mars (1954), for instance. Rather than the steady flow of, often very high quality, crime thrillers which were the mainstay of the British B-movies in the post-war period. That said, though, Matthew's respectful comparison of Wolf Rilla's The Black Rider (1954) with The Wild One - along with Sweet's mate Mark Gatiss' in-depth analysis of the prominent role of Jimmy Hanley's bottom in the former - is worth the licence fee in and of itself.

By contrast, Chibnall and McFarlane's book systematically examines the cultural policies, production economics and audience demand for the low-budget British film between 1940 and 1965. And, it avoids the temptation to perpetuate the sort of banal stereotypes so often associated with the words 'be' and 'movie'. It does not begin at the start of the production of B-movies in the UK, as the pre-1940 period had already been covered in an earlier book by the duo, Quota Quickies (published in 2007). Instead, it kicks-off around the end of the Second World War, a period when the B-movie was, effectively, facing it's darkest hour.

So what, exactly, was a British B-movie? Well, the British part at least should be self-explanatory. As for the movies themselves, the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act (which became law on 1 April 1928), was a bid to stem the flow of American films which were, at the time, threatening to flood the UK market. By the act, exhibitors were required to devote a percentage of their screen-space to British-registered films.

This, in turn, cracked open the door to economic viability for - cheap - British second features, creating the conditions for what came (disparagingly) to be known as the 'quota quickies'; British films made as cheaply (and quickly) as possible safe in the knowledge that they would be guaranteed a release and, presumably, an audience. Although in more than a few worst case scenarios, such films were sometimes shown in cinemas during the mornings, whilst the cleaners were still in, simply to fit in with the letter - if not the spirit - of the new law. However, during the Second World War there was a determined effort by the industry as a whole to phase out low-budget second features in an attempt to create cinema programmes of A-list films supported by a, rather perfunctory, number of shorts. This move was accompanied by the government's publicly-stated preference for 'educational' documentaries rather than cheap genre films to fill the 'supporting feature' role. These factors, combined with rising costs and a shortage of studio space (not to mention rationing), resulted in a marked decline in the production of British B-movies during 1943 and 1944. As the second feature declined, the featurette - short documentary films with a running time of around thirty minutes - tended to take over as the support to the latest Hollywood (or, indeed, Elstree or Ealing) blockbuster.

Soon the war came to an end. You probably heard about it, dear blog reader. It was on The News and everything. The Nazi's were defeated and Hitler (who only had one) died. In a ditch, on fire. Which was good because he was a fascist fucker and no one liked him. With regard to cinema, however, the battle lines were now in the process of being drawn between those who favoured a return of regular B-movies and those who preferred featurettes. Hitler, had he lived and expressed a preference, would've been in the latter camp. Probably. The result, joyously, was decided by the public and by the exhibitors both of whom, seemingly, wanted B-films, albeit for vastly different reasons. While the public rejected the 'one feature film only' policy and demanded two films as a 'value for my money' thing ('what's on with the main film?' became a standard query at the Box Office for the next decade-and-a-half), exhibitors opposed having state-sponsored documentaries foisted upon them, which they considered a form of government propaganda. And, to be fair, most of those produced during wartime were exactly that, although they still produced some work of genuine merit. Take, for instance Gilbert Gunn's 1944 short, Tyneside Story. Produced by the Ministry of Information, the main purpose of the film was to recruit men and, especially, women to work in the shipyards of Wallsend and Hebburn. Whether it succeeded in this aim is debateable, but at the end of the film, the question is posed in a quite remarkable, impassioned speech (by the actor FR Gibson, one of many recruited from Heaton's People's Theatre) as to what the yards would be like five years hence without significant investment. Written by the Newcastle-born essayist and author Jack Common (a close friend of George Orwell), Tyneside Story has been described as 'a tiny understated gem.' It's also worth noting that such notable film-makers as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Volunteer) and Alfred Hitchcock (Bon Voyage) made movies for the MOI during the war.

'On the one side stood the major producers, British and American, who were interested in making longer and more lavish pictures that would draw audiences as a single attraction (with only a perfunctory supporting programme),' Chinball and McFarlane declared. 'Ranged against them - and poorly equipped - was the army of small film-makers, whose interests lay in the double bill and flexible cinema programming. What power they had come not from any economic muscle, but from the stubborn resistance of cinema audiences to any attacks on a two-feature programme that they regarded as value for money.' However, the shortage and expense of studio facilities remained major obstacles to second feature production. Chibnall and McFarlane note that in 1947 there were fifteen working film studios in the country, with fifty one sound stages. The cost of renting these facilities, though, was beyond the economic reach of most B-movie producers. Ironically, the government then came to the rescue yet again with a series of regulations, such as the 1947 ad valorem duty on imported American films and the 1948 Film Act. This resulted in a reduction of American capital for the production of main features and, consequently, the urgent need for home-grown product to fill British screens.

The production of B-movies was further encouraged in 1950 by The Eady Levy which returned a percentage of cinema proceeds to local productions. Several low-budget production companies, notably Hammer, benefitted from this and crafted a profitable association with some American producers. This resulted in an influx of American actors, directors and screenwriters, including those eager to find work in Britain due to the blacklists imposed on many American film-makers as a result of HUAC investigations. This triggered something of a 'golden age' of the British B-movie production which lasted until the early-1960s. Its obituary, according to the authors, was announced in 1967 when The Times (23 January) claimed that the Film Producers Association estimated that the minimum cost of a second feature (approximately twenty four grand) regularly exceeded the maximum amount which could be recouped for the movie in the UK. Which was alleged to be only sixteen thousand smackers.

Of course, technically speaking, 'B-movies' per se didn't end in the mid-Sixties, they carried on being produced, spasmodically, well into the 1970s; indeed, it could be argued that the trend of 'double-bill features' which briefly flourished in the UK around the start of the new decade was a continuation of what had, previously, been standard practice. Thus, although not satisfying most of the criteria for being a B-movie, per se, it could be argued that The Wicker Man started its cinematic life as exactly that, first appearing as the supporting feature to Don't Look Now in late 1973. The same could be argued about another two of this blogger's favourite British horror movies of that era, The Corpse (whose 1972 UK cinema run was on the bottom-half of a double bill with an American proto-slasher movie Psycho Killer) and Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (which had the misfortune to share it's belated 1974 release as support to a, not very distinguished, Shaw Brothers kung-fu movie, The Girl With The Thunderbolt Kick). There are other examples.

Nevertheless, that - real or imagined - 'golden age' period of about fifteen years produced many remarkable movies and became a useful training academy for actors, directors and technicians with small independent companies, such as The Danzigers, Butcher's, Tempean and Anglo-Amalgamated. All of them seeking to fill gaps in the market and meet the needs of a public who still expected to get a full programme of entertainment for their shilling. Chibnall and McFarlane, in the third chapter of The British B Film, provide a comprehensive overview of the so-called 'B Factories', the companies, the studios and the producers. These included, in addition to those already mentioned, Highbury Studios, who were acquired by The Rank Organisation, Adelphi, ACT Films, EJ Fancey, a family business which included distributors DUK and New Realm as well as the production company Border, Eros, Vandyke, Anderson Povis Films, Brighton Studios, Apex Productions, Guido Coen, Bill Luckwell and Independent Artists. B-movies were, usually, around sixty minutes in length (there are quite a number of exceptions but, as a general rule, that's the sort of running time which could, subsequently, be sold in syndication to TV networks around the world (see, for example what would become known, on television, as The Edgar Wallace Mysteries).

Chibnall and McFarlane also compare the themes and tone of British B-movies with the work done in the USA, both the 'Poverty Row' studios - a majority with their curiously Ayn Rand-style objectivist philosophy - as well as some of the Hollywood majors. A point was made in the previous Quota Quickies: The Birth Of The British B Film, that while critique and academic historical analysis of the American B-movie industry was already being published in the 1960s, the equivalent British films had to wait another three decades or more before anyone began to pay them any form of attention. However, with the publication of both Quota Quickies and The British 'B' Film, that situation is now somewhat reversed. There have been studies of selected US studios, some of the films they produced and the individuals who made them and Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn's collection of articles and interviews, King Of The Bs: Working Within The Hollywood System, remains of considerable value to film scholars. If you can get your hands on a copy because it has, seemingly, been out of print since the late-1970s. By contrast, anyone studying the British B-movies can now, at least, draw on two books providing a detailed narrative which runs from the 1920s to the 1960s.

A comparison between American and British work in this territory also highlights another distinct contrast. Interest in the Hollywood B-movies has often tended to focus on the auteur (epitomised by Edgar Ulmer or, later, Roger Corman). Chibnall and McFarlane provide a chapter on the British film-makers, but here - as elsewhere - they are rigorously inclusive in their focus, also discussing the contributions of screenwriters, cinematographers and composers and devoting as much space to the films of, say, Godfrey Grayson - some 'sporadically lively in their undemanding way', others 'beyond reclamation' - as to a once major industry figure like Maurice Elvey. Other chapters look at actors and genres, how Britain was portrayed in the B-movie and how many of these films were moulded by cultural matters, the economics of the film industry and the changing habits in cinema-goers themselves.

An amusing point that Chibnall and McFarlane make is that the, perhaps, unspoken assumptions about daily life in Britain are what makes many of these films such a genuine delight. And, such an important observation of a specific time and place; getaway cars parked - entirely unsuspiciously - right outside banks or jewellers without being hindered by the traffic as they make their escape, even in Central London. Or, the extraordinary amounts of alcohol being consumed at all times of the day or night - the middle and upper classes being 'almost incapable of entering a living room without crossing straight to the drinks cabinet,' in Chibnall and McFarlane's words. Often followed, rather worryingly, by sloshed, well-off characters getting into their cars to drive home; heaven help any oiks who may get in their way.

Chapter Four of The British B Film surveys directors on the rise - John Gilling, Ken Hughes, Don Chaffey, Terence Fisher and Wolf Rilla - as well as some of those going in the opposite direction from the heights of their larger-budgeted movies of the past. This includes David MacDonald, Lance Comfort, Montgomery Tully, Vernon Sewell, Leslie Arliss, Lawrence Huntington, Bernard Knowles and the previous mentioned Elvey. Chibnall and McFarlane also celebrate those directors, such as Ernest Morris, Oswald Mitchell, Francis Searle, Michael McCarthy and Terry Bishop, who never really ,ade it beyond the B-movie field. Screenwriters like Brian Clemens, Mark Grantham, Brandon Fleming, Norman Hudis, Brock Williams and Doreen Montgomery - one of the few female writers working on B-movies - are also acknowledged alongside cinematographers like Monty Berman, Basil Emmott, Walter J Harvey, James Wilson, Geoffrey Faithfull and Arthur Grant.

There's also a lot of space given to the actors. Lee Paterson, Ronald Howard, Conrad Phillips, Donald Houston, Dermot Walsh, William Lucas, Peter Reynolds, From The North favourites Hazel Court, Barbara Shelley and Honor Blackman, Sandra Dorne, Barbara Murray, Zena Marshall, Maureen Connell, Susan Shaw, Rona Anderson and Jane Hylton all have their careers assessed. Anderson writes the book's witty and affectionate Foreword. 'When I was actually involved in B-features in the 1950s, no one took them seriously because they were churned out in three weeks,' she notes. 'But the fact that they were made quickly was the result of everyone concerned being so experienced. They knew what they were doing and there was no waste of time or money.'

The book rightfully acknowledges the significance of the impact of expatriate Hollywood directors on the British film industry. Some, including blacklisted American writers like Oscar winners Carl Foreman and Howard Koch along with Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield, often worked anonymously in Britain. Others, such as Richard Landau, sent their scripts across the Atlantic by airmail. The British B-movie in the 1950s also benefited from the presence of much Hollywood acting talent. Some were primarily character actors, or those who never quite reached the top; Dan Duryea, Alex Nicol, Dane Clark, John Ireland, Zachary Scott, Lloyd Bridges, Scot Brady, Robert Hutton, Richard Carlson, Wayne Morris, Richard Denning, Arthur Kennedy, Mary Castle, Marguerite Chapman, Mary Murphy, Faith Domergue, Hilary Brooke, Marsha Hunt, Phyllis Kirk, From The North favourite Kim Hunter, Carole Matthews and Macdonald Carey. Others were former A-listers who, for a variety of reasons, had lost their status in Los Angeles - including Paulette Goddard, who made her last movie in the UK, Terence Fisher's A Stranger Came Home (1954), George Brent, Paul Henreid, Larry Parks and George Raft. This list also includes two women who escaped toxic scandals in California: Barbara Payton and Lizabeth Scott. The latter's trip to the UK for the Hammer-Lippert co-production Stolen Face (another by the great Terence Fisher, 1952) took place as her Hollywood star was on the wane and, by the time she returned to the UK for Lance Comfort's The Weapon (1956), her stateside career was, effectively over.

Though B-mives were largely ignored or, if they were covered, dismissed by film publications like The Monthly Film Bulletin, there were some notable exceptions. Independent Artists' October Moth (John Kruse, 1960) for instance was an atmospheric chiller which follows a mentally unstable farmer as he kidnaps an injured woman who he believes to be his dead mother. He holds her hostage in a farmhouse with his terrified sister (Lana Morris) while playing out his dark, Oedipal fantasies. The film, expressionistic in its use of light and shadow, received several positive notices for this and for the camerawork which aided Lee Patterson's portrayal of a tormented young man, aesthetic qualities which were rarely associated with this type of production.

However, as television became more popular and Hollywood, in particular, fought back with sumptuous Technicolor in panoramic vision (along with 3-D, Smell-o-Vision and William Castle wiring up cinema seats with mild electric shocks, all in an effort to lure audiences back), the British B-movie was being squeezed by both sides. And, by the mid-1960s, the sort of low budget crime dramas favoured by B-movie producers could, increasingly, be found on television. 

     Chibnall and McFarlane provide a number of different approaches to the British B-movie. They categorise films according to genre and conclude, unsurprisingly, that the crime and thriller movies were the most prolific, followed by comedies. Suggesting that, whilst we may be a vicious, ghoulish people in the UK, we do enjoy a good laugh (usually, at someone else's painful expense). Within the crime genre, the authors point to the significance of the police procedural, as one of their chapter titles has it The Men From The Yard. They also analyse the point of view of a large body of B-movies with regard to key social issues in Britain in the 1950s such as law and order, attitudes to work, leisure, sex, class, race and ethnicity.

There is much focus given to, for example, Anglo-Amalgamated Productions, run by Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy, which operated from 1945 until roughly 1971 (after which it was absorbed into EMI Films). Second features, often produced at Merton Park Studios, formed the majority of AA's output and it was also the UK distributor of many films produced by American International Pictures who, in turn, distributed AA's films in the United States. It is fondly remembered for producing the first twelve Carry On films (all of which were made at Pinewood) and three highly-regarded B-movie crime series Scotland Yard (1953 to 1961) and From The North favourites The Edgar Wallace Mysteries (1960 to 1965) and The Scales Of Justice (1962 to 1967). Chibnall and McFarlane argue that part of the reason why the Edgar Wallace films, in particular, were so successful - not only in Britain but also abroad - was that they borrowed advertising, marketing and formatting techniques from television and, as such, they 'catered to an audience now used to the rhythms of television programming, by employing regular scheduling, careful product branding and quality control.' Anglo-Amalgamated, however, also produced Michael Powell's way-ahead-of-its-time Peeping Tom (1960) and such notable films as John Schlesinger's A Kind Of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), Ken Loach's Poor Cow (1967) and, one of the great British science fiction movies of the era, Alan Bridges' Invasion (1965). The company's distribution arrangement with AIP led to the last (and best) two films of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe cycle, From The North favourites The Masque Of The Red Death and The Tomb Of Ligeia (both 1964), being joint productions made in the UK.

At the opposite end of the scale to Anglo-Amalgamated were The Danzigers - the company which was widely perceived within the industry to have the shoddiest sets, the worst scripting and the cheapest-looking productions. For example, Feet Of Clay (Frank Marshall, 1960) is a predictable, if 'oddly compelling' noirish thriller in which a lawyer (Vincent Ball) investigates the murder of a probation officer. The cuts between studio and location are very jarring and the acting is, at times, stilted beyond the norm. The company's modus operandi meant that the content and style of their movies could vary depending on the studio space available. The main priority for The Danzigers was never quality but, rather, how quickly and cheaply a production could be shot. According to Brian Clemens, who worked extensively for the company in the 1950s: 'They'd come to me and say, "we've got two weeks to shoot, so we want you to write something for these sets, a seventy minute second feature and it must have The Old Bailey, a submarine and a mummy's tomb in it." So I'd write it to order. Nobody believes that they made movies like this once, but it's absolutely true.' The Danzigers were probably the worst offenders when it came to giving opportunities to a range of upcoming talents. The twenty plus one-hour films they produced between 1960 and 1964 were made by a handful of directors - Godfrey Grayson, Max Varnel, Ernest Morris and Frank Marshall - while scripts were provided by just two writers, Mark Grantham and Clemens.

The British B Film is an invaluable resource for anyone even vaguely interested in the history of the British film industry. Take, for example, one relatively minor portion of the book's survey of the so-called 'B Factories'. Film historians usually begin their coverage of Hammer with a, somewhat perfunctory, skip through the studio's low-budget origins, before moving quickly onto what really interests them, Hammer's contribution to the Horror genre from the late 1950s onwards. This blogger is as guilty of this as anyone. Not Chibnall and McFarlane, though. They end their coverage of Hammer before the release of The Curse Of Frankenstein in 1957. They are more interested in how the studio emerged from its tentative position on the fringes of the British film industry to one of consolidation into a viable production studio. This was largely due to James Carreras's canny management which was able to exploit government financial assistance while simultaneously fostering close working relationships with a number of independent American producers such as Robert Lippert. This enabled the company to distribute its co-produced films, shot in Britain, in the American market at a time when most British film companies were struggling to gain access to that - vast and lucrative - market. Lippert, for his part, supplied relatively cheap Hollywood talent for Hammer's crime films, many of them with noir overtones, that were accessible to both American and British audiences. See, for example, Lady In The Fog (1952), Mantrap and Four-Sided Triangle (both 1953), The House Across The Lake (1954) and Murder By Proxy (1955). Or even later, post The Quatermass Xperiment, X - The Unknown and The Curse Of Frankenstein, an effective little chiller such as another particular favourite of this blogger, 1958's The Snorkel.

All of this was accompanied by flexible marketing arrangements which resulted in different publicity campaigns - and, usually, different titles - for the same film in different territories. Thus, in the US, Lady In The Fog is, the far more literal, Scotland Yard Inspector, to take one example. The potentially salacious story of a middle-aged bookshop owner (George Brent) who, in a sudden fit of passion, kisses a young female employee (Diana Dors), was titled The Last Page in Britain (1952, again the work of the prolific Terence Fisher). American audiences, by contrast, were lured to their local drive-ins to see the same movie but, under the title Man Bait. To ensure that the budgets were kept tight, Hammer employed highly professional genre directors such as Fisher, Montgomery Tully and Francis Searle. Although the results could be variable in terms of quality, the low production costs and wide distribution generally ensured a healthy profit for Hammer on the majority of their productions. And, of course, some of these films were very good indeed. These include the previously-mentioned The House Across The Lake (1954, known as Heat Wave in the US), directed by Ken Hughes and starring American imports Alex Nicola and Hilary Brooke in a variation on Billy Wilder's tale of infidelity, seduction and murder, Double Indemnity (1944). The similarly themed The Flanagan Boy (Reginald Borg, 1953, released as Bad Blonde in America), starred Barbara Payton as an unfaithful, naughty wife who seduces a young man with the intention that he should kill her husband. Dead. The film was produced amidst some lurid publicity surrounding Payton and her volatile relationship with the actor Tom Neal whilst she was already married to another well-known actor, Franchot Tone. After Tone was seriously hurt in a brutal fight with Neal, Payton was at the centre of a very public scandal which, no doubt, intensified interest in The Flanagan Boy both in the UK and the US.

The book concludes with an overview of what the authors consider to be the 'best of the Bs'. These include: An Act Of Murder (Michael Gordon, 1948), It's Not Cricket (Roy Rich and Alfred Roome, 1949), The Late Edwina Black (aka The Obsessed, Maurice Elvey, 1951), Private Information (Fergus McDonell, 1951), Marilyn (aka Roadhouse Girl, Wolf Rilla, 1953), The Flying Scot (aka The Mailbag Robbery, Compton Bennett, 1957), Small Hotel (David MacDonald, 1957, featuring Janet Munro and Billie Whitelaw), the comedy The Man Who Liked Funerals (David Eady, 1959), Devil's Bait (Peter Graham Scott, 1959: 'The excellent performances of [Jane] Hylton and [Geoffrey] Keen create a wholly convincing sense of two people whose relationship is under the strain of everyday irritations and who are imperceptibly drawn closer by the near disaster in which they are caught up') and Ernest Morris's 1960 adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart.

The British B-movie story finished on something of a high in terms of quality; of the fifteen second features that Chibnall and McFarlane discuss in depth in their final chapter, almost half of them were released between 1959 and 1964. These include The Impersonator, John Kirsh's Unearthly Stranger (1963), Lance Comfort's Tomorrow At Ten (1964, with John Gregson pitting his wits against kidnapper Robert Shaw) and Jim O'Connolly's Smokescreen, (also 1964), starring Peter Vaughan as an insurance investigator involved in murder, mostly shot in Brighton ('an uncommonly neat little insurance racket-cum-murder thriller,' the authors also praise the way that its comic relief is 'built into the fabric of the film's main narrative action'). And, possibly best movie of the lot, Quentin Lawrence's suspense drama Cash On Demand (1962), featuring two outstanding performances from Andre Morell and Peter Cushing as a suave bank robber and a pressurised bank manager, respectively.

Cash On Demand is a fine movie, B or otherwise. Chibnall and McFarlane note that it also received enthusiastic contemporary reviews from both The Monthly Film Bulletin and Kinematograph Weekly. They particularly praise Cushing: 'It is Peter Cushing's performance of the austere man, to whom efficiency matters most (though the film is subtle enough to allow him a certain integrity as well) and who will be frightened into a warmer sense of humanity, that lifts the film well above the perfunctory levels of much B film-making.'

The British B Film is an outstanding book covering a far-too-often neglected area of cinema history. After all, where else are you going to see serious discussions on the merits (or otherwise) of, in no particular order: Solo For Sparrow (Gordon Flemyng, 1962), with a script by Roger Marshall adapting Edgar Wallace and featuring Glyn Houston, Anthony Newlands, Michael Coles, Allan Cuthbertson and, in minor roles, a young Michael Caine, a younger William Gaunt and a almost pre-teen Wanda Ventham. Or, The Switch (Peter Maxwell, 1963), a clever crime drama involving a gang that smuggles Rolex watches by hiding them in a petrol tank of a woman's car, starring Anthony Steel, Zena Marshall and Conrad Phillips. Or, Danger By My Side (Charles Saunders, 1962), with Anthony Oliver and Maureen Connell. Or, Night Of The Prowler (Francis Searle, 1962), starring Patrick Holt and Colette Wilde in a tale of motor racing and infidelity. Or, Death Goes To School (Stephen Clarkson, 1953), in which police (in the shape of Gordon Jackson and Sam Kydd) investigate the death of a nasty teacher at a girls school, where any number of people might have done the dirty deed. But Barbara Murray definitely didn't because her feet are too big. Or, Noose (Edmond T Gréville), a highly-regarded gangster movie starring Carole Landis which was a big box office hit in 1948.

There's also Behind The Headlines (Charles Saunders, 1956), in which a male and female journalist (Paul Carpenter and Hazel Court) join forces to hunt down a murderer. Wide Boy (Ken Hughes, 1952), an atmospheric noir about black marketeering with Sydney Tafler. Game For Three Losers (Gerry O'Hara, 1965), one of the last and definitely one of the best of the Edgar Wallace adaptations, as Mark Eden blackmails Michael Gough in a plot similar to Victim. The Boys (Sidney J Furie, 1962), a 'concerned' courtroom drama about the problems of wild youth, starring Dudley Sutton, Ronald Lacey, Tony Garnett and Jess Conrad. Cat Girl (Alfred Shaughnessy, 1957) featuring Barbara Shelley. Crossroads To Crime (1960), the film debut of Gerry Anderson shot in and around Slough and Maidenhead. And, The Man In The Back Seat (Vernon Sewell, 1961). Sewell, let it be noted, made some fine movies in his long career and some really bloody awful ones. This, starring Derren Nesbitt and Carol White, is among Sewell's best and almost makes one forgive the director for subsequently making The Blood Beast Terror. Almost.

Then there's The Hi-Jackers (Jim O'Connolly, 1962), starring Anthony Booth and Patrick Cargill. Crosstrap (1962), the first movie by Robert Hartford-Davis. Believed lost for many years, a negative was discovered in 2011, the movie having been included on the BFI's Seventy Five Most Wanted list. It has, since, been shown on Talking Pictures. Cover Girl Killer (Terry Bishop, 1959), featuring a memorably wired performance as the titular murderer by Harry H Corbett. Playback (Quentin Lawrence, 1962), another superb Edgar Wallace adaptation starring Barry Foster and written by Robert Banks Stewart. The Traitor (Michael McCarthy, 1959), a brilliantly-acted story of a French Resistance group who discover, post-war, that one of their members was collaborating with The Gestapo, with a cast that included Anton Diffring, Christopher Lee and Rupert Davies. Beat Girl (Edmond T Gréville, 1960), one of the cult movies of the era, featuring Gillian Hills, Adam Faith and The John Barry Seven. And Violent Playground (Basil Dearden, 1958), starring Stanley Baker, Peter Cushing and David McCallum and filmed in Liverpool.

And, that's before we get to the likes of Three Steps To The Gallows, The Scarlet Web, The Crooked Sky, Don't Talk To Strange Men, The Big Day, Stormy Crossing, Strangers Meeting, Behemoth, The Sea Monster, Blind Date, The Siege Of Sidney Street and many others. Just as, in rock and/or roll music, the B-side can, occasionally, be better than the A-side, so it is with the B-movie. 'The British B-movie has always had a stinking reputation,' wrote some wanker of no importance at the Independent when reviewing Chibnall and McFarlane's book upon its release. 'The image that probably springs to mind is of a low-budget second feature shot in crummy, second-rate studios, featuring actors you've never heard of and with scenery that looks as if it will fall down any minute.' 

For those interested in the subject, as well as Chibnall and McFarlane's books, this blogger also recommends Laura Mayne's essay Whatever Happened To The British B-movie? Micro-Budget Film-Making & The Death Of The One-Hour Supporting Feature In The Early 1960s which you can find here and Vic Pratt's B Pictures: Second Feature, But Not Necessarily Second-Best, which is online here. 'With film companies increasingly devoting their resources to stand-alone "quality" releases and television replacing the cinema as the cheap entertainment of choice, production of supporting features dwindled towards the end of the 1960s as the British film industry began a slow decline,' writes Pratt. 'The "double bill" and the supporting programme (increasingly using cheap travelogues, or recycling films of previous years) lingered on, but by the lean times of the 1980s, following the Conservative Government's removal of The Eady Levy ... the era of the supporting programme - and with it the British B picture - was already fading into memory.'