British Second Features/ Group 3

[Nico Rilla]

Hello all,



I wonder whether anybody has any good links to sites that can provide me with information about British second features and in particular GROUP 3.



Many thanks



Nico

[mysteriesofedgarwallace]

There are relatively few sites dedicated to second features.

These may be worth a look:--

WickedLady Scotland Yard Scales Of Justice Dinosaur Films Edgar Wallace

[DB7]

</div><div class='quotemain'>Nico Rilla:

Hello all,



I wonder whether anybody has any good links to sites that can provide me with information about British second features and in particular GROUP 3.

[/b]

John Grierson was producer at Group 3 during the 50s so you might find some info in his biography.

[DB7]

Here’s the Group 3 entry in the British Film Encyclopaedia.



Group 3 were a State-subsidised film company that survived from March 1951 until February 1956. Funded by the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC), the Labour administration intended the group to be a stepping stone for young film-makers. It was the third of the NFFC's group production schemes - the other two were co-financed by Rank and ABPC respectively - which all sought to combine producer independence, a continuous programme of production that would benefit from economies of scale and help achieve financial stability by cross-collateralising the films' revenues.



NFFC Managing Director John Lawrie and the group's chairman Michael Balcon, appointed John Grierson as managing director. The intention was to make story documentaries' which blended Documentary and fiction on budgets averaging £50,000. Unfortunately Grierson had no experience of the discipline of turning ideas into lively and coherent feature scripts. He was so slow starting that the unit's first film, Judgement Deferred (1951), was made by established director John Baxter, who was the group's production controller at their Southall Studios.



In 1954 Grierson resigned through illness and Lawrie and Balcon soon followed. By mid 1955, the NFFC realised that Group 3's type of middle-budget production was not suited to current exhibition patterns and that only one of its films, Conquest of Everest (1953), would be likely to recover its costs. The following year, having lost nearly half a million pounds, the NFFC sold the group off to become Beaconsfield Films Ltd.

[Nico Rilla]

Many thanks.



Nico Rilla