British B-movies

[donna]

Originally Posted by julian_craster All the fun of the fleapit Once upon a time, you could stroll into a cinema and enjoy a cheap yet thrilling pleasure we're now denied: the British B-movie. Matthew Sweet looks back on a low-budget golden age Friday March 14, 2008 The Guardian All the fun of the fleapit | Features | guardian.co.uk Film These days, every movie has to be an event - even when everyone who made it and promoted it knows it's a complete non-event. You see the billboards and the ads. You read the puff-pieces by the PR company's tame hacks. You watch the red-carpet premiere on TV. You take the plastic model of the lead character out of your Kinder Egg. You are convinced, by the weight of all this material, that missing out on the experience of seeing the film would be an act of cultural irresponsibility, like failing to notice who won the Republican nomination for the presidency of the US. So you pay the best part of a tenner to be part of it all - and sit in the gloom assuaging your disappointment with a £3.99 box of popcorn. And then, six months later, you buy the DVD. Article continues There was a time when people went on blind dates with movies; when you turned up at the cinema, just as Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson do in Brief Encounter, took your place in the fuggy dark and waited to see what the management would throw at you. Not just the main feature, but a whole package of supplementary material: newsreel, animation, maybe a live musical performance, and the ne plus ultra of modest, hypeless, unpretentious entertainment - the British B-movie. For most of the last century, the B-movie gave the British cinema-going public something for nothing. Often it wasn't much: a crime flick about a slow robbery conducted in an office lined with box-files; a documentary about the East Coast Railway; a thriller with the name of Spencer Teakle above the credits, or some other North American nobody, in the unlikely hope of selling the picture across the pond. They were films that British audiences watched, enjoyed and left behind, never expecting to see again. And yet, the cheapness and the marginality of these films is now the very thing that makes them seem so rich. In the past year, I've watched hundreds of the things, and come to love their bargain-bucket pleasures. I've seen Joan Crawford playing light orchestral music to the missing link in Trog. I've seen Harry H Corbett in a slippery black toupee and beer-bottle specs, murdering his way through 1950s Soho in Cover Girl Killer. I've seen Jill Esmond, the first Mrs Laurence Olivier, as the crusading heroine of Private Information, on a mission to make her local council concede the shortcomings of the sewage system under her brand new postwar housing estate. ("The subterranean pipe-joints are insecure!" is her battle cry.) I've seen an intoxicatingly low-key thriller called Smokescreen (made to support the Elvis musical Roustabout), which stars Peter Vaughan as an insurance investigator sniffing around a dodgy claim for a Hillman Imp that trundled off Beachy Head. I've seen an S&M scene in which a very young and tightly dinner-jacketed Johnny Mills writhes on the sofa under the whip-hand of his old dad. (The film is The Lash. It was made for a few thousand quid in 1934, and it preaches the morality of an earlier age: that moral recuperation is only a thrashing away.) Pictures at the bottom of the bill offered diversions that were substantially different from the movies they supported. They were free to deal with subjects beneath the dignity or the notice of expensive films - and to show us a picture of this country that now seems more shabbily accurate that the glossed-up world you're sold in contemporaneous A-films. Observe, say, 1950s Britain through its top-of-the-bill films and it emerges as a land populated by pipe-smoking, twentysomething men who drive vintage Bentleys, usually with Muriel Pavlow in the back. Explore it from the bottom of the bill and you'll encounter something different: tracts of featureless industrial estates, a world in which Wolseley police cars clatter under railway bridges in Croydon and mid-price actors occupy frowsty suburban drags. It is threadbare, unspectacular territory, where compromised people spend their time committing adultery and double-crossing each other, often while drinking pre-mixed American cocktails. There is, for instance, no UK A-picture comparable to Marilyn (1953), in which Sandra Dorne - the poor producer's Diana Dors - plays the libidinous wife of a middle-aged service station owner in a drama that's like Zola transplanted to the side of a B-road in Berkshire. Oblivious to the passion of her lesbian housemaid, she begins an affair with Maxwell Reed, a grease-smeared sex monkey her husband has foolishly employed to work the pumps. But this is just one step on the road towards her ultimate ambition - to transform their grim little transport caff into an upscale martini bar. Naturally, it all ends in tears and murder and retribution. But you get the impression that this cheap little film - and many others like it from the 1950s - are channelling something fundamental to the postwar British experience. Like Britain itself, the B-movie could not afford to realise its dreams and fantasies, and so turned frustrated desire into one of its main sources of inspiration. This artistic and financial pragmatism bred its own species of producer. Men such as Herman Cohen, who, for the 1960s monster flick Konga, secured permission to close Croydon High Street and stage a battle between the British army and a giant gorilla - thanks to the gift of a colour television set, sent round to the chief constable. Men such as Edwin J Fancey, a razor-sharp talent-spotter who gave Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan their first film roles, shot a drama of the Canadian Rockies a few miles outside Glasgow, and persuaded unwilling crew members to work overtime by threatening to punch them in the face. Fancey's reputation was a global one: when reporters asked Charlie Chaplin why he had come to visit England in the 1950s, he replied, "To sue that bastard EJ Fancey." (Fancey, it seems, had been distributing Chaplin's films without the proper permissions.) Fanceyan wiliness was absolutely necessary, however, to make a useful profit from B-movies. Budgets were so modest that actors were usually asked to supply their own costumes. But they could sometimes turn that to their own advantage. Terence Longdon, the suave leading man of dozens of low-budget British features, remembers the grumbling and kerfuffle on the set of Clash By Night when Peter Sallis - cast, incidentally, as a pyromaniac kiddie-fiddler - turned up on the first day of shooting in an unnaturally white rollneck jumper. In the finished film, the jumper is the luminous centre of every shot in which Sallis appears, allowing him to steal the picture from under the noses of his colleagues. Television now supplies us with throwaway drama. We will never again see films as modest as Clash By Night or Marilyn or Private Information. And that's because cinema is not the casual pleasure it was for much of the 20th century. It is no longer part of the diurnal rhythm of our national life, when the act of spending a few hours in the cheap seats at the Regal required as little forethought as the act of writing home or eating fish on Friday. Now, huge swathes of the population simply don't go. And when was the last time you dispensed with the astrological side of a night at the pictures: the totting-up of critical stars, the divination of screening-times, the observation of the trajectories of actors and directors? No, I can't remember either. But the B-movies that survive are a sweet reminder of the time when going to the pictures wasn't a treat. In Brief Encounter, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson settle into their seats at the Carnforth fleapit and, through the miasma produced by an audience sucking busily at their Capstan filters, they receive a pleasant surprise: a Donald Duck cartoon. Celia watches and laughs and coos in praise of his "dreadful energy and his blind frustrated rages". Then the main feature looms up. They don't like the look of it. So they get up and leave the cinema. They don't ask for their money back. They don't moan about how they've been ripped off. They just go, easily and casually. I think I envy them for that. From B-movies to A-list The stars who emerged from the British B-movie circuit Vivien Leigh Four years before she snogged Clark Gable in the lustrous Technicolor expanses of Gone With the Wind, Vivien Leigh got her first break in a couple of B-movies for Paramount British: The Village Squire and Gentleman's Agreement. The producer who spotted her, Anthony Havelock Allan, had a motto, "the best of everything at the lowest possible price", and, in 1935, Leigh fit the bill. In later years, she flatly denied that her services had ever been so cheap. Errol Flynn Before his screen test at Teddington studios, Errol Flynn borrowed a fiver from a friend to buy himself a secondhand sports jacket. He went into the audition a nobody from Tasmania and came out a star - or at least an actor with a leading part in an inexpensive thriller, set in Monte Carlo but shot entirely in south-west London. A few months later, Warner Brothers shipped him to Hollywood. In four years' time, he was squeezing into Robin Hood's tights - and sent a cheque for a fiver (plus interest) across the Atlantic. David Lean The future director of Lawrence of Arabia learned the proper use of a razor blade while cutting bottom-of-the-bill flicks in the 1930s. One sharp little number he edited is Dangerous Ground, a thriller from 1934 in which the killer is caught by the clever use of a concealed Dictaphone. You sense the quality from the opening scene, in which a gang of policemen swarm into a drinking den in the depths of Deptford and cheerfully beat up a suspect. (We're not supposed to disapprove.) John Mills In the 1930s, directors of supporting features found an enthusiastic star in little Johnny Mills, even if they did have to lay him on a sofa or put him on a flight of stairs during love scenes with actresses who were, inevitably, rather taller. He is the chirpy juvenile lead in a cheap little mystery called The Ghost Camera, but his finest B-movie hour comes in The Lash, in which he plays a permanently sloshed posh boy who spends too much time at the club, and then gets his girlfriend into one. Margaret Rutherford That Alpine swoop of hair, the great angler-fish jaw, the eyes narrowed in indignation: Margaret Rutherford is perhaps our greatest character star. She learned her shtick in a series of modest little pictures shot at Twickenham studios in the 1930s. Maybe the parts were a bit more various, too, than they later became. In Dusty Ermine, she plays the head of a forgery gang; in Beauty and the Barge, she gets a love scene. Jack Hawkins Fresh-faced and careful to insert that obligatory extra "y" between the first and second letters of the word "darling", Jack Hawkins was a well-spoken, heroic lead in dozens of modestly priced interwar movies. The most intoxicatingly odd is called A Shot in the Dark, in which he plays a man who believes he may have killed the local vicar by accidentally pushing him into a pit of slime. Fortunately, the man is saved from death by some sports equipment. "It was lucky," one of his fellow actors remarks, "that your golf clubs wedged across it." · Matthew Sweet's documentary Truly, Madly, Cheaply: British B-Movies will be broadcast on BBC4 in June

why do most stories about the stars make out they came from poor backgrounds most didnt, and Errol Flynn was one of them as you can read here, he was also gt grandson five times removed of Fletcher christian.
Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn was born in the British Commonwealth seaport of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia on June 20, 1909 to Marelle Young and Theodore Thomas Flynn. His father, a distinguished marine biologist, introduced him to the sea at a very young age. Flynn always said the one true love of his life was the ocean. As a child, he excelled in athletics but never chose to be an academic. He attended a number of private schools, spending only a short time at each. By the time he turned twenty, Flynn had already traveled to Sydney, Australia and New Guinea and had attempted several jobs, none lasting more than a few months. Finally, he bought a boat, The Sirocco, and sailed back to New Guinea where he became the manager of a tobacco plantation and wrote for The Sydney Bulletin about life in New Guinea.

[CaptainWaggett]

Looks like the BBC4 B-movie season is starting next Saturday - I've spotted these in the schedules -

The Last Journey (1936)
Director Bernard Vorhaus Actors Godfrey Tearle Hugh Williams Judy Gunn Mickey Brantford Julien Mitchell Olga Lindo Michael Hogan, Frank Pettingell Eliot Makeham Eve Gray
Sat 21st June 19:00-20:00 on BBC4 (60m)

The Black Rider (1954)Director(s): Wolf Rilla Starring... Jimmy Hanley Rona Anderson Leslie Dwyer & co.
Sun 22nd June 20:00-21:00 on BBC4 (60m)

Cover Girl Killer (1959)Director(s): Terry Bishop Starring... Harry H Corbett Felicity Young Spencer Teakle & co.
Sun 22nd June 21:00-22:05 on BBC4 (65m)


Marilyn (1953)Director(s): Wolf Rilla Starring... Sandra Dorne Leslie Dwyer Maxwell Reed & co.
Mon 23rd June 22:00-23:05 on BBC4 (65m)

[DB7]

Three good ones there, a Vorhaus and a couple of Butcher's, not seen the fourth with Maxwell but I can please Bats by rectifying that.

Another Vorhaus film, Money for Speed, is showing at the BFI as part of the Lean retrospective and it's a shame it's so far asb I'd have liked to have seen that.

[CaptainWaggett]

Originally Posted by DB7 Three good ones there, a Vorhaus and a couple of Butcher's, not seen the fourth with Maxwell but I can please Bats by rectifying that. Another Vorhaus film, Money for Speed, is showing at the BFI as part of the Lean retrospective and it's a shame it's so far asb I'd have liked to have seen that.

I'm seeing that on Monday (in a double bill with the Ghost Camera with young Johnny Mills). They're starting the season with Michael Powell's Lazybones this coming Saturday (and a Matthew Sweet documentary) so it looks very promising so fay

[batman]

Originally Posted by DB7 Three good ones there, a Vorhaus and a couple of Butcher's, not seen the fourth with Maxwell but I can please Bats by rectifying that.

It's one of Max's better films even though the plot is a rip-off of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Max gives a good performance as do the rest of the cast, especially Leslie Dwyer in his miserable old git mode. Sandra Dorne is a fine femme fatale and Ferdy Mayne is good as the 'spiv' who turns up to ruffle Max's feathers. I think you'll enjoy it, it has a wonderfully seedy feel to it and the direction is top-notch.

[batman]

Originally Posted by DB7 Three good ones there, a Vorhaus and a couple of Butcher's, not seen the fourth with Maxwell but I can please Bats by rectifying that.

The Last Journey is great and IMHO better than the more celebrated Ghost Camera. I enjoyed The Black Rider mainly because of the excellent location shooting and Cover Girl Killer is a hoot .... escpecially Harry H Corbett's specs!

A good start to the season.

[Windthrop]

It is often low-budget land and the most commercial films which show aspects of society which tell so much about a given cultural epoch. The films which survive with prestige (not always the most popular) sometimes sideline un-comfortable truths abouta given era.

[CaptainWaggett]

The season kicks off this Saturday with Lazybones - not one of Michael Powell's best quota quickies but probably the quickest of all of them - it was shot at night at Twickenham studios after Ian Hunter had finished at the theatre.

[julian_craster]

I am a bit concerned that Matthew Sweet is defining 'B' films a bit too widely.......in the 1950s such films were usually budgeted at between £15, 000 and £25, 000 (which was the fixed rate that the circuits paid for them....) , were in B/W, and had a running time of between 25mins (as with the 'Scotland Yard' series) and 70 minutes . Anything more than this and it becomes a co-feature ! (costing around £80,000 + ) . By this criteria KONGA (released top of the bill with THE HELLFIRE CLUB) and TROG (with Joan Crawford, whose fee would eat up the entire budget...) are *not* B films ! The last British B films that fit my definition were made in 1964......so PSYCOMANIA (the 1970s biker horror film) does not count in my book.
Surprisingly DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954) was released top of the bill on the Odeon circuit (see Allen Eyles book) , so what are your definitions of a British ' B' film ?

[orpheum]

I was lucky enough to be at the NFT to see Bernard Vorhaus give a brief talk about the making of the last journey.I recall him saying that they got all the shots of the railways over the course of one weekend.they used to work very quickly at Twickenham under Julius Hagen.

[MrT]

Good though all these films are, does anyone else feel a little bit of disappointment in the selection of titles announced so far? All of these films already circulate in collectors' hands having had two or more tv screenings over the years - even the rarest "Marilyn" was shown on the cable channel Bravo in the 90s. Is there some fiendish plot out there not to release any more titles - maybe to stop them ending up as bootleg dvd's on ebay? Is there any other reason why are we not seeing any of the real rarities held in the BFI archives?

Mike (MrT)

[CaptainWaggett]

I would very much doubt if they have any hidden agenda or have checked the cable channels schedules or Ebay listings - presumably they are limited by what's in the BBC vaults and what Matthew Sweet is interested in. I have only seen one of the films so far listed and would think that there's only a very tiny number of collectors who have seen them all and I shouldn't think BBC4's priority is completely anyone's collection. Personally I'm just pleased to see any b/w films on tv that aren't the usual 40 or so shown endlessly on Film 4.

I'm really looking forward to the season.

[Fellwanderer]

Originally Posted by CaptainWaggett I would very much doubt if they have any hidden agenda or have checked the cable channels schedules or Ebay listings - presumably they are limited by what's in the BBC vaults and what Matthew Sweet is interested in. I have only seen one of the films so far listed and would think that there's only a very tiny number of collectors who have seen them all and I shouldn't think BBC4's priority is completely anyone's collection. Personally I'm just pleased to see any b/w films on tv that aren't the usual 40 or so shown endlessly on Film 4. I'm really looking forward to the season.

I'm in full agreement with the good CaptainW. I haven't seen any of the four so am looking forward to a bit of a treat.

[1stas]

While we are on the subject of B-movies, does any one remember the Scala cinemas, there was one just off the Tottenham Court Road and another in King's Cross, both in London?
The TCR one is long gone and the KC one was closed down when the film Clockwork Orange was shown, although it had been banned by Kubrick. It is now a snooker club.
Anyway, I remember they used to show all night B-movies, you would go in about 11 pm and come out at about 6 am the next morning, blinking away! The funny thing was, the ticket price included about 6 films and also around about 3 am a little old lady would come round with a squeaky tea trolley offering everyone a free cup of tea!
Over the years, (it was 70's/80's) I saw a great many B-movies and drank a lot of tea!

[dremble wedge]

Originally Posted by 1stas While we are on the subject of B-movies, does any one remember the Scala cinemas, there was one just off the Tottenham Court Road and another in King's Cross, both in London? The TCR one is long gone and the KC one was closed down when the film Clockwork Orange was shown, although it had been banned by Kubrick. It is now a snooker club. Anyway, I remember they used to show all night B-movies, you would go in about 11 pm and come out at about 6 am the next morning, blinking away! The funny thing was, the ticket price included about 6 films and also around about 3 am a little old lady would come round with a squeaky tea trolley offering everyone a free cup of tea! Over the years, (it was 70's/80's) I saw a great many B-movies and drank a lot of tea!

I only went a couple of times but the Scala was a thing of wonder