Poverty Row

Right.

And I'm sorry, just to confirm, Columbia Pictures was Poverty Row and not Universal?

Correct.

[laughs] Yeah.

I, I think that all depends on how they started.

Correct.

If you start a company with success, not Poverty Row.

[laughs]

He directed a lot of B-movies.

and he kind of got exiled, and probably more, there's very, probably a little more to the story, but basically he had an affair with a studio head's wife, and that kind of got him exiled, and And he ended up in B-movie territory forever, what they call Poverty Row.

And this film was produced by PRC Productions, which stands for Poverty Row.

But anyway, this is an outstanding noir.

and a guy gets involved, not with a murder, but somebody dies while he's in the car with him, and he's worried that he's going to get pinned for murder, and so the whole thing revolves around trying to get out of state and get to California where it can be maybe a safe haven and maybe he won't get caught.

The picture was written by John T. Neville and based on a story by George Bricker.

It was produced by Producers Releasing Corporation, better known as PRC, and part of a number of production companies at the time that were referred to as Poverty Row.

This meaning they were located in the low-rent district of Hollywood, and would create productions on a shoestring budget.

PRC would be responsible for distributing a slew of low-budget B-movies from 1939 until 1947 that never cost more than $100,000 to produce.

tucking them safely back into their coffin.

Fact one.

As mentioned earlier, studios of the poverty row district, such as PRC, would embrace cost-saving measures by any means possible.

In The Devil Bat, this is on full display from the start of the film, in which they flash a screen card that provides the entire backstory in a few sentences.

So it, it wasn't a long-lasting, you know, powerhouse that these were cranking these films out.

But you also have all the, uh, the smaller film studios, what are somewhat known as Poverty Row horrors, like Republic and Monogram, that were cranking movies out for literally pennies and trying to get their foot in the door.

And some of these I still find pretty damn entertaining today.

Now, those, what you were talking about, the earlier ones being kinda stagey, since these earlier ones, like from Monogram or Republic or PRC, they had no money to begin with, so they were a bit more stagey.

And they didn't have time to come up with anything creative over and over again.

So they were cranking them out fast and furious, but goddamn, some of them were pretty entertaining.

Yeah, and I think that's an important distinction for folks out there, because I th- I see sometimes people use the terms Poverty Row- And exploitation and B-movie kind of interchangeably, and they all had different meanings, right? Like, poverty row is specifically about these much smaller studios like Republic that spin up and build a business model.

'Cause it's worth pointing out that there's something fundamentally important to remember about, about how films played in those times, and that is that they were almost always double and triple features, right? So you'd sell a ticket to the theater, and it was like an evening of ac- of, of activity or a day of activity.

Kind of doing once more, kind of a, a...

You know, it came out a year after The Wolf Man, so it's kinda like the Poverty Row studio, PRC's version of The Wolf Man.

Uh, and interestingly, Glenn Strange, when he's not, uh, The Wolf Man in this or a werewolf-type creature, uh, he is kind of doing almost a Lenny-

Hmm

You know what? I didn't look deeply into that, but that sounds right.

And that, you know, Poverty Row was the nickname for these kind of B-level movie studios at the time.

And that's definitely a classic of Poverty Row cinema.

Yeah, Detour is a one of those kind of low budget noir classics that you should watch.

Yeah, that is a classic.

So tell us what we're going to talk about, sir.

Yeah, well, one of the things that I've been particularly diving into this year and I've kind of become, I just really enjoyed and I really got into is the films of this one Poverty Row company called Grand National Pictures.

They've become not only my favorite of the Poverty Row studios, But one of my favorite studios of the 30s, to me, and I'll make a few correlations as we talk, to me, they were sort of the cabin pictures of poverty roads.

where, like Canon Pictures, they started off doing exploitation movies, but there was a genuine class about them, and they had ambitions, and they had big ambitions to go even further with their company that it ultimately didn't happen, but Jesus Christ, most of the movie studios that start, they only last a little bit.

You know, the movie studio, these are the last 10 years, you know.

No, that was it.

Yeah.

a lot i just like these kind of movies i'm really into 30s movies and i have a particular and i like all types of 30s movies but but i also i really do have a particular fondness for the poverty row studio b title films and uh and then once i had this kind of start understanding that there was a um a personality particularly

Bela returned as Igor in The Ghost of Frankenstein and ultimately appeared as the monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.

But by the late 40s, Lugosi was hopelessly typecast in Poverty Row horror spoofs.

Ugh.

Let's just call a spade a spade.

Yes

... has put together, uh, a small retrospective of a Poverty Row, uh, studio called Grand National Pictures, um, that was active for a few brief years in the '30s, and I know he's really hot and excited about all these movies.

And any time he's this excited to be sharing these new discoveries with people, I am fucking excited.

I know we talked about this extensively with, like, the William Beaudine films that played at both the New Beverly, and Video Archives, and The Vista this year.

So I can't wait for this series to get announced, and the titles.

And, you know, if we, if we can make it work, we'd love to maybe...

It'd be wonderful to talk to Quentin about Grand National Pictures and get him on the show talking about his love for this, uh, Poverty Row studio.

I'd be very curious to hear him talk about it.