The 1950s mark a significant change in the definition of the B movie. The transformation of the film industry due to court rulings that brought an end to many long-standing distribution practices as well as the challenge of television led to major changes in U.S. cinema at the exhibition level. These shifts signaled the eventual demise of the double feature that had defined much of the American moviegoing experience during Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. Even as the traditional bottom-of-the-bill second feature slowly disappeared, the term B movie was applied more broadly to the sort of inexpensive genre films that came out during the era, such as those produced to meet the demands of the burgeoning drive-in theater market.

Fadeout of the classic B

In 1948, a Supreme Court ruling in a federal antitrust suit against the leading Hollywood studios, the so-called Big Five, outlawed block booking and led to the divestiture of the majors' theater chains over the next few years. After barely inching forward in the 1930s, the average U.S. feature production cost had essentially doubled through the 1940s, reaching an average $1 million by the turn of the decade (the increase from 1940 to 1950 was 150 percent in simple terms, 93 percent after adjusting for inflation).Finler (2003), p. 42. With audiences draining away to television and other economic pressures forcing the studios to scale back production schedules, the Golden Age–style double feature began disappearing from American theaters.

At the beginning of the 1950s, most U.S. movie houses still programmed double features at least part of the time.Schatz (1999), p. 78. The major studios promoted the benefits of recycling, offering former headlining movies as second features in the place of traditional B films.Strawn (1974), p. 257. Their longer running time appears to have both accommodated and hastened the progressive abandonment of the traditional "variety program" of newsreel/cartoon/short preceding the feature presentations at many theaters. With television airing many classic Westerns as well as producing its own original Western series, the cinematic market for B oaters in particular was drying up.

The first prominent victim of the changing market was the Poverty Row studio Eagle-Lion, which released its last films in 1951. By 1953, the old Monogram brand had disappeared, the company having adopted the identity of its higher-end subsidiary, Allied Artists. The following year, Allied released Hollywood's last two B series Westerns, starring Wayne Morris: The Desperado in June and Two Guns and a Badge in September.Loy (2004), pp. 9–10; Reid (2005), pp. 53–54. As was not uncommon in series Westerns, Morris didn't play precisely the same character in the six B oaters he starred in for Allied Artists in 1953 and 1954. Even leaving aside the plots, the series nature of the films is evident from the credits: Vincent M. Fennelly produced all six pictures. Lewis D. Collins and Thomas Carr split directorial duties equally, each taking three. Daniel P. Ullman wrote four of the films. Three cinematographers each shot two of the films—in all three cases, one for each of the two directors. IMDb.com Power Search performed 12/30/06. Non-series B Westerns would continue to come out for a few more years, but Republic Pictures, long associated with cheap sagebrush sagas, was out of the filmmaking business by the end of the decade. In other genres, Universal maintained B series featuring Abbott and Costello (through 1955), Francis the Talking Mule (through 1956), and Ma and Pa Kettle (through 1957).Lev (2003), p. 205. Allied Artists kept its Bomba, the Jungle Boy series going through 1955; Allied's Bowery Boys finished their run in 1958—the end of the longest feature series in movie history (48 films, altogether) and the last B series from one of Hollywood's Golden Age studios.

The most B oriented of the Big Five, RKO Pictures, weakened by what one studio historian describes as its "systematic seven-year rape" by former owner Howard Hughes, abandoned the movie industry in 1957.Lasky (1989), p. 229. Hollywood's A product was getting longer—the top ten box-office releases of 1940 had averaged 112.5 minutes; the average length of 1955's top ten was 123.4.See Finler (2003), pp. 357–58, for top films. Finler lists The Country Girl as 1955, when it made most of its money, but it premiered in December 1954. The Seven Year Itch replaces it in this analysis (the two films happen to be virtually identical in length). In their modest way, the B's were following suit. The age of the hour-long feature film was now past; at 69 minutes, Two Guns and a Badge was about as short as Hollywood features ran. In sum, the Golden Age–style second feature was dying. B movie, however, continued to be used in a broader sense, referring to any low-budget genre film featuring relatively unheralded performers ("B actors"). The term retained its earlier suggestion that such movies relied on formulaic plots, "stock" character types, and simplistic action or unsophisticated comedy. At the same time, the realm of the B movie was becoming increasingly fertile territory for experimentation, both serious and outlandish.

Mutating genres Ida Lupino, well known as an actress, established herself as Hollywood's sole female director of the era. In short, low-budget pictures made for the production company she ran with her husband Collier Young, The Filmakers, Lupino explored virtually taboo subjects such as rape in 1950s Outrage (released by RKO) and 1953's self-explanatory The Bigamist (an entirely independent project). Her most famous directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), was another RKO release. Often referred to as the only classic film noir directed by a woman, it made a virtue of its small budget with an unusually intense focus on its three lead characters.See, e.g., Eddie Muller, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), p. 176.

That same year, RKO put out another historically notable film made at low cost and with an only faintly starry cast: the 85-minute-long Split Second comes to a head in a desert ghost town about to become a nuclear blast site, making it perhaps the first example of an "atomic noir." The most famous such movie, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), independently produced by Victor Saville and his Parklane Pictures company, typifies the persistently murky middle ground between the A and B picture. Film historian Richard Maltby identifies it as a "programmer capable of occupying either half of a neighbourhood theatre's double-bill [and] budgeted at approximately $400,000. [Its] distributor, United Artists, released around twenty-five programmers with production budgets between $100,000 and $400,000 in 1955. For UA, these movies served to spread the overhead costs of their distribution operation rather than to make profits in themselves."Maltby (2000). The film's length, 106 minutes, is A level, but its star, Ralph Meeker, had previously appeared in only one major film. It is based on an unequivocally pulpy source, one of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels, but is directed in a self-consciously aestheticized fashion by Robert Aldrich. The result is a brutal genre picture that chillingly evokes contemporary anxieties about what was often spoken of simply as the Bomb.

The fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, along with less expressible qualms about the effects of radioactive fallout from America's own atomic tests, energized many of the era's genre films. Science fiction, horror, and various hybrids of the two were now of central economic importance to the low-budget end of the business. Most down-market films of the type—like many of those produced by William Alland at Universal (e.g., Creature from the Black Lagoon ) and Sam Katzman at Columbia (e.g., It Came from Beneath the Sea )—provided little more than simple diversion.See Buhle and Wagner (2003), pp. 74–80, for Alland's efforts to make message-laden genre films. For the political implications of the Katzman-produced Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), see pp. 81–82. But these were genres whose fantastic nature could also be used as cover for mordant cultural observations often difficult to make in mainstream movies.

Two well-financed films of 1951, The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still, are often mentioned as vanguard examples, but scholar Richard Hodgens argues that they are beasts of a different sort: The Thing "proved that some money could be made by 'science fiction' that preyed on current fears symbolized crudely by any preposterous monster." Its fellow traveller was a thriller with a simplistic moral: "Earthlings, behave yourselves."Hodgens (1972), pp. 83, 84. The era's most provocative and unsettling fantasies were made for B-level money. Director Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), produced by Walter Wanger for $300,000 and released by Allied Artists, treats conformist pressures and the evil of banality in haunting, allegorical fashion.Lev (2003), pp. 186, 184; Braucort (1972), 75. Even the majors' genre mills at times came out with challenging films. Produced on a "trifling budget" by Katzman, The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957), "uses the physical transfer of the life force from one class to another as a metaphor for economic expropriation."Buhle and Wagner (2003), pp. 82, 83. Among the most disturbing was The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), written, directed, and produced by Bert I. Gordon. A "King Kong for the atomic age", it is both a monster movie that happens to depict the horrific effects of radiation exposure and "a ferocious cold-war fable [that] spins Korea, the army's obsessive secrecy, and America's post-war growth into one fantastic whole."Auty (1999), p. 24. See also Shapiro (2002), pp. 120–24.

AIP and Corman

The Amazing Colossal Man was released by a new company whose name was much bigger than its budgets. American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1956 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff in a reorganization of their American Releasing Corporation (ARC), soon became the leading U.S. studio devoted entirely to B-priced productions. American International helped keep the original-release double bill alive through paired packages of its films: these movies were low-budget, but the economic model was different from that of the traditional B movie—instead of a flat rate, they were rented out on a percentage basis, like A films.Strawn (1974), p. 259; Lev (2003), p. 206. I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) is perhaps the best known AIP film of the era. Guided by experienced genre writer-producer Herman Cohen, the movie starred a twenty-year-old Michael Landon. As its title suggests, AIP sought audiences not only with fantastic genre subjects, but also with new, teen-oriented angles. One exemplary film, Daddy-O (a.k.a. Out on Probation; 1958), sported the tagline "Alive!! With the Beat and the Heat of Today's Rock-N-Roll Generation!" If Hot Rod Gang (1958) worked, then why wouldn't hot rod horror? Result: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959). AIP is credited with having "led the way...in demographic exploitation, target marketing, and saturation booking, all of which would become standard procedure for the majors in planning and releasing their mass-market 'event' films" by the late 1970s.Cook (2000), p. 324. See also p. 171.