For today’s moviegoers, a film must attain the status of a special event to command attention; there’s not much of a regular moviegoing public anymore. Audiences of the 1930s and ’40s, lacking the alternative of television, were less demanding. They went to films for routine entertainment, and could be satisfied by cheaply made westerns and horror films that remained within the conventions of their genres. Such films were provided by a group of smaller Hollywood studios that specialized in turning out low-budget fare and that became known collectively as “poverty row.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Lacking surplus cast and sets, directors turned to pacing to move their stories along. Viewers of the taut noir mystery The Trespasser, which starts out as a comedy set in a newspaper office and ends up as a drama about book forging, will have trouble finding a wasted scene in its 71 minutes. “Those that are well done tell their stories so succinctly and so neatly that audiences today used to the very, very padded two-hour TV films and very, very self-indulgent contemporary films will be surprised at how well good stories can be told, albeit simply, in a one-hour framework,” says Everson.
Amazingly, these films were made as late as the 1940s for budgets as low as $20,000. Using minimal sets mixed with painted backdrops, the directors and their cinematographers often made masterful use of the mobile camera and sparse, suggestive lighting to create an illusion of space where there was none. In Strangler of the Swamp, one of two films in the series directed by German emigre Frank Wisbar, the swamp set is quite small. Light and fog create an illusion of depth, but they cannot hide the fact that the same dead logs are seen again and again. Yet the repeated return to the same set seems appropriate to the quirkily obsessive narrative, and Wisbar’s debt to German expressionist filmmaking is evident in some stylishly fluid camera movements.
Some of these films also give viewers the opportunity to see “top directors on the way down and new directors on the way up,” says Everson. Joseph H. Lewis’s Minstrel Man makes frequent use of stylized imagery–several shots are framed by a stair banister–that anticipates the cinematic flair of his later films. Similarly, Someone to Remember, by Robert Siodmak, who would soon be directing haunting films noirs such as The Spiral Staircase, is a well constructed drama; notice the strikingly tight shot of students grouped around the older woman’s bed near the end.
