Blu-ray Review: In the Shadow of Hollywood: Highlights from Poverty Row

This set gives four long-neglected Poverty Row films the kind of tender loving care typically reserved for major studio releases.

In the Shadow of HollywoodDisparagingly referred to as Poverty Row, the short-lived B-movie studios that operated independent of Hollywood’s Big Eight from the 1920s through the early ’50s, produced a wide array of genre films designed to fill the second half of double bills. These studios—Republic Pictures, Monograms Pictures, and Liberty Pictures, among others, many of whom rose to prominence during the Depression—operated on shoestring budgets and miniscule profit margins, necessitating short shooting schedules and minimal rehearsal time.

As most of these studios didn’t even own their own studio space, productions would often rent locations by the day, even further intensifying the pressures to shoot fast and cheap. If the B movies churned out by the major studios were operating with the scraps left over from their big-budget productions, Poverty Row studios were operating on mere crumbs, regularly making films for at least 10 to 20 times less money than the average Hollywood budget.

Because of these limitations, sets were usually barely adorned, and the films were often marked by stiff performances, clumsy pacing, and hackneyed plots. Their runtimes also rarely exceeded 80 minutes. But these challenging conditions also gave filmmakers the freedom to experiment and tackle more taboo subjects that the major studios would never have allowed at the height of the Production Code era. Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour is certainly the most famously successful example of this, and for good reason, but many other Poverty Row films exhibit a freshness and alluring strangeness that resulted from filmmakers innovating on the fly and trying to capture their audience’s attention with little means at their disposal.

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Flicker Alley’s In the Shadow of Hollywood: Highlights from Poverty Row serves up a wonderful sampling of four such films, including a morality tale, a newspaper melodrama, a proto-noir, and a tale of twisted revenge. The first of these, Chester Erskine’s Murder (also known as Call It Murder), is steeped in the sort of humanist, socially conscious drama that was popular between the two World Wars. And while it’s quite heavy-handed in its moralizing approach to the death penalty, it has an economy of storytelling that’s quite impressive.

One scene intercuts shots of recently convicted killer Ethel (Helen Flint) feverishly pacing in her cell with shots of jury foreman Edward (O.P. Heggie) plagued by doubts as he nervously walks around his living room. In another sequence, Edward’s troubled daughter, Stella (Sidney Fox), tries to stop her boyfriend, Gar (Humphrey Bogart), from heading out on a dangerous job. As he leaves the house, she moves off screen, visible only in a reflection in a mirror on the far wall, succinctly highlighting her sudden sense of isolation and despair. Poverty Row films were known for such clever visual shorthand—the kind of aesthetic inventiveness that wasn’t fully integrated into Hollywood filmmaking until the 1940s, and which briskly propels the narrative forward without needless exposition, or, in many cases, even dialogue.

Memorable moments like these abound in the other films included in this set. In John H. Auer’s The Crime of Dr. Crespi, there’s a downright haunting scene in which the vengeful doctor played to devilish perfection by Erich von Stroheim rhythmically pounds his fist and pen on his desk as a woman ethereally whispers in voiceover, “Forgive…and…forget.” And Phil Rosen’s Woman in the Dark is full of surrealist flourishes that you typically don’t see in Hollywood productions from the ’30s. Rosen gives his protagonist (Ralph Bellamy) an almost angelic aura as he puffs on a cigarette as the object of his desire, Louise (Fay Wray), falls asleep in the back seat of his broken-down car. These films, while far from perfect, go a long way to proving the maxim that necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

Image/Sound

All four films have been newly restored from archival 35mm material and look wonderful in high definition. There’s occasionally some light flickering or signs of damage, and the contrast ratios leave a bit to be desired, particularly in The Crime of Dr. Crespi, where parts of a delightfully morbid scene between the doctor and the patient whom he’s temporarily paralyzed are so dark that it’s impossible to make out facial expressions, even in close-up. But for the most part, the image quality is sharp and detailed and there’s a healthy and even grain distribution that preserves the pleasingly soft texture of the 35mm. The audio is more than serviceable, especially considering that these films were all shot in the early sound era and on the cheap, and the dialogue is clean and hisses and pops are kept to a minimum.

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Extras

Flicker Alley has included newly recorded audio commentaries for each film. In her commentary on Call It Murder, author and film scholar Leah Alridge provides an in-depth aesthetic analysis, focusing much of her attention on the film’s clever, efficient camerawork, framing, and compositions. The other three tracks are equally compelling but lean more toward historical analysis, serving up historical backgrounds of many of the actors and directors involved and shedding light into the financial and operational realities of Poverty Row productions. The set also comes with a handsome booklet, with full page stills and a lengthy piece by historian and restorer Jan-Christopher Horak that gives a nice overview of the history of these studios and how each of the four films in the set came into being.

Overall

Flicker Alley’s In the Shadow of Hollywood gives four long-neglected Poverty Row films the kind of tender loving care typically reserved for major studio releases.

Score: 
 Cast: Sidney Fox, O.P. Heggie, Henry Hull, Margaret Wycherly, Humphrey Bogart, Peggy Shannon, Russell Hopton, Claude Gillingwater, Edwin Maxwell, Fay Wray, Ralph Bellamy, Melvyn Douglas, Erich von Stroheim, Harriet Russell, Dwight Frye  Director: Chester Erskine, Anton Lorenze, Phil Rosen, John H. Auer  Screenwriter: Chester Erskine, Harry Chandlee, Douglas W. Churchill, F. McGrew Willis, Sada Cowan, Lou Goldberg, O.P. Heggie  Distributor: Flicker Alley  Running Time: 250 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1934 - 1935  Release Date: November 2, 2021  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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