Attack of the Killer B's

I’ve always been fascinated with B movies of the 50s-70s, so I was really struck by a comment that Baumann makes in chapter 3. Talking about the rise of so-called prestige productions, he explains, “By the late 1940s audiences had come to expect the professionalism and craftsmanship of prestige productions in all films. ‘B’ quality entertainment could be had for free on television” (94).It’s a brief but interesting argument: since TV offered free but relatively low quality entertainment, one angle for Hollywood to take was to offer more high-quality stuff. I kept this comment in the back of my mind, and while I read Baumann describing the growing art world for Hollywood in the 50s and 60s, I couldn’t help but think about the growing industry of B movies that occurred during just this period. I want to suggest here that just as one segment of the filmgoing audience wanted relatively highbrow and experimental films like Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy, another group wanted lowbrow, cheap, exploitative movies like H.G. Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs or Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama.

What I’m pointing out is something actually fairly obvious: that despite Baumann’s triumphant description of the emergence of an art world for film in the 1960s, there was at the same time a very healthy schlock world for film that coexisted. What I would argue is that while highbrow audiences wanted highbrow films in the 60s, there was still a great demand for lowbrow films.

A comment Baumann makes later helps to explain the success of the 1950s or 1960s B movie. Again, it’s related to television. He explains Hollywood’s need to, again, give the audience something they couldn’t get from TV: “Hollywood needed to provide audiences with a rationale for choosing their product over television. Films needed to be sufficiently different so that their audiences had a reason for going out to theaters instead of what became the default option, staying in to watch television” (107). This point applies rather nicely to B movies, which almost by their very nature strive to offer audiences something they can’t get on TV. Exploitation pictures in general exploit sex or violence or else capitalize on a new trend. Roger Corman’s 1967 The Trip, for instance, was popular because LSD was all over the newspapers, having been criminalized in the previous year. This was, of course, a manner of content that couldn’t be seen on TV, and that’s much the case for most B movies, whether because they were too sexy, too bloody, or too edgy in terms of content.

My intervention here serves not to challenge Baumann or even to suggest that he’s “left something out.” Rather, I point to the success of B movies in order to illustrate that the great deal of changes that Baumann explains took place in the film industry during the 50s-60s created ripples that went in many different directions, some of which are within the scope of his project, and some of which aren’t. For instance, just as Bonnie and Clyde toyed with gangster-movie conventions and challenged the existing Code, Two Thousand Maniacs toyed with horror-film conventions and, because it was created by an independent director, evaded the code and was almost laughably bloody. The former’s much more notable today because it helped, presumably, legitimize the art world for Hollywood, but the latter, on close examination, is participating in similar processes and is swept up in the same exciting ebb and flow that took place in film during this era.