the attention of major newspapers and magazines, and ultimately winning several Academy Awards.
In purely budgetary terms, many of the thrillers that historians describe as B or 'underground' pictures were actually 'intermediates' like The Informer, specifically designed to gain a certain amount of critical attention and larger profits from percentage-deal bookings in the cities. These productions typically offered a good deal of sex and violence, along with implicit claims to artistic significance and social realism, usually signified by a mixture of expressionist and documentary techniques. They were shot on dark streets or on inexpensive sets, but they also featured well-known actors from the second tier of the Hollywood star system. Sometimes they had enough impact to become 'sleepers' and make a good deal of money. One of the most successful instances of the strategy is T-Men (1947), a police procedural about government undercover agents working to crack the 'Shanghai Paper Case.' This film was distributed by Eagle-Lion, a newly formed company owned by J. Arthur Rank and headed by Brian Foy, who had formerly been in charge of the B-picture unit at Warner. It used the sound stages and physical plant of PRC, one of the leading producers of cheap genre movies in Hollywood, and it employed director Anthony Mann and photographer John Alton because they were both veterans of low-budget action pictures at Republic. T-Men was nevertheless provided with a $450,000 budget and a reasonable chance to compete in the A-picture marketplace. Alton, who had always regarded himself as an artist rather than a Hollywood roughneck, responded with a dynamic, wide-angle photography that made especially effective use of expensive locations and night-for-night situations in Detroit and Los Angeles. His brilliant imagery was enhanced by Mann's direction and by the surprisingly tough performance of Dennis O'Keefe, who also specialized in light comedy and low-budget musicals. As a result, the film attracted the interest of critics and trade reporters. Life magazine gave T- Men a full-scale ''Movie of the Week' analysis, and commentators in Newsweek and other journals praised it for injecting 'realism' into a formulaic plot. (This realism consisted largely of devices borrowed from the successful postwar productions of Louis de Rochemont at Twentieth-Century Fox: newsreel-style narration, location photography, and official cooperation from a U.S. government agency.) Ultimately, the film made $1.6 million at the box officea profit that would have been impossible under B-picture rental arrangements. 13
T-Men arrived at the very end of the double feature era, when movie attendance was shrinking, when the studios were reorganizing, and when independent production companies were becoming an industry trend. For a while, its success helped to secure a place in the marker for atmospheric, medium-budget thrillers that slightly raised the level of screen violence and perversity. RKO had long specialized in such films, and in the early 1950s Republic and Monogram (which changed its name to Allied Artists) tried to follow suit. Not surprisingly, Mann and Alton were soon hired by Dore Schary at MGMwhere, together or separately, they made such modest but technically sophisticated films as Border Incident (1949), Side Street (1949), and Mystery Street (1950). From that point onward, they were free of Poverty Row, and their pictures were seldom rented at a flat rate. Much the same thing could be said of the roughly contemporary work of Samuel Fuller, Jacques Tourneur, and Joseph H. Lewis, who are often inaccurately described as B-picture auteurs. When critics analyze Lewis's career, for example, they barely mention his Bowery Boys films at Monogram in 1940 to 1941, his war movies and westerns at PRC in 1942 to 1944, or his contribution to the Falcon series at RKO in 1945; instead, they concentrate on My Name Is Julia Ross (1946), Gun Crazy (1950), and The Big Combo (1955). These last films were mid-level productions from the era when the Poverty Row system was changing or dying out, and they were all reviewed in the national press.14 Strictly speaking, they belong not to the world of B pictures but to the more amorphous realm of what Manny Farber described as 'faceless' or 'half-polished' melodramas, most of which did not become objects of critical fascination until long after they were released.
To see what film noir on a Poverty Row budget looked like, one needs to search out a truly obscure picture such as The Argyle Secrets (1948), an antifascist crime drama written and directed by Cyril Endfield and produced by the Film Classics Studio. The acting, set design, and photography in this movie are not much better than in the standard offering in a Saturday matinee, but the plot is reminiscent of Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon, with a couple of scenes from Thirty-Nine Steps tossed in for good measure. Throughout, the dialogue and narration are clever, and the action always moves swiftly. One episode is particularly memorable for its perversity: the protagonist (William Gargan), a tough newspaper reporter searching for the meaning of a rich man's last words, is captured by a gang of villains like the one in The Maltese Falcon and subjected to a slow, methodical beating. The torture scene is rendered in the form of an expressionist dream sequence, with the faces of the gang superimposed over the reporter's body and their voices speaking in rhythm with the sound of blows. Soon afterward, the bruised and bloody reporter awakens in a strange bedroom, where he is confronted by a femme fatale (Marjorie Lord). This lady offers him a chance to escape his captors by feigning an attack on her, and he willingly complies, taking an evident sexual pleasure in the job. 'It was a funny experience, choking a woman deliberately,' he says in his offscreen narration. 'I squeezed pretty hard, scuffing bruises at her throat to make it look good. I got so mixed up I didn't know what I was doing, and I stopped once and kissed her pretty hard.' Here and elsewhere, one gets the feeling that a movie designed for provincial audiences has been invaded with the dark ironies of big-city entertainment. Even so, The Argyle Secrets received no important bookings, and it was given only one reviewin Variety, which described it as 'okay supporting material' for double features. It therefore dropped from sight and has seldom been revived. 15
The most celebrated director of this sort of 'supporting' cinema is Edgar G. Ulmerwho, had he not existed, would probably need to be invented. A true aesthete of the lower depths, Ulmer seems to have taken a pleasure out of blending the sophisticated and the tawdry. He was in fact among the most talented of the many distinguished European emigres to Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s. While in Germany, he was a designer for Max Reinhardt; an assistant for F. W. Murnau, Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch; a codirector with Robert Siodmak onMenschen am Sontag; and a self-described 'art-obsessed' intellectual who felt an affinity with Bertolt Brecht and the Bauhaus. In America, however, he spent much of his time on Yiddish art films, two-bit westerns, instructional films for the Ford motor company, and exploitation movies with titles like Girls in Chains (1943). 'I knew [L. B.] Mayer very well,' he told Peter Bogdanovich, 'and I prided myself that he could never hire me!''16 At the peak of his career, he was dubbed 'the Capra of PRC,' which meant that he had his own crew and relative freedom at a sub-minor-league studio. His masterpiece, Detour (1945), is a genuinely cheap production, photographed in only six days, with a two-to-one shooting ratio, seven speaking parts, and a running time of a little over an hour. As far as I can determine, its only U.S. review was in Variety, which said that it was 'okay as a supporting dualer' (23 January 1946). It is nevertheless contemporary with the first group of Hollywood movies that the French described as American noir, and it can stand comparison with any of them.
Detour's script, by Martin Goldsmith, is reminiscent of James M. Cain's novels (immediately after the success of Double Indemnity, Ulmer wrote a script for PRC entitled Single Indemnity), but it also borrows from the doom-laden, slightly crazed fiction of Cornell Woolrich and Frederic Brown, and from the uncanny, twist-of-fate stories that were common on radio during the 1940s. In keeping with these sources, its mise-en-scene is distilled from the essence of hard-boiled cliche. Near the beginning, we see the protagonist, Al Roberts (Tom Neal), wearing a rumpled suit, a snap-brim hat, and a five-o'clock shadow, drinking coffee in a roadside diner just outside Reno. When a truck driver drops a nickel into the jukebox, Roberts's offscreen voice asks, 'Why was it always that rotten tune?' This leads to an obligatory flashback and to a bizarre tale of desire and death.
Like Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, Al blames his problems on destiny. The flashback begins by showing him in better days, playing a piano in a New York nightclub, where his girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) is the featured singer. Al seems to have talent, but when Sue moves to Los Angeles in hopes of becoming a star, he sinks into a black mood. At one point, working solo in the club, he performs a rather violent, boogie-woogie rendition of Brahms, for which he receives a meager tip. Soon afterward, he quits his job and hitchhikes westward. For all his travels, however, he goes nowhere. On the highway, he catches a ride in a flashy convertible driven by Charles Haskell (Edmund MacDonald), who exhibits an old dueling scar from his youth and a vicious scratch that he claims to have received quite recently from an angry woman. That night, while Al takes the
