Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I, and :Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II, and :Columbia Classics Bad Girls of Film Noir Volume 1, and :Columbia Classics Bad Girls of Film Noir Volume 2 (review)

There has long been a debate about what constitutes a B film and when it ceased to exist as a definable category. Much like the debates surrounding any film genre, movement, or historical periodization, its boundaries are elastic. Some scholars contend, for instance, that the B film is restricted to the Hollywood studio era and ended as an industrial practice with the Paramount Decree of 1948. Others limit the practice to the small Poverty Row studios, such as Republic, Monogram, and PRC, that relied on the B film to provide product to small, independent theaters. The problem of defining the B film is exacerbated when it is combined with the concept of film noir because both terms are accompanied by their own critical baggage. James Naremore defines B films noirs as “liminal products [that] occupy a borderland between generic thrillers and art movies.”¹ Naremore’s use of the term liminal seems especially appropriate as the category of film noir is continually expanding year to year, depending on either academic scholarship or DVD marketing strategies. Andrew Sarris further observes that “a disproportionate number of fondly remembered B pictures fall into the general category of the film noir. Somehow even mediocrity can become majestic when it is coupled with death.”² The eighteen films in the recently released Columbia film noir DVD collections exemplify the majesty of mediocrity as it was developed at Columbia Studios in the 1950s. They also show how the B film noir was able to flourish in postwar Hollywood as an economic product that capitalized on crime and topical events.

One of the advantages that Columbia had in the post–Paramount Decree era was its status as a horizontally integrated minor studio. Because it had no exhibition venues to divest, it could adapt more easily to the changing economic environment. Columbia had been a prolific producer of B films, serials, and short subjects in the studio era. It was able to strategize by producing one or two A pictures, depending on finances in a given year, but the majority of its annual output consisted of B westerns, series, and short subjects. Harry and Jack Cohn once said of their business philosophy, “[We] want one good picture a year. That’s [our] policy . . . and [we] won’t let an exhibitor have it unless he takes the bread-and-butter product, the Boston Blackies, the Blondies, the low budget westerns and the rest of the junk we make.”³

In the 1950s, Jack Cohn began to look more to independent production as a source for annual product, thereby diverting production costs to larger-budgeted prestige films. The production strategy of one or two big-budgeted features supplemented by more modestly budgeted productions (generally forty films a year) continued. During the 1950s, some of Columbia’s award-winning films included From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). But the majority of their output consisted of bread-and-butter films such as Slaves of Babylon (1953), The Law vs. Billy the Kid (1954), and Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) and many of the films contained in the Columbia noir collections. Sony had already begun marketing Columbia’s postwar bread-and-butter product with the release of such DVD collections as the Sam Katzman: Icons of Horror collection, the William Castle collection, and the entire short subjects of the Three Stooges. It has now grouped together a disparate number of films in four separate collections under the aegis of noir. What the Sony’s Columbia noir collections reveal is...