Death on the Cheap - The Lost B Movies of Film Noir

The B films, with a few notable exceptions, have largely been ignored. Arthur Lyons, who really knows his stuff, figured that the world didn't need to read again about Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, or Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott. Instead, he devotes his intelligent pen to helping us rediscover the B films, the second features that helped keep movie theaters full in the 1940s and 1950s. Made for budgets that frequently fell short of $100,000, with cheap sets and costumes, these plot-driven movies had little in the way of special effects and nothing in the way of super-star actors and actresses. Republic was famous for its low-budget films and serials, as was Monogram, but even the major studios had B units.