How a studio of cheap monster films released Cabaret

Allied Artists was a Hollywood studio and distributor created in 1946 by Monogram Pictures, a low-budget company, and it released both cheap science fiction and horror films and Cabaret, the 1972 musical. Cabaret won 8 Academy Awards, among them Best Director and Best Actress. It lost Best Picture to The Godfather.

Relay has at least 10 Allied Artists releases, from 1955 to 1977. Below are science fiction and horror films and one thriller.

How did a low-budget studio become Allied Artists?

Monogram was founded in 1931 and lived on cheap pictures. In 1946 it created a unit called Allied Artists Productions to make costlier films with better-known casts, and it dropped the Monogram name in 1953.

Steve Broidy, who had joined Monogram in 1933 and became its president in 1945, oversaw the change. MovieMaker magazine says the new label was meant to deliver more prestigious pictures with bigger budgets. Walter Mirisch, later the Oscar-winning producer of In the Heat of the Night, rose to head of production and, with his brothers Harold and Marvin, pushed the studio toward bigger pictures.

Did the prestige plan work?

Partly. Friendly Persuasion (1956) received 6 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won none. MovieMaker says the studio soon reverted to the pictures Monogram had been known for. In 1957 the Mirisch brothers left to form their own company.

The cheap films kept coming, and many were science fiction and horror, made to fill the bottom half of a double bill, two films for one ticket. Cabaret arrived in 1972 as a co-production with ABC Pictures. Allied Artists filed for bankruptcy in 1979, and the production company Lorimar later acquired its library.

Which Allied Artists films are on Relay?

Not of This Earth (1957)

An alien from the planet Davana lives in a Los Angeles mansion and kills people to drain their blood, hoping to cure a disease that struck his people after a nuclear war. The low-budget producer and director Roger Corman made it through his company Los Altos Productions, and it played as the bottom half of a double bill. It was remade in 1988 and again in 1995, with Corman credited as a producer on both.

Horror

The Cosmic Man (1959)

A globe-shaped UFO lands near a mountain lodge, the military seals off the area and an alien in human form befriends a lodge owner's son and cures his paralysis. Critics have traced the peaceful visitor to The Day the Earth Stood Still. Bruce Bennett, an Olympic silver medalist who had played Tarzan, plays a scientist.

Sci-Fi

Hands of a Stranger (1962)

A concert pianist's hands are ruined in a car accident, a surgeon replaces them with the hands of a murder victim, and the pianist begins to feel the hands are driving him to kill. Newt Arnold wrote, directed and co-produced it as his first film, then worked for decades as an assistant director on films including The Godfather Part II and Blade Runner. It was shot in 1960 and sat for about 2 years before release. It is the fourth screen version of a 1920 French novel, after a 1924 German silent, Mad Love (1935) and a 1960 French version.

Horror

The Next Man (1976)

Sean Connery plays a Saudi minister who becomes the "next man" after his predecessor is assassinated, then becomes a target himself after calling for sweeping reforms at the United Nations. It opened on November 10, 1976, as "An Allied Artists Release". It was the first film score by the composer Michael Kamen, who later scored the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard films. Reviews were mostly negative.

Thriller

Where to go next

• For the company Allied Artists grew out of, see Monogram Pictures.
• For the kind of film that filled the bottom of a double bill, see what a B movie is.