The 1940s B movie studio that made 179 films on tiny budgets

Producers Releasing Corporation, known as PRC, was a Hollywood studio of the 1940s that made and distributed cheap B movies, and one of its releases, Detour, became the first B movie added to the National Film Registry, in 1992. The Registry is the Library of Congress list of films chosen for preservation as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.

PRC was one of the studios of Poverty Row, the nickname for Hollywood's low-budget producers. It made 179 features and almost never spent more than $100,000 on one. Its Billy the Kid series alone ran to 42 westerns.

Its best work came from a director with nowhere else to go. Edgar G. Ulmer, whose career at the major studios had stalled, began working for PRC in 1942. French critics noticed his films in the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1940s PRC had been taken over by Eagle-Lion Films. Four of its releases, from 1942 to 1946, are on Relay.

Who ran PRC?

Sigmund Neufeld, a producer, and his brother Sam Newfield, a director, made the early PRC films. Newfield worked under names such as Sherman Scott, which made the studio look like it had a larger directing staff.

Which PRC films are on Relay?

Billy the Kid Trapped (1942)

Buster Crabbe, the star of PRC's Billy the Kid westerns, plays Billy in this one of his 13 films in the role, with the actor Al St. John as his sidekick Fuzzy. Billy and his friends are sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit, escape, and find impostors committing robberies dressed as them. The AFI Catalog notes the story bears no resemblance to the real outlaw's life.

Western

Bluebeard (1944)

Ulmer made this at PRC, designed the sets himself and rebuilt Paris on the studio lot. The actor John Carradine plays a painter and puppeteer who kills his models. Ulmer said PRC was unhappy with the finished film and that it earned a great deal of money in France.

Crime

Detour (1945)

A nightclub pianist hitchhikes to Los Angeles. The gambler he rides with dies, he takes the man's identity, and a blackmailing woman gets in his way. Tom Neal and Ann Savage star.

Ulmer said in 1972 that he shot it in six days. Accounts of the cost run from $20,000 to about $100,000.

Crime

The Flying Serpent (1946)

The actor George Zucco plays an archaeologist who keeps a winged serpent, which he calls Quetzalcoatl after the Aztec god, and uses it against people who threaten him. Newfield directed it as Sherman Scott. The AFI Catalog says it is another version of the screenplay PRC had filmed in 1940 as The Devil Bat, so PRC reused its own script.

Horror