What is a B-movie? The new dragstrip action film, The Fast and the Furious, would certainly seem to qualify, except that it's an expensive, widely publicised remake of a 1954 quickie that really is a B-movie. For some reason, Hollywood seems compelled to remake old movies that no one (not even the hacks who made them) gave a second thought to - hence The Fast and the Furious, John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, Jeepers Creepers, Antitrust, Red Planet, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Highlander: Endgame, Hollow Man, Battlefield Earth, and so on.
But given that the lovable old Bs were fast, cheap and out of control, is B-ness still possible? B-movies were products of a film culture markedly different from the one we inhabit today. From the beginning of the feature film, B-movies were the celluloid equivalent of the ancillary entertainment surrounding a vaudeville show's headlining act.
Movies began as photographed theatre and, around the beginning of the last century, most theatre was a conglomeration of music acts, comics, novelty stunts, Shakespeare readings, semi-erotic dance numbers and animal tricks. Thus movies carried on what was deemed to be an honourable and profitable tradition: give the people the most for their money. Make the purchased entertainment feel like an expansive, satisfying night out by supplementing the main act with goodies.
For cinema, that meant live acts (very early on), newsreels, short films, cartoons, coming attractions and - most significantly - a second, slightly shorter, definitely cheaper feature film, usually belonging to a familiar and adored genre and featuring players who had been relegated to the second shelf. The B-movie filled out the double-bill's "bottom half".
Bs were integral to Hollywood for most of the 20th century, because audiences were accustomed to seeing two quickly-paced films at a time. Here was the grace, economy and beauty of B-movies: they were modest, they often used visual and narrative shortcuts to get to the point and they were - compared with grade-A movies - relatively unpoliced, allowing for all manner of innuendo, visual daring and thematic risk (1958's I Married a Monster from Outer Space is a sterling example of all three).
This is what film noir is all about: a sweaty, despairing mass of films that arose from wartime and post-war turmoil. The studio heads and the government agencies empowered to control what audiences watched didn't actually decide that the nation needed visions of shadowy nihilism to counteract the homefront propaganda and musical fluff. They just weren't paying attention to the bottom half of the bill, and film-makers ran rampant. The glorious giant bug and alien invasion movies of the 1950s, the Randolph Scott/Budd Boetticher westerns, the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur horror films - all of them were strange, atmospheric achievements that would have been killed in their cradles by big stars, big productions and big money.
As drive-ins prospered in the US in the 1950s, B-movies sometimes double-billed themselves, requiring no help from an A-list star to prompt horny teenagers to park their Chevys in the dark. As independent/exploitation films became powerful in the 1960s thanks to inexpensive equipment, Bs became sleazier, nastier, gorier, sexier and even cheaper.
The double-billing continued into the 1970s, at which time the notion arrived that a single film could be so overwhelmingly popular (The Sound of Music, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, Star Wars, in that order) as to make the usual additional show stuff extraneous. Ever since, virtually every film released has had to justify itself as a free-standing "event" worthy of a ticket's full price.
It is a highly questionable presumption if movies such as The Fast and the Furious and John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars are any indication, and so the critical drubbings such movies take aren't truly the films' faults. Would Carpenter's sloppy retread have gathered much animus if it had been released in 1970 as the second feature to Count Yorga, Vampire? We would have expected, and cared, less.
It is, after all, easy to love B-movies. Because they are by definition inexpensive, unambitious, designed for raw thrill and plotted like campfire tales, B-movies are a cocktail-in-the-hand pleasure to watch in ways that big-budget, "meaningful" or "event" movies can never be. Pretension is a movie disease rare in the B world. In Bs, the stories are tight and pointed, the situations sometimes outrageous, the characters motivated by rocket fuel.
Today there are straight-to-video cheapies (and their proliferating sequels), there are rancid exploitation movies, there are rebellious indies, there are pulpy made-for-TV dramas. But none of them are Bs because none of them share the essential circumstances that gave rise to the grade, and none of them serve its inherently subversive purpose: to provide a formal and thematic counterpoint to Hollywood's high-profile hootenanny, often from within the machine itself. Call them whatever you want, but Bs they ain't. The B is dead - long live the B.