Poverty Row

Poverty Row is a slang term used in Hollywood from the late silent period through the mid-fifties to refer to a variety of small and mostly short-lived film studios, many clustered in the area of Los Angeles, USA known as "Gower Gulch", near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street.

The films of Poverty Row, many of them Westerns or series such as those featuring the Bowery Boys and detectives such as Mr. Wong and Charlie Chan, are generally characterized by low budgets, casts made up of unknowns or stars distinctly on the way down, and overall production values that emphasize the haste and economy with which they were made.

While some Poverty Row studios came and quickly went after a few releases, others operated on more or less the same terms — if vastly different scales — from larger studios such as MGM, Warner Brothers, and Paramount Pictures.

The most successful and longest-lived of such lower-tier companies operated much like larger studios; they maintained permanent lots (and many standing sets that dedicated moviegoers could frequently recognize from movie to movie), had both cast and crew on long-term contract, and had a more varied output than smaller firms. Leading studios on Poverty Row included Republic (home of countless Westerns and the disconcerting oeuvre of Vera Hruba Ralston, wife of studio head Herbert J. Yates, as well, eventually of more ambitious projects as Johnny Guitar, which helped solidify Joan Crawford's screen reputation as a hard-boiled termagent) and Monogram Pictures, which over several decades produced everything from college/teen musicals starring popular swing bands and half (or more) forgotten names like Gale Storm to cut-rate versions of classics like Oliver Twist to the final films of fallen diva Kay Francis, who eked out a three-picture production deal with the studio in movies that were the palest possible echoes of her earlier successes.

The smallest studios, many of which have names -- Tiffany, Victory, Mascot, Chesterfield -- both evocative and obscure, were more likely to package and release films from independent producers, British "quota quickie" films, or borderline exploitation films (titles such as Hitler, Beast of Berlin come to mind). One that regularly skirted the line between sensation and exploitation was the notorious PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), which released Hitler and was home to specialty star Rondo Hatton, whose brief career tried to do for acromegaly what Esther Williams did for swimming.

The breakup of the studio system (and its tight distribution network, which left independent movie houses eager for seat-filling product from the Poverty Row studios) and the advent of television are among the factors that led to the disappearance of "Poverty Row" as a concrete phenomenon. The kinds of films produced by Poverty Row studios only grew in popularity, but were increasingly available both from major production companies and from independent producers who no longer needed to rely on a studio's ability to package and release their work.

Today, major films from Star Wars to the Indiana Jones films to the endless stream of action-adventure blockbusters recall the glory days of Poverty Row, albeit often without the awkward and usually unconscious charm that is at the heart of the continuing appeal of Hollywood's poor relatives.

Reference

Fernett, Gene, Hollywood's Poverty Row, 1930-1950, Coral Reef Publications, Inc., Satellite Beach, FL, 1973.]