10 great quota quickies

Michael Powell was among the most prolific directors of so-called ‘quota quickies’. Yet, the fact that so many of the 23 titles he churned out in the early 1930s have been lost forever testifies to the low esteem in which these featurettes were held. Budgeted at £1 per foot of film, these thrillers, comedies and melodramas were made to tight schedules to conform with the terms of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which required that a certain proportion of films shown in British cinemas were ‘homemade’.

The results were typically lambasted by contemporary critics, and their scorn has been set in stone by subsequent historians. Of course, several absolute clunkers were made over the decade. But the quickies weren’t all bad. Indeed, they helped save British cinema. Because although Hollywood studios were accused of sponsoring sub-standard pictures to turn audiences against them – with John Grierson comparing them to imperial buccaneers and Lawrence Huntington’s short film Screen Struck (1937) mocking Hollywood hacks slumming it in ‘Quickieland’ – production increased sixfold as a consequence of the regulation. Paramount (Elstree), Warners (Teddington), Fox (Wembley), Universal (Shepperton) and RKO (Twickenham) would all establish British bases.

Despite fears these ‘cuckoo’ productions would disseminate American attitudes, the quickies examined local issues in the same British idiom as the stage, music hall and radio. Preserving little snapshots of the national character, they also helped ease the transition to talkies and sustain attendances during the Depression through value-for-money double bills.

These pound-a-footers extended the careers of silent stalwarts like Henry Edwards, Thomas Bentley, George Pearson, Graham Cutts and Adrian Brunel; the latter’s Badger’s Green (1934) is considered a lost quickie gem. They also afforded opportunities for such enterprising independents as Widgey R. Newman, John Baxter, George King and Donovan Pedelty, although Mary Field and Jacqueline Logan’s Strictly Business (1931) was the sole quickie directed by women. 

Although resented by some, Americans such as Albert Parker, Frank Richardson and Bernard Vorhaus brought Hollywood know-how. They’d help hone the skills of the actors, directors and technicians who would keep wartime audiences informed and entertained before guiding the post-war revival that restored the reputation of British cinema, with its Ealing comedies, Gainsborough melodramas, Rank crowd-pleasers, and Korda, Archers and Cineguild classics.

Quickies were largely doomed by the 1938 Cinematograph Films Act, which introduced new quota criteria and promoted the making of the shorts. Hollywood cut its losses and ties, and jobs were lost as production fell by 55% to just 103 features. But the quickie lived on in the B movies produced in the 1950s, as well as in the first television programmes, where cut-price speed of operation was often of the essence.

Director: Michael Powell

The last of the six pictures that Michael Powell made with producer Jerome Jackson for Film Engineering, Hotel Splendide continues the fascination with disguise that screenwriter Philip MacDonald had shown in the same year’s Rynox. Jerry Verno – another regular Powell collaborator, here in his second of five films for the director – stars as the office clerk who inherits the rundown hotel in sleepy Speymouth that has been built over the place where old lag Edgar Norfolk had stashed the Dysart pearls. 

Briskly shot at Nettlefold Studios, it was dubbed by The Bioscope, “one of those unostentatiously produced British potboilers, made with an eye on the cash box”, in spite of the fact that the high angles and hard source lighting made it more visually ambitious than most quickies. Fittingly for a caper allowing Powell to make a Hitchcockian cameo as an eavesdropping crook named Marconi, it made use of Charles Gounod’s ‘Funeral March of the Marionettes’, which would become the theme of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955 to 1965).

Director: John Baxter

Director John Baxter was Britain’s quota quickie conscience, championing underdogs, whether they were struggling farmers (Song of the Plough, 1933), old soldiers (Lest We Forget, 1934) or the urban poor (Hearts of Humanity, 1936). Although striving for authenticity in depicting the doughtiness and dignity of the marginalised, Baxter’s films were often conservative and sentimental, unlike his remarkable debut: Doss House.

Shot on a shoestring at Shepperton for MGM, it accompanied reporter Arnold Bell to a flophouse, where he spends the night hearing hard-luck stories from honest toilers and lost souls alike. Despite being close to the bone at the height of the Depression, the film was well received and Baxter later remade it as The Common Touch (1941), by which time he had branched out into comedies and musicals like Kentucky Minstrels (1934), which saw Harry Scott and Eddie Whaley become the first Black stars of a British film.

Director: Bernard Vorhaus

John Mills recalled seeing this comic thriller at the Empire, Leicester Square, and joining in with the barracking audience in case they recognised him from the screen. In fact, American director Bernard Vorhaus succeeded in putting a very English spin on tropes borrowed from pulp fiction and Hollywood B movies, as chemist Henry Kendall helps Ida Lupino get brother Mills out of a jam after discovering an incriminating camera on the back seat of his car. 

There’s a screwball rapport between the leads, with the dialogue fizzing with innuendo, while the underrated Kendall’s silly ass banter with Cockney assistant Victor Stanley also amuses. However, it’s the adventurous style that makes this so significant. Decamping from Twickenham Studios, Vorhaus and estimable cinematographer Ernest Palmer shot extensively on location and made bold use of subjective shots. These were nimbly incorporated into flashbacks and the climactic courtroom sequence by editor David Lean, whose innovative montages move the story along with wit and precision.

Director: Milton Rosmer

Prompted by recent sightings at Loch Ness and the success of King Kong (1933), Milton Rosmer’s creature feature was written by Charles Bennett and Billie Bristow after a recce to the Highlands. She was one of the few women screenwriters working in Britain at the time, while he was renowned for his association with Alfred Hitchcock; their screenplay has a Whisky Galore! feel, especially when the London press pack rubs shoulders with the thirsty locals. 

Producer Bray Wyndham took advantage of Ealing Studios being idle while Basil Dean feuded with RKO to shoot the picture in four weeks. The critics took Aldwych Theatre founder Seymour Hicks to task for hamming it up as the professor mocked for his prehistoric theorising. Yet, even though the back-projected, iguana-menacing diving reporter Frederick Peisley is hilariously unterrifying, the ambition of the first ever film about Nessie is unquestionable. Moreover, the editing by David Lean (again) is first rate, with his match shots being particularly neat.

Director: Walter Summers

While most post-war British Bs featured an imported Hollywood star, they were less common in the 1930s. Bela Lugosi graced Hammer’s The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1935), while Noah Beery essayed a Chicago gangster in The Avenging Hand (1936). But George Zucco made the opposite journey: the villain of many a Poverty Row thriller and Universal horror over in the US learned the cinematic ropes in quickies like this adaptation of a Lillian Trimble Bradley play, which writer-director Walter Summers adapted at Welwyn Studios for British Independent Pictures. 

For once, Zucco is on the right side of the law, as Inspector Hull gives courtroom testimony against a young sculptor charged with murdering his uncle. In a much-imitated gambit, the action repeatedly cross-cuts from the witness box to the scene of the crime. But it’s less the technique that sets this splendidly preposterous melodrama apart than the performance of Richard Bird, who had also excelled in Summers’ take on Arnold Ridley’s The Warren Case (1934).

Director: J. Elder Wills

When producer Bray Wyndham submitted John Quinn’s script for a drama based on Limehouse drug dealers Brilliant Chang and Annie Lai, the British Board of Film Censors sniffed: “The whole story is an exact replica of the worst type of American gangster films.” The board also railed at the Hollywoodese dialogue and the presence of drunken sailors and “prostitutes of every race and colour”. However, Wyndham had already cast Anna May Wong, and script editor Billie Bristow was dispatched to the BBFC to discuss compromises.

Six weeks later, the picture (again edited by David Lean) was given an ‘A’ certificate. Despite now being set in a South American dive, the action still revels in its lowlife environs, as Wong’s Xinhai Revolution fugitive seeks to protect ward Rene Ray from regulars – such as the ever-hissable Henry Victor – at a seedy dockside bar that pleasingly resembles a hastily redecorated East End bordello.

Director: George Pearson

Notwithstanding the excellence of Frank Vosper in a rare lead, the star of this RKO melodrama is the Paragon House set built for a pittance on a Twickenham soundstage by art director James A. Carter. With its columned lobby, sweeping staircase, dance floors and dining rooms, it offered Depression audiences a glimpse of grandeur, while also revealing that even the elite have their problems. 

The influence of The Last Laugh (1924) and Grand Hotel (1932) is readily evident, as the camera glides and plotlines interweave around Anton, the Russian grand duke reduced to working as duty manager at a swanky night spot. Seemingly snatched from the headlines, the stories of a jaded showgirl, a dying wife and a foolish secretary are enacted with sincerity by a fine ensemble. Meanwhile, Pearson, a silent veteran fallen on hard times, demonstrates unfussy craftsmanship in blending intimacy and intrigue, as he would in exploiting another evocative setting in Midnight at Madame Tussaud’s (1936).

Director: Albert Parker

Shakespeare often cropped up in quota quickies. In a rare period piece, The Immortal Gentleman (1935), the Bard points out the Southwark tavern frequenters who remind him of his most celebrated characters, while a production of Macbeth dominates Vivien Leigh’s debut in The Village Squire (1935). A.G. Macdonell’s 1933 mystery novel The Shakespeare Murders (written under the pseudonym Neil Gordon) also inspired a pair of old-dark-house thrillers: The Claydon Treasure Mystery (1938) and The Third Clue. 

Made for Fox by American journeyman Albert Parker, the latter was announced as “a production on a big scale”, as 17 sets were built at Ealing to tell the story of the Indian temple jewels hidden at Clayton Manor. Shrouded in shadow, the MacGuffin-driven action creaks terribly. But, with its Hamlet samplers, secret panels, shifty servants, cunning crooks, cult devotees, rookie reporters, distressed damsels and grisly murders, it’s also quirkily compelling.

Director: Milton Rosmer

Whether directing first-timer Laurence Olivier in Too Many Crooks (1930) or a penguin in the Ealing comedy To Brighton with Gladys (1933), the versatile George King was an unsung quickie hero. His reputation today, however, rests on an eight-film collaboration with actor Tod Slaughter, who debuted at 49 in this hoary melodrama, which King produced for Milton Rosmer. 

Harking back to Slaughter’s mid-20s glory days at the Elephant and Castle Theatre, the action opens on a stage with an emcee introducing the players to a boisterous audience. No attempt is made to disguise Squire Corder’s villainy, even though he tries to blame the death of a compromised village girl on Eric Portman’s well-spoken Gypsy. The production values are meagre, but proceedings are shrouded in the Guignolesque atmosphere that King would also bring to Slaughter’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) and one of the final quickies, The Face at the Window (1939).

Director: Bernard Mainwaring

Largely forgotten today, Salopian Bernard Mainwaring was one of the foot soldiers of the quickie era. He only made 10 features, including the first (but sadly lost) Hammer release The Public Life of Henry the Ninth (1935). Yet he scored a surprise hit with this crime drama adapted from a novel by the American writer, Rob Eden. 

Shot cheaply on serviceable sets at Wembley Studios, it’s not much to look at, and Twentieth Century-Fox was so indifferent that it misspelt Mainwaring’s first name in the credits. But the story of a South African showgirl who flees London after a theatre manager’s murder and lays low as a Birmingham dance hostess is unusual in its provincial setting. Moreover, it anticipates the strain of noirish ‘women’s pictures’ produced in post-war Hollywood. And yes, Ballard Berkeley, the dapper architect who stands by Rene Ray when cop John Longden catches up with her, did go on to play Major Gowen in Fawlty Towers (1975 to 1979).