Down and Dirty in Gower Gulch: Poverty Row Films Preserved at UCLA

Situated along Hollywood’s Gower Street in the 1930s and 40s—then known as “Poverty Row”—numerous small companies (including Majestic Pictures and Tiffany Productions) churned out the low-budget pictures that filled the bottom slot of double-bills (hence “B movie”) or provided content for the Saturday matinee market. Genre pictures—westerns, horror films, and crime thrillers—were staples, and the films often featured controversial content not available to the larger studios bound by the Motion Picture Association of America’s Production Code.

In this series you’ll see a selection of films recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive that highlight the surprising amount of creative freedom that filmmakers enjoyed under these conditions—plus cartoons from the era just for kicks!

• See the complete B-Movie Mania: A Low-Budget Summer lineup