Picked up a tape from a local video shop yesterday, and now I'm completely obsessed about it. It's name is THE LATE-LATE-LATE SHOW, and it's a collection of trailers from Something Weird Video. As the copy on the box states:
For all you Insomniacs who saw these obscure European espionage movies, westerns, thrillers and historical dramas of the early Sixties on TV: The Fury of the Apaches, Danger of the Middle East, To Catch a Spy, Agent of Doom, MMM 83, X-Ray of a Killer, Lost Treasure of the Aztecs, Eyes of the Sahara, Dangerous Agent, King of the Vikings, Duel of Fire, Walls of Fear, Stranger from Hong Kong, Killer Spy, Secret File 1413, Operation Gold Ingot, Escape from Saigon, Headlines of Destruction, The Black Monocle, Death Pays in Dollars, Sergeant X of the Foreign Legion, Nest of Spies, Prisoner of the Jungle, Messalina, Hercules of the Desert, Sea Fighter, Destination Fury, Prisoner of the Iron Mask, Musketeers of the Sea, and the 1952 suspense short THE GENTLEMAN IN ROOM 6.
Even in this time of all-inclusive film scholarship and, thanks to the internet, a very informed fanbase with reams of documentation at their fingertips, these are films that are, for the most part, forgotten. Most the films whose trailers I saw were European spy thrillers (mainly French from what I can ascertain) produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was before Bond-mania took over half of the world, and Euro-spy programmers became parodies and goofy pop-art extravaganzas. But what of their predecessors, these very humble and earnest black and white thrillers? As Something Weird's box copy so implies: these were cheap gut-bucket flicks that local TV needed to fill holes in their schedule. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, time needed to be filled for programming, and movies were the cheapest way to fill that time. Mainly these were packages from studios like A.I.P. that were mainly european programmers picked up for a song and then re-edited, cheaply dubbed and retitled. If you're old enough, maybe you remember a morning movie, or an afternoon movie, maybe tied in to a sweepstakes or contest. Remember when there used to be Late Late Movies, and not infomercials?
I certainly do. Watch this space for more information. I intend to track some of this stuff down.