Producers Releasing Corporation

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PRC's logo 1945

One of the larger Hollywood production conglomerates of Poverty Row of the late 30s-mid 40s (along with Republic Pictures and Monogram Pictures and smaller outfits) PRC, as it was commonly known, intentionally made mostly small-budget B-movies. The productions were often so cheap (and, according to critics, often so bad) that the Hollywood community took to claiming that PRC stood for "Pretty Rotten Crap". Still, the company was substantial enough to not only produce but also to distribute its own product and some imports from the UK, and operated its own studio facility.

The company loosely evolved from the earlier Producers Distributing Corporation of Ben Judell, which had hired brothers Sigmund Neufeld and Sam Newfield to make its films. After the collapse of PDC, the brothers established and ran PRC, which was later bought up by Pathe Industries Inc., though the only noticeable change was of the name of the company's production arm to P.R.C. Pictures Inc.. The company otherwise continued to flourish within its own element until after WWII. The distribution arm of the company was absorbed in the formation of Eagle-Lion Films Inc. in 1947, and the production arm (and, therewith, the entire company) followed shortly thereafter.

Most of the movies made were westerns or action melodramas, plus an occasional horror movie, and took a week or less to shoot. Typical of these efforts, but instead with a crime-setting, was Baby Face Morgan(1942), with Mary Carlisle and also starring Robert Armstrong and Richard Cromwell. German director Edgar G. Ulmer began working for the studio in 1942 and directed three films noir there - Bluebeard (1944), Strange Illusion (1945) and Detour (1945) - which have been recognized more recently as minor artistic achievements. Another of their productions, Hitler's Madmen, was picked up by MGM for distribution, and one of their regular music composers, Leo Erdody, was nominated for an Academy Award for his musical score for PRC's Minstrel Man in 1944.