“As a cultural phenomenon the B-movie lasted for less than 40 years. Its life was extended for a while by the post-war popularity of the drive-in cinema, but it finally succumbed to television and the inexorable disappearance of locally owned independent movie houses.
Fairly rapidly ‘B-picture’ became a pejorative term. ‘B-movie dialogue’ meant a string of clichés. ‘B-movie plots’ were predictable dramas retreading familiar stories. There is some justice to this. Most B-movies are bad and forgotten. But at their worst they have an unpretentious, sometimes camp, charm. At their best they are as different from smooth A-movies as the great pulp writers like David Goodis and Horace McCoy were from the respectable best-selling novelists of the day.”
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