Producers Releasing Corporation

Part of the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood studios Poverty Row (along with Republic Pictures and Monogram Pictures), PRC made only small-budget B-movies. The productions were so cheap (and, according to critics, so bad) that Hollywood executives nicked named PRC "Pretty Rotten Crap". Most of the movies made were westerns or melodramas and took a week or less to shoot. German director Edgar J. Ulmer began working for the studio in 1942 and directed three films noir there: Bluebeard (1944), Strange Illusion (1945) and Detour (1945). Detour has gone on to become a cult classic.

Ben Judell founded PRC in 1939 first calling the studio Producers Pictures and then Producers Distribution Corporation (PDC). PRC, always on the verge of bankruptcy, made many movies with once successful actors like Bela Lugosi and Buster Crabbe. The film studio was taken over by British company Eagle Lion Corporation in 1947. Under the Eagle Lion name budgets increased and the films made were more successful including He Walked By Night (1949) , Hollow Triumph (1948), Trapped (1949) and two Anthony Mann directed films noir, now considered classics, Raw Deal and T-Men . Mann, after directing Railroaded! (1947) for PRC went on to direct many films for other movie studios and eventually big-budget westerns. In 1950, the company merged with United Artists and ceased to exist.