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I'm not even sure if the film knows that it's doing this. In part, no doubt, because it acts so much like a generic programmer, lulling the viewer into assuming that we're watching one kind of thing, when we're actually watching something else entirely. This is a real pity, because even without making allowances for what B-horror is usually up to, The City of the Dead is a real treat, and almost impossibly for quickie genre film of this age, it completely blindsided me. Even as such an incredibly little project with such unmistakably modest goals, it barely met them: it turned a profit (at the minuscule budget, it would be hard-pressed not to), but not much else, and it certainly didn't make the kind of in-roads into Hammer's territory that the filmmakers presumably hoped for. It started life as a television pilot written by George Baxt before Subotsky added enough new subplots to bring it up to a running time that could conceivably pass muster as a commercially-released feature. It's not even particularly ambitious for a cheapie programmer: the budget was a ludicrously tiny ₤45,000, which was enough to pay for a running time of just 78 minutes, squarely in "the filler half of a double feature" territory. That's all in the wake of The City of the Dead, which had no such aspirations, of course (it was, for the record, not made by Amicus Productions, but by Vulcan Films - the only film in that company's history, and it has been customary to regard this as the proto-Amicus). Yet they found such success in migrating that they stayed to found a whole entire company, Amicus Productions, which would during its 15-year lifespan become one of the most recognisable names in British genre cinema - admittedly not a competitive field, but Amicus was also trying to carve out a reputation in territory that had been the exclusive domain of Hammer Film.
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And the producers, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, were Americans who had seen success in America, making it a little unclear why they needed to find money on the far side of the ocean. But it's an American screenplay on a quintessentially American subject and in a quintessentially American locale though the way the themes are teased out - the conflict between the very old and the very young - takes on a particularly English-ish vibe. It's a British-made film and it has the feel of one, with the unmistakable coziness of something shot at Shepperton Studios, and an all-British cast bringing a distinctly classical approach to their roles.
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The film industries of the United Kingdom and the United States have always been awfully permeable, and in the form of 1960's The City of the Dead, we find an especially fun bit of transatlantic maneuvering. First up, though, is the film that was an Amicus film before Amicus existed. This October, I'll be working my way through several of the films made by Amicus Productions, the second-most-beloved British horror film specialists of the 1960s and '70s.