A small but resourceful
production/distribution company, Anglo-Amalgamated was set up in 1945 by two energetic and
astute businessmen, Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy. They began by making low-budget
thrillers for the bottom half of the double bill, and, gambling shrewdly on new
talents, showed themselves cleverly attuned to changing market demands, until,
in 1969, they were swallowed up in ABPC/EMI. Their earliest productions were
half-hour features such as The Drayton Case (d. Ken Hughes, 1953), with plotlines which
attested to the unceasing vigilance of Scotland Yard, and with portentous
introductions by Edgar Lustgarten. By the '60s, these had given way to hour-long
thrillers drawn chiefly from the works of Edgar Wallace and made at the austere
studios at Merton Park.
But A-A was not limiting itself to
'B' film crime, the market for which would dry up in a few years: it produced
three musicals with the pop star Tommy Steele (1957-59), all the Carry On
films up till 1966, and a batch of horror films, including Horrors of the
Black Museum (d. Arthur Crabtree, 1959), two Edgar Allan Poe films in collaboration with
American International Pictures, The Masque of the Red Death (UK/US, d. Roger Corman, 1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (d. Corman, 1964), and, most famously, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960).
In the '60s, the company moved
upmarket and allied itself with some of the most important filmmakers of the
decade, particularly with producer Joseph Janni and directors John Schlesinger
and Joseph Losey. Janni, previously with Rank and British Lion, brought A
Kind of Loving (d. Tony Richardson, 1962) and Billy Liar! (d. John Schlesinger, 1963) to A-A in the first instance, thereby launching Schlesinger's features career, but making producer
Peter Rogers feel A-A was getting too quality-orientated for the Carry On
team. The company produced Losey's first British film, The Sleeping Tiger
(1954), though listing its producer Victor Hanbury as the director instead of the Blacklisted Losey. By 1960, Losey's name was on the A-A release The
Criminal, and Cohen backed The Go-Between (1971), though, by that time, A-A had ceased independent existence and the film was released through
EMI. A-A also produced that archetypal sixties black comedy, Nothing But the
Best (d. Clive Donner, 1964), and backed the first features of John Boorman (Catch Us If
You Can, 1965) and Ken Loach (Poor Cow, 1967). A good deal of the
history of British filmmaking in the '50s and '60s is encapsulated in the A-A
enterprise. Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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