ABSTRACT
Compared to the breadth of research devoted to canonical films and composers, the musical scores of B films largely remain an ‘undiscovered country’ within the field of film studies. Much of what we know about the scores for B films comes from the memoirs of composers like Cy Feuer and Henry Mancini, who began their careers writing cues for the bottom half of the double bill before achieving fame years later as songwriters and recording artists (Feuer and Gross 2003; Mancini with Lees 1989). Besides these autobiographical accounts, there are only a handful of critical studies of music in B films, and even these tend to be limited to the work of a particular composer, title, or studio (Jones 1998; Littman 1989). The reasons for this negligence are fairly transparent. Given the low cultural status of these films and their often poor production values, they hardly seem worth the attention lavished instead on the prestige costume pictures, westerns, adventure films, literary adaptations, and romantic comedies that make up much of the classical Hollywood canon.
