This article is part of the B movie series.

B movies (Hollywood Golden Age)

B movies (Transition in the 1950s)

B movies (The exploitation boom)

B movies (1980s to the present)

Z movie

This is a history of B movies in the 1950s. The transformation of the film industry due to court rulings that outlawed many long-standing distribution practices as well as the challenge of television meant an end to the double feature that had defined much of the American moviegoing experience during Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. Though the traditional bottom-of-the-bill B movie slowly disappeared, the term was still applied to the sort of inexpensive genre films that came out during the era, such as those produced to meet the demands of the burgeoning drive-in theater market. Image File history File links COS_02. ... The King of the Bs, Roger Corman, produced and directed The Raven (1963) for American International Pictures. ... This is a history of the early decades of the B movie, from its roots in the silent era through Hollywoods Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. ... This is a history of B movies in the 1960s and 1970s. ... This is a history of B movies from the 1980s to the present. ... Z-movie (or Grade-Z movie) is a term applied to films with an extremely low budget and a miserable quality. ... The King of the Bs, Roger Corman, produced and directed The Raven (1963) for American International Pictures. ... Much like American popular music, American cinema has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. ... Hulls Drive In Theatre, outside Lexington, Virginia A drive-in theater is a form of cinema structure consisting of a large screen, a projection booth, a concession stand and a large parking area for automobiles. ...

Fadeout of the classic B

The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm (1957), from Universal, was the final installment of the last B series put out by a major studio.

In 1948, a Supreme Court ruling in a federal antitrust suit against the leading Hollywood studios, the so-called Big Five, outlawed block booking and led to the divestiture of their theater chains over the next few years. With audiences draining away to television and other economic pressures forcing the studios to scale back production schedules, the Golden Age–style double feature began disappearing from American theaters. After barely inching forward in the 1930s, the average U.S. feature production cost had essentially doubled over the 1940s, reaching $1 million by the turn of the decade (the increase from 1940 to 1950 was 150 percent in simple terms, 93 percent after adjusting for inflation).^[1] The major studios promoted the benefits of recycling, offering former headlining movies as second features in the place of traditional B films.^[2] (Their longer running time appears to have both accommodated and hastened the progressive abandonment of the traditional "variety program" of newsreel/cartoon/short preceding the feature presentations at many theaters.) With television airing many classic Westerns as well as producing its own original Western series, the cinematic market for B oaters in particular was drying up. Ma and Pa Kettle were the featured characters in a series of popular light comedic movies in the 1940s and 1950s. ... Look up universal in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... United States v. ... The studio system was a means of film production and distribution dominant in Hollywood from the early 1920s through the early 1950s. ... i like western films The Western is an American genre in literature and film. ... Oater is a slang term meaning a movie about a frontier or cowboy life; a western. ...

The first prominent victim of the changing market was the Poverty Row studio Eagle-Lion, which released its last films in 1951. By 1953, the old Monogram brand had disappeared, the company having adopted the identity of its higher-end subsidiary, Allied Artists. The following year, Allied released Hollywood's last two B series Westerns, starring Wayne Morris: The Desperado in June and Two Guns and a Badge in September.^[3] Non-series B Westerns would continue to come out for a few more years, but Republic Pictures, long associated with cheap sagebrush sagas, was out of the filmmaking business by the end of the decade. In other genres, Universal maintained B series featuring Abbott and Costello (through 1955), Francis the Talking Mule (through 1956), and Ma and Pa Kettle (through 1957).^[4] Allied Artists kept its Bomba the Jungle Boy series going through 1955; Allied's Bowery Boys finished their run in 1958—the end of the longest feature series in movie history (48 films, altogether) and the last B series from one of Hollywood's Golden Age studios. Poverty Row is a slang term used in Hollywood from the late silent period through the mid-fifties to refer to a variety of mostly short-lived small studios, many clustered in the area of Los Angeles, USA known as Gower Gulch, near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower... Eagle Lion Films was a British film company that merged with PRC Pictures in the 1940s. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... An actor most famous for his role as Robin Hood (aka Robin of Kensington) in the television comedy series (Maid Marian and Her Merry Men) . He is also known as Adam Morris. ... Republic Pictures Corporation (aka Republic Entertainment) is an independent film, television, and video distribution company that was originally a movie production-distribution corporation with studio facilities, best known for its specialization in quality B pictures, westerns and movie serials. ... This article is about the major American media conglomerate. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Francis the Talking Mule was a mule celebrity, featured in seven movie comedies in the 1950s. ... Ma and Pa Kettle were the featured characters in a series of popular light comedic movies in the 1940s and 1950s. ... The Dead End Kids were six young actors from New York who appeared in Sidney Kingsleys play Dead End in 1935 on Broadway. ...

The most B oriented of the Big Five, RKO Pictures, weakened by what one studio historian describes as its "systematic seven-year rape" by former owner Howard Hughes, abandoned the movie industry in 1957.^[5] Hollywood's A product was getting longer—the top ten box-office releases of 1940 had averaged 112.5 minutes; the average length of 1955's top ten was 123.4.^[6] In their modest way, the B's were following suit. The age of the hour-long feature film was now past; at 69 minutes, Two Guns and a Badge was about as short as Hollywood features ran. In sum, the Golden Age–style second feature was dying. B movie, however, continued to be used in a broader sense, referring to any low-budget genre film featuring relatively unheralded performers ("B actors"). The term retained its earlier suggestion that such movies relied on formulaic plots, "stock" character types, and simplistic action or unsophisticated comedy. At the same time, the realm of the B movie was becoming increasingly fertile territory for experimentation, both serious and outlandish. This article is about the film production company. ... For the Welsh murderer, see Howard Hughes (murderer). ... A B-actor is an actor hired to act in B-movies. ...

Mutating genres

Ida Lupino, well known as an actress, established herself as Hollywood's sole female director of the era. In short, low-budget pictures made for the production company she ran with her husband Collier Young, The Filmakers, Lupino explored virtually taboo subjects such as rape in 1950's Outrage (released by RKO) and 1953's self-explanatory The Bigamist (an entirely independent project). Her most famous directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), was another RKO release. Often referred to as the only classic film noir directed by a woman, it made a virtue of its small budget with an unusually intense focus on its three lead characters.^[7] That same year, RKO put out another historically notable film made at low cost and with an only faintly starry cast: the 85-minute-long Split Second comes to a head in a desert ghost town about to become a nuclear blast site, making it perhaps the first example of an "atomic noir." The most famous such movie, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), independently produced by Victor Saville and his Parklane Pictures company, typifies the persistently murky middle ground between the A and B picture. Film historian Richard Maltby identifies it as a "programmer capable of occupying either half of a neighbourhood theatre's double-bill [and] budgeted at approximately $400,000. [Its] distributor, United Artists, released around twenty-five programmers with production budgets between $100,000 and $400,000 in 1955. For UA, these movies served to spread the overhead costs of their distribution operation rather than to make profits in themselves."^[8] The film's length, 106 minutes, is A level, but its star, Ralph Meeker, had previously appeared in only one major film. It is based on an unequivocally pulpy source, one of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels, but is directed in a self-consciously aestheticized fashion by Robert Aldrich. The result is a brutal genre picture that chillingly evokes contemporary anxieties about what was often spoken of simply as the Bomb. Lupino in 1979 Ida Lupino (February 4, 1918 – August 3, 1995) was a film actress, director, and a pioneer in the field of women filmmakers. ... Movie producer and writer Collier Young (August 19, 1908 - December 25, 1980) worked on many films in the 50s before becoming a television producer for such shows as Ironside and The Wild Wild West. ... Outrage is a 1950 black-and-white B-movie starring Mala Powers. ... The Hitch-Hiker is a 1953 film noir film which tells the story of two hunting buddies who pick up a mysterious hitchhiker. ... Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 film produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. ... The current United Artists logo (a variant was used during the 1980s). ... Meeker as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly Ralph Meeker (November 21, 1920 - August 5, 1988) was a film actor who appeared as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly. ... Flynns Detective Fiction from 1941. ... Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918 – July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American author of crime novels. ... Mike Hammer is a fictional American detective created by the American author Mickey Spillane in the 1947 book I, the Jury (made into a movie in 1953 and 1982). ... Robert Aldrich (August 9, 1918 – December 5, 1983) was a United States film director, writer and producer notable for a number of films including What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and The Dirty Dozen. ...

Rocketship X-M (1950), produced and released by small Lippert Pictures, is cited as possibly "the first postnuclear holocaust film."^[9] It was at the leading edge of a large cycle of movies, mostly low-budget and many long forgotten, classifiable as "atomic bomb cinema."

The fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, along with less expressible qualms about the effects of radioactive fallout from America's own atomic tests, energized many of the era's genre films. Science fiction, horror, and various hybrids of the two were now of central economic importance to the low-budget end of the business. Most down-market films of the type—like many of those produced by William Alland at Universal (e.g., Creature from the Black Lagoon [1954]) and Sam Katzman at Columbia (e.g., It Came from Beneath the Sea [1955])—provided little more than simple diversion.^[10] But these were genres whose fantastic nature could also be used as cover for mordant cultural observations often difficult to make in mainstream movies. Two well-financed films of 1951, The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still, are often mentioned as vanguard examples, but scholar Richard Hodgens argues that they are beasts of a different sort: The Thing "proved that some money could be made by 'science fiction' that preyed on current fears symbolized crudely by any preposterous monster." Its fellow traveller was a thriller with a simplistic moral: "Earthlings, behave yourselves."^[11] The era's most provocative and unsettling fantasies were made for B-level money. Director Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), produced by Walter Wanger for $300,000 and released by Allied Artists, treats conformist pressures and the evil of banality in haunting, allegorical fashion.^[12] Even the majors' genre mills at times came out with challenging films. Produced on a "trifling budget" by Katzman, The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957), "uses the physical transfer of the life force from one class to another as a metaphor for economic expropriation."^[13] Among the most disturbing was The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), written, directed, and produced by Bert I. Gordon. A "King Kong for the atomic age," it is both a monster movie that happens to depict the horrific effects of radiation exposure and "a ferocious cold-war fable [that] spins Korea, the army's obsessive secrecy, and America's post-war growth into one fantastic whole."^[14] Rocketship X-M (1950) was the second of the American science fiction feature films of the space adventure genre begun in the post-war era, in 1950. ... William Alland (March 4, 1916 - November 11, 1997) was an actor, producer, writer and director of science fiction and western films. ... Creature from the Black Lagoon is a 1954 black-and-white science fiction film directed by Jack Arnold, and starring Richard Carlson, Julia Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno, and Whit Bissell. ... Sam Katzman (July 7, 1901 – August 4, 1973) was an American film producer. ... film poster of It Came From Beneath The Sea It Came From Beneath The Sea is an American black and white 1955 science fiction film produced by Sam Katzman and Charles Schneer for Columbia Pictures Corp. ... The Thing from Another World is a 1951 science fiction film which tells the story of an Air Force crew & scientists at a remote Arctic research outpost who fight a malevolent alien being, The Thing. ... The Day the Earth Stood Still is a 1951 science fiction film that tells the story of a humanoid alien who comes to Earth to warn its leaders not to take their conflicts into space, or they will face lethal consequences. ... Don Siegel (October 26, 1912 - April 20, 1991) was an influential American film director. ... Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 science fiction film. ... Walter Wanger (July 11, 1894 - November 18, 1968) was an important American film producer. ... The Amazing Colossal Man is a 1957 black-and-white science fiction film, starring Glenn Langan and produced and distributed by American-International Pictures Inc. ... Bert I. Gordon (born as Bert Ira Gordon, September 24, 1922 in Kenosha, WI) is an American film director. ... This is about the original movie and novel. ... Combatants United Nations:  Republic of Korea,  Australia,  Belgium,  Luxembourg,  Canada,  Colombia,  Ethiopia,  France,  Greece,  Luxembourg,  Netherlands,  New Zealand,  Philippines,  South Africa,  Thailand,  Turkey,  United Kingdom,  United States Medical staff:  Denmark,  Australia,  Italy,  Norway,  Sweden Communist states:  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,  Peoples Republic of China,  Soviet Union Commanders...

AIP and Corman

When one of AIP's movies hit, the company was able to take advantage quickly. I Was a Teenage Werewolf premiered June 19, 1957. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, also produced and cowritten by Herman Cohen, opened just five months later.

The Amazing Colossal Man was released by a new company whose name was much bigger than its budgets. American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1956 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff in a reorganization of their American Releasing Corporation (ARC), soon became the leading U.S. studio devoted entirely to B-priced productions. American International helped keep the original-release double bill alive through paired packages of its films: these movies were low-budget, but the economic model was different from that of the traditional B movie—instead of a flat rate, they were rented out on a percentage basis, like A films.^[15] I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) is perhaps the best known AIP film of the era. Guided by experienced genre writer-producer Herman Cohen, the movie starred a twenty-year-old Michael Landon. As its title suggests, AIP sought audiences not only with fantastic genre subjects, but also with new, teen-oriented angles. One exemplary film, Daddy-O (aka Out on Probation; 1958), sported the tagline "Alive!! With the Beat and the Heat of Today's Rock-N-Roll Generation!" If Hot Rod Gang (1958) worked, then why wouldn't hot rod horror? Result: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959). AIP is credited with having "led the way...in demographic exploitation, target marketing, and saturation booking, all of which would become standard procedure for the majors in planning and releasing their mass-market 'event' films" by the late 1970s.^[16] At least in terms of content, the majors were already there, putting out low-budget "J.D." movies such as Warner Bros.' Untamed Youth (1957), starring Mamie Van Doren, and MGM's High School Confidential (1958), with Van Doren and Russ Tamblyn. In Bill Osgerby's description, these films "purported to preach against the 'evils' of juvenile crime, yet simultaneously provided young audiences with the vicarious thrills of delinquent rebellion," a gambit as old as St. Augustine, if not the Hollywood hills themselves.^[17] The early AIP logo. ... I Was a Teenage Werewolf is a 1957 horror film starring Michael Landon as a troubled teenager and Whit Bissell as the primary adult. ... I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is a film starring Whit Bissell, Phyllis Coates and Gary Conway released by AIP (American International Pictures) in November of 1957. ... Herman Cohen (August 27, 1925 - June 2, 2002) was a producer of B-movies during the 1950s, who helped to popularize the teen horror movie genre with films like the cult classic I Was a Teenage Werewolf. ... The early AIP logo. ... James Harvey Nicholson (September 14, 1916–December 10, 1972) was an American film producer. ... Samuel Zachary Arkoff (June 12, 1918–September 16, 2001) was an American producer of B-movies. ... I Was a Teenage Werewolf is a 1957 horror film starring Michael Landon as a troubled teenager and Whit Bissell as the primary adult. ... Herman Cohen (August 27, 1925 - June 2, 2002) was a producer of B-movies during the 1950s, who helped to popularize the teen horror movie genre with films like the cult classic I Was a Teenage Werewolf. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Daddy-O is a 1958 B-movie starring Dick Contino . ... Market segmentation is the process in marketing of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Target audience. ... Juvenile delinquency refers to criminal acts performed by juveniles. ... Warner Bros. ... Mamie Van Doren Mamie Van Doren (born February 6, 1931) is an American actress and sex symbol. ... MGM logo Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM, is a large media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of cinema and television programs. ... Russ Tamblyn (born 30 December 1934 in Los Angeles, California) is an actor. ... Augustinus redirects here. ...

In 1954, a young filmmaker named Roger Corman received his first screen credits as writer and associate producer of Allied Artists' Highway Dragnet. Later that year, he independently produced his first movie, The Monster from the Ocean Floor, on a $12,000 budget and a six-day shooting schedule.^[18] In 1955, Corman produced and directed the first official ARC release, Apache Woman, one of five movies he had a hand in directing that year. Within a few months he would direct Day the World Ended, half of Arkoff and Nicholson's first twin-bill package, and one of the first AIP films, It Conquered the World. Corman would go on to direct over fifty feature films through 1990. As of 2007, he remained active as a producer, with more than 350 movies to his credit. Often referred to as the "King of the B's," the historically sensitive Corman has said that "to my way of thinking, I never made a 'B' movie in my life," as B movies, in the classic Hollywood sense of the term, were dying out by the time he began making pictures. He prefers to describe his metier as "low-budget exploitation films."^[19] In later years Corman, both with AIP and as head of his own companies, would help launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Towne, and Robert De Niro, among many others. Roger Corman. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Martin Luciano Scorsese (IPA: AmE: ; Ita: []) (born November 17, 1942) is an Academy Award-winning American film director. ... Towne in the 1960 movie Last Woman on Earth Robert Towne (born November 23, 1934) is an American actor, screenwriter and director. ... Robert Mario De Niro Jr. ...

New trends in exhibition

An ad for The Tingler (1959), focusing on William Castle's Percepto gimmick. "GUARANTEED: 'The Tingler' will break loose in the theatre while you are in the audience. As you enter the theatre you will receive instructions how to guard yourself against attack by THE TINGLER!"

In the late 1950s, William Castle was even better known as a B filmmaker than Corman. A long-time director and producer of mostly low-end movies for Columbia, including several entries in the studio's Whistler detective series, he left in 1957 to establish the independent Susina Productions with writer Robb White. Castle was the great innovator of the B-movie publicity gimmick. Audiences of Macabre (1958), an $86,000 production distributed by Allied Artists, were invited to take out insurance policies to cover potential death from fright. With this film and his next collaboration with White, House on Haunted Hill (1958), another Allied release, Castle "combine[d] the saturation advertising campaign perfected by Columbia and Universal in their Sam Katzman and William Alland packages with centralized and standardized publicity stunts and gimmicks that had previously been the purview of the local exhibitor."^[20] Castle and White's 1959 creature feature The Tingler, distributed by Columbia, featured his most famous gimmick, Percepto: at the film's climax, buzzers attached to select theater seats would unexpectedly rattle a few audience members, prompting either appropriate screams or even more appropriate laughter.^[21] The Tingler is a 1963 film by the American producer and director William Castle. ... William Castle (April 24, 1914–May 31, 1977) born William Schloss, was an American film director, producer, and actor. ... William Castle (April 24, 1914–May 31, 1977) born William Schloss, was an American film director, producer, and actor. ... House on Haunted Hill is a 1959 horror film. ... The Tingler is a 1963 film by the American producer and director William Castle. ...

The growth of the drive-in theater market was one of the major spurs to the expansion of the independent low-budget film industry. As of January 1, 1945, there were 96 drive-ins in the United States; a decade later, the number had passed 3,700.^[22] Unpretentious pictures with simple, familiar plots and reliable shock effects—that is, B pictures in both production values and aesthetic spirit if not by the older, more precise industrial definition—were ideally suited for auto-based film viewing, with all its attendant distractions. The phenomenon of the drive-in movie became one of the defining symbols of American popular culture in the 1950s. Over the course of the decade, many local television stations began showing B genre films in late-night slots, popularizing the notion of the midnight movie. In the spring of 1954, Los Angeles TV station KABC expanded on the concept by having an appropriately offbeat host introduce the films: on Saturday nights, The Vampira Show, with Maila Nurmi as the titular MC, screened low-budget horror and suspense movies, including at least one that would become a cult classic—Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour, produced in 1945 for $117,000. Variations on the Vampira format were soon running at stations around the country.^[23] Hulls Drive In Theatre, outside Lexington, Virginia A drive-in theater is a form of cinema structure consisting of a large screen, a projection booth, a concession stand and a large parking area for automobiles. ... January 1 is the first day of the calendar year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. ... 1945 (MCMXLV) was a common year starting on Monday. ... Midnight movies were popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, before VCRs became readily available; showings typically began at midnight, hence the name. ... KABC-TV (Channel 7, branded as ABC7) is the American Broadcasting Company owned television station in the Greater Los Angeles area market, and is the most-watched television station in Southern California. ... Maila Nurmi (born Maila Syrjäniemi, December 21, 1921 in Petsamo, Finland — now Pechenga, Russia) created the well-remembered 1950s character of Vampira. ... A cult classic is a cultural artifact (e. ... Edgar G. Ulmer - Wikipedia /**/ @import /w/skins-1. ... Detour is a 1945 film noir cult classic that stars Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake and Edmund MacDonald. ...

Increasingly, American-made genre films were being joined by foreign movies acquired cheaply and dubbed for the U.S. market. Promoter Joseph E. Levine was the crucial figure in this development. In 1956, he financed the shooting of new footage with American actor Raymond Burr that was edited into the Japanese sci-fi horror film Godzilla. The Americanized version was distributed by Levine's Embassy Pictures as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! In 1959, Embassy acquired the worldwide rights to a cheaply made movie starring an American-born bodybuilder as one of the original superheroes. Steve Reeves had appeared in all of two films previously; his debut was in the independent production Jail Bait (1954), directed by Edward D. Wood, Jr. On top of a $125,000 purchase price for his import, Levine then spent $1.5 million on advertising and publicity, a virtually unprecedented amount.^[24] The New York Times was nonplussed: "Hercules, an Italianmade spectacle film dubbed in English, is the kind of picture that normally would draw little more than yawns in the film market. It would have, that is, had it not been that promoter Joseph E. Levine has launched the movie throughout the country with a deafening barrage of publicity. The exploitation film, which has been taken over by Warner Brothers for distribution, opened yesterday at 135 theatres in the New York area alone."^[25] Levine counted on opening-weekend box office for his profits, booking the film "into as many cinemas as he could for a week's run, then withdrawing it before poor word-of-mouth withdrew it for him."^[26] The strategy was a smashing success: the film earned $4.7 million in domestic rentals alone. Just as valuable to the bottom line, it was even more successful overseas.^[27] Within a few decades, Hollywood would be dominated by both movies and an exploitation philosophy very like Levine's. Joseph E. Levine (September 9, 1905 – July 31, 1987) was an American film producer. ... Raymond William Stacey Burr (May 21, 1917—September 12, 1993) was an Emmy-nominated actor and vintner, perhaps best known for his roles in the television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside. ... Godzilla ) is a 1954 Japanese science fiction film, produced by Toho Film Company Ltd. ... Embassy Pictures Corporation (aka Embassy Film Associates) was an independent studio and distributor responsible for such films as The Graduate and The Lion in Winter. ... Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is a 1956 American black-and-white science fiction film adapted from the 1954 Japanese film Godzilla, which had previously been shown subtitled in the United States in Japanese community theaters only, and was not known in Europe. ... Stephen L. Reeves (January 21, 1926 – May 5, 2000), was a bodybuilder, actor, and author. ... Edward D. Wood, Jr. ... The New York Times is a newspaper published in New York City by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. ... Steve Reeves as Hercules Hercules was the name of the English release of the 1958 Italian film Le Fatiche di Ercole starring the bodybuilder Steve Reeves. ...

Notes

The 1954 movie was adapted by George Seaton from the play. ... This article or section seems to contain too many quotations for an encyclopedia entry. ... DVD Earth vs. ... January 1 is the first day of the calendar year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. ... 1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... January 1 is the first day of the calendar year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. ... 1947 (MCMXLVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1947 calendar). ...

Sources