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." 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. 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. 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." The era's most provocative and unsettling fantasies were made for B-level money. Director Don Siegel's Invasion of the