were more ambitious: White Zombie (1932), directed by Victor Halperin and starring Béla Lugosi, is now regarded as the archetypal zombie movie, though it was poorly received at the time. It was picked up by United Artists for distribution after it lost deals with Columbia and the small Educational Pictures. On occasion, a low-end movie would get separated from the pack. Reviewing the 77-minute Universal crime melodrama Rio (1939), The New York Times declared that director "John Brahm's impact on the Class B picture is producing one of the strangest sound effects in recent cinema history. It is that of an unmistakable B buzzing like an A." Bs from major to minor: 1940s By 1940, the average production cost of an American feature was $400,000, a negligible increase over ten years. A number of small Hollywood companies had folded around the turn of the decade, including the ambitious Grand National, but a new firm, Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), emerged as third in the Poverty Row hierarchy behind Republic and Monogram. The double feature, never universal, was still the prevailing exhibition model: in 1941, 50 percent of theaters were double-billing exclusively, with additional numbers screening under the policy part-time. In the early 1940s, legal pressure forced the studios to replace seasonal block booking with packages generally limited to five pictures (MGM carried on with blocks of twelve for a while). Restrictions were also placed on the majors' ability to enforce blind bidding. These were crucial factors in the progressive shift by most of the Big Five over to A-film production, making the smaller studios even more important as B-movie suppliers. In 1944, for instance, MGM, Paramount, Fox, and Warners released a total of ninety-five features: fourteen had B-level budgets of $200,000 or less; eleven were budgeted between $200,000 and $500,000, a range encompassing programmers as well as straight B movies on the lower end; and seventy were A budgeted at $0.5 million or more. In late 1946, executives at the newly merged Universal-International announced that no U-I feature would run less than seventy minutes; supposedly, all B pictures were to be discontinued, even if they were in the midst of production. The studio did release three more sub-70-minute films: two Cinecolor westerns, The Michigan Kid and The Vigilantes Return, in 1947; the self-explanatory Arctic Manhunt in 1949. Fox also phased out B production in 1946, releasing low-budget unit chief Bryan Foy,