Irving Allen was one of the busier, if not always one of the classier, movie producers of the post-World War II era, with a string of successful action-adventure films stretching from the end of the 1940s into the early '70s. Born Irving Applebaum in Poland in 1905, he entered the movie industry as an editor at Universal in 1929, just as synchronized sound was making editing into a new kind of art, and later worked for Paramount and Republic. He moved up to directing on short subjects with Forty Boys and a Song (1941) — billed as Irving Applebaum — and later made a string of low-budget features, including Avalanche (1946) and 16 Fathoms Deep (1948), as Irving Allen. The latter movie, a remake of an old adventure-thriller from the early '30s, demonstrated his cleverness as a producer — Allen turned it into a test vehicle for a then-new German photographic process called Anscocolor, which Hollywood was looking at as a possible lower-cost alternative to Technicolor. As a result, all of the major trade papers and studio production chiefs paid attention to this low-budget film, which also achieved a somewhat wider release than would normally have been the case. On the other hand, the movie's flaws also highlighted Allen…  » Read more