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United States Pictures (also known asUnited States Productions) was the name of themotion picture production company belonging toMilton Sperling who wasHarry Warner's (of theWarner Bros. studio) son-in-law.
Sperling was a highly experiencedscreenwriter andproducer with20th Century Fox and other studios who had just returned from hisWorld War II service in theU.S. Marine Corps Photographic Unit. Warner Bros. offered Sperling an independent production company that would useWarner Bros. studio resources and financing to makemotion pictures that would be released by the studio. In the post World War II era, theHollywoodmajor studios were beginning to find the idea of purchasing completed motion pictures from independentfilm production companies more economical than producing the films themselves (althoughUnited Artists had done this decades earlier, acting as a distributor for independent films since its establishment in 1919).[1]
Beginning withFritz Lang'sCloak and Dagger (1946), followed byRaoul Walsh'sPursued (1947), Sperling's United States Pictures made a total of 14 films. The last two,Samuel Fuller'sMerrill's Marauders (1962) andKen Annakin'sBattle of the Bulge (1965) were filmed in thePhilippines andSpain respectively. Sperling found that the Filipino and Spanish governments and film companies thought they were dealing with a branch of theUnited States Government due to the name of the company and provided superb cooperation.
The pre-1960 film library was first sold to Jayark Films in 1960,[2] then these were sold, along with the Cagney Enterprises and Venus films that Jayark bought,[3] to Golden Arrow Films in 1965, and finally they sell the group to Richard Feiner & Company in 1969, before transferring toRepublic Pictures in 1986. Feiner subsequently suedParamount Pictures in 2011, and the case was settled in 2013.[4][5]
The United States Pictures marked with an (*) signifies Milton Sperling contributed to the screenplay.