B means low-budget, not necessarily bad. B movies were made to occupy the bottom half of double features at the time when US movie theater patrons could see two films for the price of one ticket: a main feature (the "A" movie) followed by a lower-budget, shorter feature (the "B" movie). The Wikipedia entry for B movies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_movie) does a good job of describing the phenomenon, and I would advise you to go there if you want to learn more about how B movies came to be.
I haven't found any budget figure for The amazing Mr. X, but it was distributed by Eagle-Lion, a production company and distributor that specialized in B movies, with budgets lower than half a million dollars. This amount is about half of what the average movie production cost at the end of the 1940s, and according to the American Film Institute even an average Twentieth Century-Fox production like Kiss of death (1947) cost over two million dollars to make (http://www.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=25232), although this figure includes advertising costs as well.
The amazing Mr X is a good film, but there are clear signs that it was made on a lower budget. First, the running time (78mn) is consistent with the typical running time of a B movie (60 to 80mn) and shorter than the typical running time of a main feature (100mn or more), resulting in lower photographic film costs. Second, the cast is very small: about a half-dozen actors, none of whom were marquee names (major stars such as Claudette Colbert or Joan Crawford commanded $150,000 per film in the 1940s, and having one or more on board would have caused costs to balloon). Third, there are only a handful of sets, even if they are decently made. Finally, the nice cinematography shouldn't be taken as a sign of a large budget, as it was the work of John Alton, a renowned cinematographer who spent practically his whole career working on B movies and who was skilled at getting around budget limitations.
So, it is a B movie, and you could imagine a spiritualist-themed double feature with Nightmare alley as the main feature followed by The amazing Mr. X.
B movies are really all over the map in terms of quality. Lower budgets don't automatically mean wooden acting, scripts full of holes, shoddy sets and poor cinematography, direction or editing, although the financial limitations frequently lead to one or more of these afflictions.
Eagle-Lion was at the high-end of the "poverty row studios" (the studios specialized in low-budget films), and the films they produced or distributed had a more polished feel. Some are even memorable, such as T-Men (1947, made on a $450,000 budget), He walked by night (1948) and Hollow triumph (1948), all three with John Alton as the cinematoprapher. Other poverty row studios such as Producers Releasing Corporation and Monogram Pictures worked with even lower budgets than Eagle-Lion. For example, Detour (1945) was made on a $30,000 budget. On such low budgets, serious flaws were much more likely to appear, which is why B movies have a bad reputation in some corners.
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