This article investigates an alleged link between US organized crime and the UK’s Hammer Film Productions Ltd that is said to have operated via Meyer Lansky (the notorious Syndicate casino lynchpin) and Eliot Hyman, the latter being head of Seven Arts Productions Ltd, a US film production company. It does so by first examining the significant business link between Hammer and Seven Arts, which encompassed many Hammer film productions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It then traces aspects of the business history of Seven Arts and its various corporate investments such as in The Grand Bahama Development Company, the latter being engineered primarily by Seven Arts board member Lou Chesler, whose nickname was ‘The Big Fat Money Machine’. It concludes that the link between Seven Arts and the organized crime Syndicate was certainly real for a specific period of time, but it was limited primarily to some of the business operations of Chesler, the removal of whom from the company was engineered by Hyman after the controversial link to Lansky became apparent in the early 1960s.

本文调查了美国有组织犯罪与英国 Hammer Film Productions Ltd 之间的所谓联系，据说该公司通过 Meyer Lansky（臭名昭著的 Syndicate 赌场关键人物）和 Eliot Hyman 运作，后者是美国电影 Seven Arts Productions Ltd 的负责人制作公司。为此，它首先检查了 Hammer 和七艺之间的重要商业联系，其中包括 1950 年代末和 1960 年代初的许多 Hammer 电影作品。然后它追溯了七艺的商业历史及其各种企业投资，例如大巴哈马开发公司，后者主要由七艺董事会成员 Lou Chesler 设计，他的绰号是“大发钱机”。