Word: riskin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Deeds Goes to Town (Columbia). Columbia's star team of Writer Robert Riskin and Director Frank Capra are co-masters of a unique kind of U. S. comedy, part farce, part fantasy and part pure hokum, which has been often imitated but never successfully copied since they brought it to the screen in It Happened One Night. This time, in Clarence Budington Kelland's ingenious story about the misfortunes of a humble young man who inherits $20,000,000, they have a perfect show case for their specialty...
...essence of Riskin-Capra magic to defy analysis on paper because it fits so perfectly its proper medium, the screen. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town it is applied most spectacularly to a courtroom scene in which Longfellow simultaneously proves his sanity and regains the faith in the girl he loves (Jean Arthur) which he had lost on learning that she was the reporter who made him the city's laughing stock. The scene is consequently the funniest as well as one of the most spiritually nourishing cinema climaxes of the current season...
Absent from the banquet was Columbia's expert Scenarist Robert Riskin who also collaborated with Director Frank Capra on Lady for a Day, Broadway Bill and whose The Whole Town's Talking last week had its Manhattan première (see below). Now 40, Scenarist Riskin was brought up in Baltimore, attended Columbia University for two years. After 15 years as a cinema director, playwright, free-lance producer and scenarist, he struck his stride with Lady for a Day, has since become one of Hollywood's highest-paid writers.* He lives at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, plays...
...crack scenarist like Riskin makes about $2,000 per week...
...genuinely suited to their medium, no recapitulation of the plot of The Whole Town's Talking can begin to convey its superlative qualities as entertainment. Equipped with material which they could have used as the basis for uproarious comedy or stark horror, Scenarists Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin and Director John Ford contrived to do both without giving their work at any point the appearance of a tour de force. A network of subsidiary plots-the sad misadventure of Jones's maiden aunt when she meets Killer Mannion; Mannion's astute revenge on a rival gangster...