Word: riskin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...awards, valued by Hollywood purely for the publicity attached to winning them, five went to Columbia's famed comedy, It Happened One Night (TIME, Feb. 26, 1934): production; direction (Frank Capra); performances (Claudette Colbert & Clark Gable); adaptation (Robert Riskin). Columbia got two more, best musical scoring and sound recording, with One Night of Love. Best original story was Manhattan Melodrama by Arthur Caesar. Best shorts were The Tortoise and the Hare, La Cucaracha, City of Wax. Best song was "The Continental...
...goes back to the racetracks whence he came, enters his horse, Broadway Bill, in the Derby and sees him win against heavy odds. In outline this is the story the cinema has been telling for a decade. On the screen it is something else again. Gaily adapted by Robert Riskin, ably directed by Frank Capra (It Happened One Night, Lady for a Day), it becomes one of the most wisely amusing and genuinely original comedies of the year, an up-to-date sporting print with bright colors and clear lines. Difficult to analyze and impossible to imitate, the hallmark...
...Night). A chunky Italian with short fingers and round, glossy eyes, he has a fine sense of human comedy, an aptitude for "gags" that dates back to the days when he was "gagman" for Hal Roach's Our Gang. He has collaborated on all his hits with Writer Robert Riskin, considers that no good actor can become a has-been, asks his cast for advice before making a scene but seldom follows it. His opinion of Clark Gable: "As soon as he walked into the studio I knew he was a comedian. It was written all over his face...
Instead of attempting a journalistic study of bus-travel, regularly punctuated by comic touches, Director Frank Capra and Robert Riskin who adapted Samuel Hopkins Adams' story, fused the two. When Gable and Colbert hail a Ford for a lift the driver sings them a tuneless paean on the pleasures of hitchhiking. When they stop for gas, he tries to drive off with their battered suitcase. The quick flow of comic incident through It Happened One Night reaches its fantastic conclusion in a wedding at which the groom arrives in an autogyro while the bride runs away...
...Carver's Profession (Columbia) is a solemn little problem picture, based on the notion that woman's place is in the home. The banality of this theme is only less startling than the fact that Robert Riskin, who wrote and adapted the story, was clearly under the delusion that he was proposing an explosively novel theory for behavior. This odd combination of circumstances has a peculiar effect. It gives the picture a disarming sincerity; because Fay Wray in a serious emotional role develops a skillful and moving performance, the trite machinations of the plot acquire an incongruous validity...