Word: rko
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Victoria the Great (RKO Radio). Shaking from her pretty shoulders the garish costumes of two previous cinema roles-as Nell Gwyn and Peg Woffington -Britain's beloved Anna Neagle last week traced with pomp and piety Queen Victoria's long reign. Because the film is lengthy, because its subject is the most sanctified one in British history, awed critics detoured around its rough spots with wistful allusions to Helen Hayes and Victoria Regina, vaguely said that the picture, presenting almost precisely the same episodes as did Laurence Housman's play, was perhaps about as good...
...proof that Producer Abbott's sympathetic impulses are guided by a hard head or a hot hunch, Broadway wiseacres pointed to his phenomenal success with last season's Room Service, which he sold to RKO Radio for $255,000. Room Service was a washed-up play property when unknown Playwrights John Murray & Allen Boretz brought it to Abbott. Sam Harris had tried it out in Philadelphia two years earlier with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer money. It was a $23,000 flop; When the Harris option lapsed, Abbott looked at the script, felt warmly toward it because it was about...
Breakfast for Two (RKO Radio) involves honored Tragedians Herbert Marshall and Barbara Stanwyck with pub-crawling, ventriloquism, loaded boxing gloves, custard pies and a butler named Butch (Eric Blore). They seem to enjoy the change...
...King (RKO-Radio) places Joe E. Brown, his great mouth and banshee yawp in the newspaper business, to the patent disadvantage of all concerned. In the course of his six-reel career he frustrates craven intrigues in a turbulent Graustarkian monarchy, out-halfwits his press rival, Paul Kelly, wins the hand of Puppet Princess Helen Mack...
...share, cutting the play manager's accordingly. Hollywood, accustomed to making the manager a dummy figure and further controlling play property destinies by entering into noncompetitive bidding accords with other studios, promptly stopped backing plays. Simultaneously seven studios (Warner Bros., Universal, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Twentieth Century-Fox, Paramount, RKO-Radio, Columbia) set up the Bureau of New Plays, with canny Theresa Helburn (see p. 55) at the helm, offered advances on royalties, fellowships; hoped to corner young talent. Now in its second year, the Bureau has paid awards, but has so far found no play worth producing...