Word: rko
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Spitfire (RKO), completed before Katharine Hepburn left Hollywood for her Manhattan stage appearance in The Lake, is an unsatisfactory sequel to Little Women. It exhibits her as a West Virginia cabin waif named Trigger, part tomboy and part prophetess. She has a pack of Sunday School cards. Her implicit faith in their texts not only enables her, amid blubbering prayers, to heal her neighbors with hookworm, but also causes her beneficiaries to regard her as a witch. When not engaged in faith-healing, little Trigger throws stones at her acquaintances, abuses an idiot girl friend, steals a sick baby, falls...
...Lost Patrol (RKO) is an account of what happens to twelve members of a British cavalry troop in Mesopotamia in 1915. Arabs, firing from ambush, kill the troop's captain. The rest reach an oasis. The first night, Arabs shoot a sentry, steal the horses. The next morning a cockney soldier climbs a palm tree to get a look at the enemy. He topples down with a bullet in his heart. The sergeant (Victor McLaglen) draws lots, sends two of his men to scout for help. They come back dead, strapped to the backs of horses. A rescue plane...
Hips, Hips, Hooray (RKO). "Frisby's Beauty Products" is another business enterprise in which girls sing, dance and tub. The opulent proprietress (Thelma Todd) and a pretty salesgirl (Dorothy Lee) meet two preposterous persons (Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey) who sell flavored lipstick. They dance a lively ballet in a stranger's office, plug a pleasant song: "Keep On Doin' What You're Doin.' " Admirers of the agonized smile of small Wheeler and the brisk dignity of cigar-chewing Woolsey will relish the automobile race which they win after a cyclone whirls them up into...
...Kong (RKO), sponsored rather by economy than inspiration, makes mediocre use of the mechanical monsters which littered RKO studios after last year's production of King Kong. Unlike famed Kong, 30-ft. prehistoric whatnot who, transplanted to Manhattan, was shot by airplanes off the top of the Empire State Building, his son is a mild hobgoblin, with small taste for adventure. When Robert Armstrong and Helen Mack (instead of Fay Wray, who aroused his father's lust) arrive to hunt for hidden treasure on his South Sea island, he greets them hospitably, defends them against hostile natives...
...some quips which may cause some cinemagoers to wonder what Will Hays is doing. Typical sequence: a drunk loudly advocating that "Our merchandise be placed in slot machines on every corner, in case of emergency" only to discover that he is in the wrong convention. Flying Down to Rio (RKO). In the current cycle of musicomedies there are three major types: 1) elaborate revues, with plots based on backstage activities or neo-Freudian dreams, like Roman Scandals; 2) naive comedies based on the real careers of the actors involved, like Going Hollywood (see col. 1); 3) semi-sophisticated romances like...