Word: rko
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bigger & Better. Heartened by La Jolla's success, stagestruck Hollywood has a much bigger project under way. Peck, with the newly formed Actors' Company,' plans to build a $2,000,000 showplace housing a year-round theater in Beverly Hills. Former RKO Chief Peter Rathvon heads the company; its other officers are Peck, Ferrer, Rosalind Russell and Producer Jerry Wald. The project calls for the production of six plays a year for a run of at least six weeks each, with every member of a star-cluttered board of directors already agreed to appear every season...
Mighty Joe Young (Arko; RKO Radio), a fine piece of action-fantasy, provides the most stupendous spectacle of simian shenanigans since King Kong defied attacking airplanes from the mooring mast of the Empire State Building (1933). Its trick photography is admirable, its whopping implausibility almost impeccable. Best of all, it is such a gigantic, reckless spoof, that it is practically irresistible...
...Steal (RKO Radio) is a melodrama with some real assets: 1) it was handsomely photographed against handsome Mexican backgrounds; 2) it has one of the fastest and longest chases of the current season; 3) it never once pauses long enough to draw a serious breath...
Roughshod (RKO Radio) is a modest little film which offers several minor but pleasant surprises. It is a western, but it is hardly recognizable as such, since it was filmed in black & white against a landscape not even remotely resembling a Grand National Park. Its story is peopled mostly by quiet, plausible characters who engage in no horsy heroics and in only one shooting fracas. In fact, its hero (Robert Sterling) openly confesses to a distaste for manslaughter...
Director Mark Robson, who made the picture for RKO shortly before rocketing into the limelight with Champion (TIME, April 11), imprinted it with several signs of his fresh style. For one thing, there is an intelligent use of sound. Small, natural noises-the clop of hooves and the rattle of stones under the wagon wheels-take on weight and value. Spots of unbroken silence have the quality of noonday sunlight on an empty plain. Other refreshing and honest touches: the homely treatment of four frontier chippies (including Gloria Grahame); the persuasively intimate feel of the western countryside; the sensitive cinematic...