The refreshingly brutal candour of 'The RKO Story'

On a recent trip through Palmerston North I stopped at the excellent Thorndon Books second-hand bookshop near the city centre (533 Main St). I was lucky enough to find in the film section a hardcover book from 1982 called The RKO Story by Richard B. Jewell. This was a treasure trove of history and reviews listing all of the hundreds of movies produced by RKO Pictures from 1928 until the end of the 1950s when megalomaniacal studio owner Howard Hughes brought the company to ruin.

What quickly became obvious was the particular editorial approach of author Jewell, who worked at RKO for almost 50 years. Seemingly encyclopedic knowledge and excellent research are evident in Jewell's reviews of RKO's pictures, which were often B-movies such as cheaply made westerns, detective stories or Tarzan pictures, or remakes of their own titles such as umpteen versions of Seven Keys to Baldpate, but ranged as high as the incredible King Kong, Citizen Kane, It's A Wonderful Life and Notorious in occasional feats of dramatic excellence. But despite working at the studio for nearly half a century, he is brutally honest about the remarkably low quality of many of the films RKO put out, which makes for highly entertaining reading for film buffs.

Below are just a selection of some of the more pungent, and at times rampantly score-settling analyses Jewell offers in his sweeping summary of RKO film output:

---

Pity the poor viewers who had to suffer through The Lady Refuses (1931), an unsavoury melodrama directed with contemptuous indifference by George Archainbaud... Wallace Smith's screenplay, based on a Robert Milton-Guy Bolton story, made for a gruelling 72 minutes, with the going especially painful whenever tongue-tied John Darrow... was on screen. 

---

Panama Flo (1932) was such a rampant disaster that only one question seems relevant: how did this picture ever come to be made? Producer Charles R. Rogers and his associate Harry Joe Brown must have noticed the narrative weaknesses that ran through Garrett Fort's script, but they never bothered to rectify them. The most damaging of the incoherencies was the sudden transformation of Charles Bickford, the obvious heavy for much of the story, into the romantic hero, and the concomitant flip-flop of Robert Armstrong from apparent champion to deceitful murderer. Perhaps the filmmakers (including director Ralph Murphy) expected the steamy jungle atmosphere and heroine Helen Twelvetrees' unbridled histrionics to defuse the audience's critical sensibilities; instead viewers were confounded and angered by the degree of pictorial ineptitude which they witnessed in this absurd story of a honky-tonk girl stranded in Panama, who ends up as housekeeper to a man who will otherwise send her to jail for fleecing his pocketbook. 

---

Rockabye (1932) was an out-and-out disaster that damaged David Selznick's credibility precisely when the renewal of his RKO contract was under consideration. The studio bought the rights to Lucia Bronder's teary paean to mother love from Gloria Swanson, then rushed it into production because of certain commitments to exhibitors and to Constance Bennett, its star... George Fitzmaurice, who had directed several Greta Garbo films, as well as Rudolph Valentino's triumphant Son Of The Sheik, was borrowed from MGM, and Selznick negotiated a deal with Paramount to use Phillips Holmes as the leading man. The finished film was so wretched that George Cukor was summoned to direct two weeks of retakes, with Joel McCrea taking over Holmes' role. The salvage job was eventually deemed worthy of release, though it was still one of the year's most abysmal efforts. Bennett was criminally miscast as an actress who forsakes her lover rather than disrupt the twin spiritual harmonies of family and motherhood. The only hearts broken by this weeper belonged to RKO executives. 

---

It is sometimes said that a film is so bad that it's good, meaning that the sheer ineptitude of the undertaking may have a perverse entertainment value. Down To Their Last Yacht (1934, GB: Hawaiian Nights) would very probably qualify for such a description by today's campy standards, but in its own time it came to be regarded as the worst film ever produced by RKO. The basic idea of millionaires forced to live on their yacht and work for a living had possibilities, but this plot soon disintegrated to be replaced by a South Sea island story full of nonsensical pandemonium. At the end, the yacht is blown to bits so rich and poor can live together and think about nothing but love. The film had a number of amazing ingredients: loin-clothed natives behaving like gangsters, a blonde queen (Mary Boland) who enjoys feeding her guests to the sharks, and hula dancers who obviously learned to shimmy in a Broadway chorus line (dance director Dave Gould) - but there was little humour, less social comment and no intelligence to be found in the surreal production. The other bewildered performers who struggled against the tidal wave of inanity included Sidney Fox, Polly Moran, Sidney Blackmer, Ned Sparks, Sterling Holloway, Marjorie Gateson, Irene Franklin, Charles Coleman and Tom Kennedy. One would think they had all wandered onto the set one day and tried to make up a Polynesian musical as they went along, although the credits (director Paul Sloane; screenplay Marion Dix and Lynn Starling; story Herbert Fields and Lou Brock) belied this possibility. The film's biggest loser was Lou Brock. Much can be forgiven an indulgent producer if his efforts are successful. Brock was renowned around the RKO lot for his tendency to allow pictures to overrun their budget estimates and for his sanguine disregard for proper authorizations. Since both Melody Cruise and Flying Down To Rio had been hits, his carryings-on were tolerated until he completed this appallingly bad picture. In short order, Mr Brock was pounding the Hollywood pavements, looking for a new job. The (also wretched) songs included: 'South Sea Bolero' May Steiner, Ann Ronell: 'Tiny Little Finger On Your Hand' Val Burton, Will Jason; 'Malakamokalua' Cliff Friend, Sidney Mitchell; 'Funny Little World', 'Beach Boy' Ann Ronell.

---

A remake of a 1930 Conrad Nagel-Lila Lee vehicle, Second Wife (1936) was unquestionably the worst RKO film of the year (Sylvia Scarlett notwithstanding). Audiences in theatres everywhere hooted its trite story, platitudinous dialogue and extended histrionics. Thomas Lennon's dehydrated script (based on a play by Fulton Oursler), aggravated by Edward Killy's meat-axe direction, left the actors between the proverbial rock and hard spot. Walter Abel played the husband who is faced with a choice between journeying abroad to comfort his ill, 10-year-old son or remaining at home with his new wife, who is about to have their first child. An intelligent decision would have been for Abel to stay out of this picture in the first place. 

---

If RKO executives had had any choice in the matter, Scattergood Survives A Murder (1942) would have had a different title and denouement, for the brass was anxious to be rid of Coldriver's leading citizen and his consistently third-rate pictures. But the Pyramid Pictures Corporation contract called for one more Scattergood picture, and one more there had to be. Michael L. Simmons' screenplay, directed by Christy Cabanne, was an enervated whodunit requiring the protagonist (Guy Kibbee) to shed his guise as a storekeeper and have a go at amateur detective work. The strange deaths of two spinsters who leave their fortune to a house cat is his provocation and, after determining that the old ladies' demise was not accidental, he baits a trap which snares the murderer. 

---

The first mistake RKO made with Mama Loves Papa (1945) was to pay Paramount $8500 for the rights to such a property. The second mistake occurred when the studio assigned Charles E. Roberts and Monte Brice to prepare an original script that would use the aforementioned title. And the third mistake was to put said screenplay into production. A dreary fable about a mollycoddled clerk who becomes a playground commissioner and gets involved with a crooked manufacturer of recreational equipment, it featured Leon Errol and Elisabeth Risdon as the title characters... Leon Errol toiled extra hard to bring the movie to life, but it was clearly a corpse from the start. The producer was Ben Stoloff, the executive producer Sid Rogell and the ineffectual director Frank Strayer.

---

Made in garish Technicolor on the largest budget thus far expended by RKO ($3,200,000), Tycoon was a full-blown stinker, hamstrung by a ridiculous plot, artificial conflicts, romance without passion and atrocious acting. Borden Chase and John Twist's screenplay, adapted from a novel by C. E. Scoggins, concerned a feud between engineer John Wayne, who is attempting to build a railroad through the Andes Mountains, and his haughty employer Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Hardwicke played the tycoon of the title a financial big shot who objects to Wayne's methods and, even more so, to the roughneck's romance with his daughter Laraine Day. As the film unfolds, Wayne's mad obsession with his dangerous job sends everyone diving for cover, including his associates and the beloved Miss Day. And yet, the star's overblown performance never succeeded in making the character either titanic or believable, a feat he would accomplish magnificently when portraying similar individuals in Howard Hawks' Red River (1948) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Since the other characters were also generally unconvincing, the finger of guilt pointed in the direction of the writers, and of director Richard Wallace, who must have been concentrating on the spectacular action scenes while every thing else siphoned down the drain. RKO's money went along as well; the final loss was $1,035,000. 

---

Purchased by RKO from Prominent Pictures for $131,250, Destination Murder (1950) was an appalling programme-filler featuring Joyce MacKenzie, Stanley Clements and Hurd Hatfield. When a gambler is killed, his daughter (MacKenzie) becomes irritated at the police department's casual attitude and decides to find the killer herself. She takes a job at the nightclub run by the man she suspects, managing to become romantically involved with Clements, Hatfield and Albert Dekker, all of whom had a hand in the murder. Don Martin's screenplay was so lamely executed that it never even bothered to explain why Miss MacKenzie's father was knocked off in the first place.

---

She Couldn't Say No (GB: Beautiful But Dangerous) sank to depths hitherto unexplored by the worst of RKO's 'A'-budget comedies. The D. D. Beauchamp-William Bowers-Richard Flournoy screenplay (story by Beauchamp) had wealthy but foolish Jean Simmons advancing on the small town of Progress, Arkansas, with a plan to repay the villagers who had donated money for an operation which saved her life when she was a child. The material rewards she bestows anonymously on the locals attracts all sorts of con artists, parasites and other avaricious interlopers to Progress, thus upsetting the town's delicate bu colic harmony. Practically every joke in the film landed with a deadening thud. The atrocious script was largely to blame, though director Lloyd Bacon might have salvaged something out of the fiasco by playing it as a black comedy - an alternative style that he clearly never even considered. Miss Simmons and physician-cum-fisherman Robert Mitchum were completely wasted, as were all the other players except Arthur Hunnicutt, who provoked a chuckle or two as the town lush... Note: This picture was the last of three releases made back-to-back to fulfil contractual obligations to Miss Simmons. Angel Face and Affair With A Stranger (both released in 1953) were the other two.

---

Susan Slept Here (1954) was another astonishingly dreadful major-budget comedy, produced by Harriet Parsons (her finale for RKO) and directed by Frank Tashlin. The story of a man-about Hollywood (Dick Powell) and a girl of 18 (Debbie Reynolds, borrowed from MGM) began on Christmas eve when a policeman, knowing Powell wants to write a serious script about juvenile delinquency, deposits teenage hellion Reynolds in the bachelor's apartment as a boon to his screenwriting research. Soon enough, a triangle develops, with green-eyed Anne Francis (borrowed from 20th Century-Fox) completing the threesome, and storyteller Powell labouring to clear up all the loose ends in a plot light years beyond his comprehension. The actual author Alex Gottlieb, who developed his script from a play by Steve Fisher and himself, intended the Technicolor production to be both sexy and humorous. In the event, it was about as attractive and amusing as an afternoon in the dentist's chair. The fickle finger also points toward Leigh Harline, who composed the nearly continuous and always awful background jazz score.

---

Wayne & Hayward in 'The Conqueror'

The Conqueror (1956) receives prominent mention in a popular book listing the 50 worst films of all time. It deserved this brand of recognition for its casting and dialogue alone. John Wayne topped the acting contingent as Temujin, the Mongol leader who captures Bortai (Susan Hayward, borrowed from 20th Century-Fox), the tempestuous daughter of a Tartar king. 'She is a woman - much woman,' Temujin observes. She, of course, hates him until he is captured by her father and tortured. Then she loves him, as he had predicted ('I shall keep you, Bortai, in response to my passion. Your hatred will kindle into love'). Bortai helps him escape, and soon he and his warriors conquer all of the Gobi Desert tribes, at which point he becomes known as Genghis Khan. There was no denying the sweep and spectacular production values of this $6 million epic which was made in CinemaScope and stereophonic sound with prints manufactured by Technicolor. There was also no way around the astoundingly ridiculous characters, bad acting and laughable writing, or the total inaccuracy of the film's treatment of Asian history... The prime mover behind the film was Howard Hughes, who took a presentation credit and later bought the picture and all available prints from RKO so he could have The Conqueror completely to himself.

---

And as a mild antidote to all that entirely legitimate cinematic snark, here's a heartening tale to close on a high:

Miracles do happen in Hollywood, despite what the sceptics say. Dorothy Wilson, an RKO secretary, was chosen to play the lead in The Age of Consent (1932), turned in a pleasing performance, and earned herself a studio contract. Director Gregory LaCava teamed Miss Wilson with Richard Cromwell (on loan from Columbia) in this interesting (and inexpensive) study of college life.

(Wilson went on to appear in a total of 20 films between 1932 and 1937. In 1936 she married scriptwriter Lewis R. Foster, who went on to win an Oscar for his script for Mr Smith Goes to Washington).

See also:

Movies: The dream factory of old Hollywood, 17 February 2021

Movies: Rich pickings at the Regal Cinema, 10 February 2020

Movies: The Paramount Theatre, 25 September 2017

Movies: The remarkable impact of My Forgotten Man, 1 May 2016

Movies: Great are the marvels of living photography, 28 September 2015