This installment of the RKO story does something that all but the very first one did not - talk about the studio and the times in which movies were being made in general.
RKO had some really good years during the 40s. As one interviewee said, you could make a movie about almost anything and it would make money. RKO's film "Hitler's Children" cost very little to make and made three million at the box office, for example. Also, Val Lewton had a series of psychological thriller hits such as Cat People during this time. These films are more along the line of horror and really had nothing to do with the war, but people loved them. After Lewton left RKO, he really did nothing worth mentioning and died in 1951 at only age 46.
When the war ended, RKO became a pioneer in film noir. Because director Edward Dmytryk, Jane Greer, and Robert Mitchum were alive and well when their interviews were done, they could tell a great deal about this period in film and talk about individual films. Dory Schary, in charge of production at RKO at the time, encouraged the daring and often controversial storytelling that defined film noir. To this day RKO is often called "The House of Noir".
But then the "Red Scares" and the age of HUAC came up and RKO's ground breaking films suddenly became considered some kind of threat to America, supposedly containing Communist messages in code. One of the oddest things in film history is how Dmytryk's film "Tender Comrade", a 1943 story of wartime assembly line women pooling their paltry individual wages to raise their standard of living, suddenly was considered Communist propaganda. It is very available via Turner Classic Movies and the Warner Archive if you want to see how ridiculous that assertion is. But the odd thing is, when Ginger Rogers is asked about it (she starred in it), she tries to backpedal away from the thing saying there was stuff in that film she did not believe in. It seems she still had HUAC PTSD decades later.
The episode concludes with paranoid eccentric Howard Hughes buying RKO in 1948, and soon nothing will be the same or even sane at the studio. But the details are left to the final installment of the RKO story.
RKO had some really good years during the 40s. As one interviewee said, you could make a movie about almost anything and it would make money. RKO's film "Hitler's Children" cost very little to make and made three million at the box office, for example. Also, Val Lewton had a series of psychological thriller hits such as Cat People during this time. These films are more along the line of horror and really had nothing to do with the war, but people loved them. After Lewton left RKO, he really did nothing worth mentioning and died in 1951 at only age 46.
When the war ended, RKO became a pioneer in film noir. Because director Edward Dmytryk, Jane Greer, and Robert Mitchum were alive and well when their interviews were done, they could tell a great deal about this period in film and talk about individual films. Dory Schary, in charge of production at RKO at the time, encouraged the daring and often controversial storytelling that defined film noir. To this day RKO is often called "The House of Noir".
But then the "Red Scares" and the age of HUAC came up and RKO's ground breaking films suddenly became considered some kind of threat to America, supposedly containing Communist messages in code. One of the oddest things in film history is how Dmytryk's film "Tender Comrade", a 1943 story of wartime assembly line women pooling their paltry individual wages to raise their standard of living, suddenly was considered Communist propaganda. It is very available via Turner Classic Movies and the Warner Archive if you want to see how ridiculous that assertion is. But the odd thing is, when Ginger Rogers is asked about it (she starred in it), she tries to backpedal away from the thing saying there was stuff in that film she did not believe in. It seems she still had HUAC PTSD decades later.
The episode concludes with paranoid eccentric Howard Hughes buying RKO in 1948, and soon nothing will be the same or even sane at the studio. But the details are left to the final installment of the RKO story.