You may have heard that RKO Studios was saved by a big ape. While it is true that the lookout for RKO was not exactly on a par with MGM or Warner Brothers, to suggest that the success of King Kong saved the struggling studio from going under is a bit of an understatement. The fact is that by the end of the year that King Kong was released, RKO had also released to great commercial success the very first in a long and tremendously popular series of musicals teaming a short little bald guy who could dance a little bit named Fred Astaire and a bright-eyed blonde who could do the same moves backward named Ginger Rogers.
An RKO movie is recognizable, like most of the classic movies from the studio system’s heyday, by the opening images. There was that antenna beeping out a transmission and those strange words A Radio Picture. A radio picture seems to be one of those oxymorons, like John McCain for Change. Radio means words without images in the sense that we know it, right? So wouldn’t a radio picture be something that could not exist? So, what’s the deal? Who cares; RKO may have had a weird name but they were responsible for some of the most amazing movies in Hollywood history.
RKO essentially did little of consequence before that magical year of 1933. That is not to say that RKO did not have produce some titles that have stood the test of time before the big ape came along to “save” the little studio (1931’s Cimarron was the last Western to win a Best Picture Oscar before Dances With Wolves), but it would be after Kong, Astaire and Katherine Hepburn and a few other women of a diminutive nature that established RKO as one of the premier studios of the Great Depression.
RKO is to be admired for being the non-conformist studio of its day. Whereas the average MGM production is instantly recognizable for its lavish production values, and the average Warner Brothers film was notable for its grittiness, you can’t easily tell if a movie was made by RKO or not. The musicals of Astaire and Rogers are could easily have been made by MGM and most people probably think they were. Of Human Bondage, the movie that made Bette Davis a star, looks every bit like a Warner Brothers movie from the late 30s. RKO could easily produce classic screwball comedies like The Mad Miss Manton, Bringing Up Baby, and Vivacious Lady and then put out masterful thrillers like Hitchcock’s Suspicion and Notorious and then produce all those wonderful Val Lewton atmospheric horror movies like I Walked With a Zombie and Cat People and terrific action movies like Gunga Din.
Of course, RKO was also the studio that brought a ridiculously young radio and Broadway personality named Orson Welles to Hollywood, handing over to him the keys to the studio. The result was the one film that has appeared at the top of more lists of greatest movies ever made than any other: Citizen Kane. Of course, let’s not give too much credit to the suits at RKO. Like the executives at any entertainment conglomerate, RKO did not realize what they had in Orson Welles and their utter inability to recognize that the single greatest film director in the world was all theirs resulted in Welles never again having the ability to put out a film exactly as he envisioned it. Even so, one can only imagine that Orson would never even have been able to produce Citizen Kane at MGM or Columbia. Even at Warner Brothers Welles would probably never have been able to finish it.
RKO does stick out like a sore thumb when one looks back at the golden age of Hollywood. It is practically impossible to watch a marathon of RKO movies and realize that you are, indeed, watching a marathon of movies made entirely at one studio. The string of actors who marched through the production line at RKO reads like a who’s who of Hollywood legends: Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles, Astaire and Rogers, Bette Davis, Chester Morris, Lucille Ball, Herbert Marshall, and Joan Fontaine. If you were to read that a marathon was being shown featuring that lineup of actors you’d probably guess the studio behind it was either MGM or Warner Brothers.
RKO was the first of the big five studios that made up the Hollywood studio system to go under. By the late 1950s RKO was essentially no more. Eventually, of course, none of those studios would be what they once were; the odd thing is that each of the more successful studios that would survive the upheaval of the breakdown of the studio system would come to resemble RKO more than they resembled their themselves during the height of that system.
Sources:
http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/RKO-Radio-Pictures.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~hdtv/History/RKOGeneral/RKOPictures.html
