Word: rko
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...months, like a ham actor overplaying a role, Hollywood has been beating its breast and wailing about the hard times. There is plenty of reason for wailing. Studios like Warner and RKO are carrying on only token operations; Eagle-Lion has suspended production. The foreign market is shot, the cost of making pictures has risen skyhigh, like everything else, and who can predict what damage television will eventually do to the movie industry...
Enchantment (Goldwyn; RKO Radio), a film version of Rumer Godden's novel Take Three Tenses, is a tear-squeezer which shuttles back & forth between blitz-time London and the gay old '90s. The link is an aged general (David Niven) come home to dream-and to warn the young 'uns against making the same mistakes he did. This leads to so many flashbacks that Enchantment might have sent its audiences into St. Vitus' dance, had it not been for Cameraman Gregg Toland, who completed the picture a few weeks before he died (TIME...
Blood on the Moon (RKO Radio) is a cow opera in which even the cattle behave convincingly. When they stampede, they look less like a spectacle than just a big nuisance. The bad men (Robert Preston, et al.) are also believable. Before Cowpoke Robert Mitchum gets mixed up in plot, he has a friendly shooting match with the rancher's daughter (Barbara Bel Geddes). She snipes at him as he tries to ford a stream. He retaliates by shooting the heel off her boot. At some point in this exchange of lead, love blossoms...
Joan of Arc (Sierra Pictures; RKO Radio) gives Ingrid Bergman the biggest role in her career. She almost fills it. If the rest of the movie were up to Miss Bergman, it could be rated very close to excellent. As it is, it rates A for effort...
...Dore Schary is contemplating revenge for the rough handling he got from RKO's crusty new boss, Howard Hughes, he can forget it. For "Station West," one of the last pictures Schary made at RKO before his collision with Hughes, will certainly accomplish any dark purpose he may have in mind. It stinks and it will make Mr. Hughes squirm like a rattlesnake on a lot stove...