For the last five decades, Sight and Sound magazine’s every-ten-year-poll of film critics and filmmakers has always reached the same consensus – That Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane was the greatest film of all time.

But the pillars of cinematic heaven were shaken today when Sight and Sound released the results of their latest poll which states that Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo has taken the top spot, bumping Citizen Kane down to number two. Vertigo first made it onto the poll in 1972 where it tied at #11. By 1982 it was able to claw its way up to #7. In 1992 it had jumped to #4, and in 2002 it jumped again to #2.

Sight and Sound polled over 800 “film critics, academics, distributors, writers and programmers from all corners of the globe” in order to achieve the rankings announced today. (Disclosure – I was not asked to participate. The nerve.)

Here is the poll’s Top Ten -

1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)

2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)

3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)

4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)

5. Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)

7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)

10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)

You can read all of Sight And Sound‘s coverage of their annual poll here.

I have to admit that I am a bit surprised by this turn of events. Not so much that the critical group-think has shifted somewhat. That was bound to happen over time. I’m just mildly surprised that the film to unseat Welles’s masterpiece was Vertigo as I frankly don’t think it is his best work. Sure, I would put it in his top five, where it would be sharing space with Strangers On A Train, Notorious, Psycho and North By Northwest. Granted these are based on personal preference, but in a way, aren’t all these lists?

Vertigo certainly wasn’t a big hit with critics when it was first released and even when the critical move to re-evaluate Hitchcock as an artist rather than as a showman started in the 1960s, the film was not one that would be part of those discussions. But Vertigo was one of five of Hitchcock’s films that were taken out of circulation in 1973 and I am forced to wonder if its reemergence to public view ten years later led critics to embrace it a bit more enthusiastically due to its renewed availability.

A film called Dark Shadows opened last week. It shares the same name and a number of characters with a cult soap opera from the late 60s, early 70s. Both feature time-tossed vampires who join their descendants 200 years in the future. However, the film plays the story as a wacky fish-out-of-water comedy while the soap opera, which was campy because, well, it was a soap opera with a production budget of $5, portrayed the story as a somber Gothic romance.

This week, Battleship opens. It shares its name with a Milton-Bradley board game that was first introduced in 1943. The game is advertised as a game of naval strategy where players try to sink each others armadas first by guessing location of ships on a grid. The film, which was based on the game, features the U.S. Navy combating a sea-based alien invasion force.

Now, this won’t be the kind of post that criticizes Hollywood for their lack of originality. Hollywood has always adapted  works from other media for the screen. That is not necessarily a bad thing. To prove my point, let’s take a look at the Top 10 films on the 2007 version of AFI’s “100 Years…100 Movies” list.

Now, you can argue semantics about this list all night–this film should be higher, that one lower, this film included, that one not–but we can pretty much all agree that these are great films. What do we see here? We have five films based on novels or plays (The Godfather, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, Vertigo, and The Wizard of Oz), four films based on or inspired by the lives of real people (Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, Schindler’s List and Citizen Kane, which was a fictionalized account of William Randolph Hearst’s life) and one inspired by Hollywood’s history (Singin’ in the Rain). Not one wholly original, but great films nonetheless.

But those were adaptations done right. Unfortunately, Hollywood has the nasty habit of wanting to put their own stamp on properties they adapt, usually with not-so-good results. And Dark Shadows and Battleship take this habit to a dangerous and puzzling new level.

Now, I’m not naive as to think that every original work should be adapted to the screen with no changes. I realize that it would be impossible for eight seasons of a TV series, 300 pages of a novel, or 200 issues of a comic book to be squeezed into one two-hour movie. But doing a good adaptation means keeping the stuff that works, keeping the same tone and characterization, and if you are going to change anything, change it to the better. The problem lies in the fact that the film studios definition of better doesn’t really end up as being better.

This problem, unfortunately, is nothing new. Studios have been making changes to classic works from other medium for decades. Whether it be modern literature, like The Bonfire of the Vanities (Does the journalist need to be British? Why can’t it be Bruce Willis? And does Sherman McCoy have to be such a erudite jerk? Why can’t he be nice, like Tom Hanks? And why have spot-on, social satire? Wouldn’t broad comedy be better?), classic literature like The Scarlet Letter (You know what would make kids pay more attention to the book in school? If Hester diddled herself in the tub.), comic books like Jonah Hex (What? The character is basically the cowboy antihero archetype that led Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson to stardom? That will never work in films. Give him superpowers, have him stop an anacronistic weapon of mass destruction, and, please, make it campy), or video games, like Super Mario Brothers (You know who the best actors to play a pair of Italian plumbers would be? An British Cockney and a Latino American! And Dennis Hopper playing their turtle nemesis! It’s like printing money!), more than one film adaptation was ruined by studio’s “improvement.” But Dark Shadows and Battleship take these kind of changes to an entirely new, and dangerous level.

Dark Shadows is the latest example of a film trying to present a property that is loved by a large, cult audience while having the studio, or, in this case, the director put their own stamp on the project. But what it really is just an unnecessary form of this type of marketing.

While I don’t deny that Dark Shadows does have a following, the fans of the show are not exactly in the 18-35 demographic that make films a hit. It was before my time and I’m way out of that demographic.

And, really? Do you need help marketing a movie where Tim Burton directs Johnny Depp again? You could have kept the fish out of water/man out of time plot, you could have even kept the main character a vampire,  you could have kept the premise the same and not have it tie into Dark Shadows at all and people would most likely still have come to see it.

The real reason that the film is called Dark Shadows is because Tim Burton was a fan of the series and wanted to do his own take on it, a take even he knew that fans of the TV show wouldn’t like. I’m sure Burton probably sold the idea to studios using the TV shows built in fan base. But this was Burton co-opting an existing property for his own use when he could have, and should have, created something original that would have still allowed him to say what he wanted to say. Dark Shadows fans have a right to be upset.

The case with Battleship is even more absurd. It’s not really a case of an adaptation being screwed up by Hollywood, because, really, if there was any way to adapt that particular board game, it would probably an even worse film than this one.

One of the producers of this film is Hasbro, the toy company that bought out Milton Bradley and owns the rights to G.I. Joe, Transformers and, you guessed it, Battleship (And Candy Land, which also has a film in the works). What happened was that Hasbro saw how much money they could make on films with the first two properties, so they decided to make a film out of every piece of intellectual property they own, whether making it into a film made sense or not. Personally, I cannot wait for Easy-Bake Oven: The Movie.

Battleship, like Dark Shadows, is a film that could have been released under another name and still do probably the same amount of business. Also, like Dark Shadows, the demographic of the source material will probably not follow it to the big screen even it was an exact representation of the game. What we have here is a generic alien invasion flick with the twist that the invasion takes place at sea.

Yes, rumor has it that there will be a scene in the film that mimics the gameplay of the original game, and I’m fairly certain that at some point in the film we will see a character, most likely Liam Neeson’s, pull a pair of binoculars away from their faces, squint off into a point just past where the camera was placed, and utter with grim, steely reserve, “They sank my battleship” (or some variation there of). But other than that, the film could have been called Aliens At Sea and it would not have made a bit of difference, except that it would have been mocked slightly less in the press.

So this is what the state of the film adaptation is today. The source material is reduced to a name only, a name Hollywood can use to practice a new kind of originality. The names become tools for directors to work out the issues they had with the original source or companies to earn a quick buck from their intellectual property in by any means necessary. Hollywood has always been accused of not caring about the books, TV shows and comics they adapt. At least now, they are being honest about it. And they get to have the best of both worlds–a film with a recognizable public image that is an “original” creation by the Hollywood establishment.

Unfortunately, this trend will not stop here. By now we should all be familiar Michael Bay’s Ninja Turtles, which every one from Bay to co-creator Kevin Eastman have promised fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would deliver “everything that made [them] become fans in the first place.” Everything except the characters being Teenagers (they will be a bit older) or Mutants (they’re aliens). They couch these changes as “building a richer world,” as if the world that made the Turtles a pop culture phenomenon for thirty years wasn’t rich enough.

And you thought Demi Moore writhing in a bathtub was bad.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, the comic book muck monsters, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing, hit the big screen two decades apart.

While Man-Thing, who made his debut in Marvel Comics’ Savage Tales #1, cover dated May 1971, came before Swamp Thing, who debuted in DC Comics’ House of Secrets #92 cover dated July 1971, in the comics, the latter would beat the former to movie screens by more than twenty years, and even then Man-Thing would only be released internationally.

The comic book origins of the two are remarkably similar. Both were working on secret formulas in laboratories located in swamps.  Both are attacked by foes looking to gain the formula for themselves. Both are exposed to the chemicals, become grievously injured, and end up coming to rest in the swamp where the formula and mystical forces work to combine the men’s bodies with plant matter, creating a new lifeform.

Due to the close proximity of release dates of their first appearances, it would be easy to write of the similarities as coincidence. However, Swamp Thing’s co-creator, Len Wein, was roommates with Man-Thing’s co-creator, Gerry Conway. Wein even wrote the second Man-Thing story that would have been in Savage Tales #2 if the series wasn’t cancelled.

Whether it was subliminal influence or direct copying, it didn’t matter. Both characters bore more than a passing similarity to a Golden Age character called The Heap (which debuted in 1942) and each character went off into quite different directions after they first appeared—Swamp Thing becoming a sentient being searching for revenge and a cure for his condition, Man-Thing becoming an essentially mindless force of nature wreaking havoc on all evil men who crossed its path.

Swamp Thing had more success in the comic book world, starring in a number of well-received series over the years. The first, written by Wein and drawn by co-creator Bernie Wrightson for the first ten issues, established the revenge/looking for a cure with a horror tinge to it. That series ended in 1976, but it certainly was fresh in the minds of Hollywood filmmakers, who decided to make a film of it in the early 1980s. 

The film, Swamp Thing, was written and directed by horror master Wes Craven, who was then known for The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left and was two years away from creating another of his seminal works, Nightmare on Elm Street.

The film was a campy action film, lacking much of the horror elements that Craven and the comic book were known for. However, the film was responsible for DC starting up a new Swamp Thing series to capitalize on the film (the series’ first annual adapted the film).This series would be one that would change the landscape of American comics forever.

With the twentieth issue of this second series, a new writer was brought in to take over for series originator Martin Pasko. This writer was British, known primarily for his work on Marvel UK’s Captain Britain series but almost completely otherwise unknown here in the States. The writer’s name was Alan Moore, and he would revolutionize comics in many ways.

Moore is credited with introducing the “grim and gritty” trend in comics, which isn’t truly fair because Pasko’s work on the title was just as grim and just as gritty as Moore’s. But what Moore did was change the way writers (and, by extension, readers) looked at comic book stories. He deconstructed the character of Swamp Thing, revitalized him, and set the bar for every other creator working in comics. He made Swamp Thing a buzz book and made himself into a superstar.

If Moore wasn’t placed on Swamp Thing and given the freedom to do what he saw fit, we probably wouldn’t have had great stories such as Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Batman: The Killing Joke, and Watchmen. If his writing wasn’t a success, the door wouldn’t have been opened for U.K. writers such as Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison to gain a foothold in the States. And  Vertigo, DC’s imprint for experimentation and literate comic book writing, would never have come into being.

With all the excitement that Moore was bringing to Swamp Thing, it was only natural that talk would turn to a sequel to Craven’s film. And, in true Hollywood fashion, the producers took a look at what was happening in the comics, ignored all of it, and amped the campy nature of the first film into a full blown comedy with 1989’s Return of the Swamp Thing.

The reason why people don’t remember Swamp Thing being as campy as it was is because it seems as somber as Citizen Kane next to Return of the Swamp Thing. The only major element carried over from the comics was the romance between Swampy and Abigail Arcane, who was played by Heather Locklear. However, Abigail was written in the comics as a well-rounded female character while in the film she is written as having all the emotional weight of a helium balloon. And the romance, which was portrayed in comics with the sensitivity and tact of two soul mates finding each other against all odds, was portrayed in the film as more of a kinky exercise where a plant lover would really get off on having sex with a plant.

As bad as Return of the Swamp Thing was, it in itself is like Citizen Kane to 2005’s Man-Thing film.

This film acts as a blip in the otherwise successful run Marvel has been having since 2000. The fact that the film aired on the SyFy Network (then called SciFi) as a SciFi original gives us some indication as to the quality of the film. While the storyline remains somewhat true to the comic book (the origin is changed as is Man-Thing’s alter ego Ted Sallis, who goes from a scientist to a Native American Shaman), the production values are severely lacking. Marvel chose not to give the film a release in the U.S. because they thought the poor quality of the film would derail the momentum the studio was building with its other properties.  It was released internationally, surely giving foreign countries another reason to view America in a negative light.

While the movie might have killed any possibility of any other Man-Thing films ever being made, there is a Swamp Thing remake in development. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (a name that strikes fear and terror in the hearts of comic fans everywhere) is writing the film and director Vincenzo Natali (Splice) has been tapped to direct.

Next up, we go to the jungle and examine the popularity of the “jungle girl” through the trend’s most famous example, Sheena.

Looking for the ultimate Christmas gift for the movie lover in your life? How about the Best Screenplay Academy Award statue that Orson Welles won for writing the classic Citizen Kane. The Oscar will be going up for auction on December 20th at Los Angeles auction house Nate D. Sanders. This is the same Oscar statue that was up for auction in 2007, but didn’t sell then. This time around, it is hoped that the statue will sale for anywhere between $60,000 and $1 million. This is down considerably from the $800,000 to $1.2 million it was expected to earn the last time it had been placed up for auction.

Long thought lost, Welles’s Oscar was revealed to be in the possession of cinematographer Gary Graver, who stated that the director had given him the statue as payment for working on Welles’s unfinished 1974 film The Other Side Of The Wind. Graver tried to auction the Oscar through Sotheby’s, but was sued by Welles’ daughter Beatrice Welles, who was eventually awarded ownership of the Academy Award by a California court.

Beatrice Welles put the Oscar up for auction herself, but was sued by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences. The Academy had enacted a stipulation that the Oscar statues could not be resold without first offering to sell them back to the Academy for the nominal sum of $1.00. However, a California court ruled that as this rule was enacted in 1950, the Citizen Kane Oscar was not covered by the policy. The auction went ahead in 2003, with the Oscar being acquired by the Dax Foundation, who has decided to resale the statue and use the proceeds to help fund the non-profit organization’s charitable works. However, the statue failed to move at the 2007 auction and it appears that the Dax Foundation has sold the Oscar privately, as the reported current owner of the statue is wishing to remain anonymous.

Via Hollywood Reporter.

Citizen Kane, which has rightly been called one of the greatest American films, will be coming to blu-ray disc and various online streaming options this fall. Starting on September 13 you’ll be able to own director/star Orson Welles’ masterpiece in high-def. The film will also be available soon after via iTunes, On Demand, VUDU and Amazon Instant Video.

Released 70 years ago, Welles film told of the glorious rise and ignoble fall of a publishing tycoon, a thinly-veiled swipe at newspaper magnate William Randolp Hurst. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won for Best Original Screenplay.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film will be undergoing a frame-by-frame high-definition 4K restoration from the original nitrate negative. The studio is touting this as the best looking release of the film ever, which is saying something as I think the DVD version is pretty damn near perfect.

If you have the original DVD, all of its extras – including the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane and the two fantastic commentary tracks from Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdanovich – will be ported over to this new release. Additionally, the blu-ray will contain RKO 281, the docudrama about the making of the film starring Liev Schrieber and James Cromwell, a 48-page book, part of which will be a 20-page reproduction of the original 1941 souvenir program, lobby cards plus facsimiles of memos and correspondence made during the movie’s production.

In the February 2011 issue of GQ magazine, Mark Harris writes an article called “The Day the Movies Died.” In it, Harris relates how “brand movies” have stifled originality in Hollywood. It’s a familiar theme of many an entertainment journalist–films have been dying for over thirty years at the hands of the summer blockbuster, but Harris brings something new to the equation–a poorly thought out argument where he contradicts himself a number of times.

His argument is that witty, complex movies such as Inception can only get made as sort of a vanity project to director Christopher Nolan to entice him back for Batman 3, a brand movie. Hollywood is focusing less and less on quality writing and good stories in lieu of marketable brands. They are green lighting films that come from other medium, have a built in fan base, and are easy to market.

I’m not saying Harris doesn’t have a point. What I am saying is that it is not as bad as he makes it out to be, and the “facts” he uses to prove his point are counter productive.

This is how Harris describes the 2011 movie slate:

“four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in its title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have a 7 1/2 in the title.

He uses similar verbiage to describe the 2012 film output as well. They list the films Harris is referring to in a footnote in the article, but I thought it be fun for you to have a little guessing game with what films Harris is referring to.

Presented as such, the film output looks fairly damning, even considering that this is just a representation of the films coming out this year. There’s a lot of sequels and adaptations. The point is that the lack of originality killed movies, and he makes it quite definitively.

Then he goes and blows his argument out of the water in two different ways.

First, he makes mention that films such as this make it harder for great films like Black Swan, The Social Network, The Fighter and True Grit get any attention, let alone get made. Original films one and all, right?

Well, maybe not. Even if you let The Fighter and The Social Network slide despite that they are both essentially biopics (movies based on real people’s stories are not that original to me), True Grit, using Harris’ terminology, is a remake of an adaption of a novel. It is exactly what Harris is complaining about, only it has the Coen Brothers at the helm instead of Jon Favreau.

Second, he lists the film that started the “Brand Film” trend as 1986′s Top Gun, a film that was neither an adaptation nor a sequel. (It was “inspired” by a magazine article, but if you’re counting that as an adaptation, I am taking the biopic exemption off the table.) Harris choosing this instead of either of the two sequels to Superman, the two sequels to Star Wars, or the two sequels to Jaws that arrived in theaters before Top Gun seems odd, especially considering there was a Superman III and Jaws 3-D in there that would have proved his point better.

If Harris’ argument wasn’t damaged enough, let me ask you what the three best films of all time were. Most critics would answer Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and The Godfather in some order. Great films, right? Well, how’s this for originality–the first was a thinly-veiled biography of William Randolph Hurst, the second adapted from an unproduced stage play, and the third from a novel (It also had two sequels to boot!). Just because something comes from another media doesn’t mean that it’s automatically bad. Some great films have come to us this way, many more than Harris would care to admit.

Harris then goes on to say that the focus on “Brand Films” is due to the pursuit of the prized 18-24 age bracket. Why is this bracket so sought after, according to Harris? Because they don’t have “taste and discernment.” And, although Harris fails to mention it, they also have a boatload of discretionary income–no mortgage, no wife, no kids–so they can spend their money on going to films. Numerous times. I think the latter reason might be more germane.

Harris also wears his biases on his sleeve. He thinks that the fact that 8 of the top nine films (as of when he went to press) were from “three kid-oriented genres–animated movies, movies based on comic books, and movies based on children’s books” is bad. Really.

This really shows Harris’ ignorance. Pixar has been putting out the most creative, inventive and critically acclaimed films in the recent past. Harris pays lip service to this fact (“We can all acknowledge that the world of American movies is an infinitely richer place because of Pixar”) but the fact that it is family fare means that it no matter how great the films are, they will never be more than “Brand Films.”

As for comic books and  ”children’s books,” well, Harris really doesn’t know what he’s talking about here. Comic books haven’t been exclusively “kid-oriented” since, well, Mark Harris was a kid. It’s been almost 30 years since the medium has been marketed and targeted almost exclusively to adults. And the two “children’s books” that Harris is referring to is Harry Potter and the Twilight Saga. Do you know how many adults read those books? I’d wager a whole lot more adults read those books than kids do. And you can quote me on that.

And, to close out the article, Harris makes note that a positive sign for the health of films was the consecutive weekends that The Town (adapted from a book), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (a sequel) and The Social Network (a biopic, kind of) spent on the top of the box office. Not the best way to celebrate the fact that originality might not be dead.

Mark Harris is entitled to his opinion. However, since he is trying to make an argument here, he should have expressed his opinion better. If you are mourning the lack of originality in the blockbuster films genre, don’t celebrate it in the serious drama category. It makes you look like you haven’t really thought things out.

1. Watchmen (Warner Brothers, 3,611 Theaters, 163 Minutes, Rated R): They are a skittish group, these comic fans, especially when it comes to movies based on their favorite heroes. They complain when plot elements change, get upset if the costumes are a bit off, and let you know when they think a hero has been miscast. But no comic book property has created as much agita, excitement, controversy and discussion as Watchmen. 

The reason for this is the unbelievable impact the Watchmen miniseries has had on the world of comics. It is the Citizen Kane of  the four-color medium. I’m not saying it is as good as the Orson Welles masterpiece, all you who are mocking me out there now, but it stands as the best comic book series in the almost 80-year history of the art form. It is the work that all other comics are compared to. It is the one work many comic fans insist the uninitiated read first if they want to experiment in the world of graphic novels.

In a time when comic book movie deals were virtually unheard of, it escaped the morass and it’s option was picked up  And it began an over 20 year trek to the silver screen. Finally, journey is over, and we have our Watchmen film.

But some fans never wanted a Watchmen film. They thought like Catcher in the Rye that it couldn’t be made and shouldn’t ever reach the screen. That there would be no way to ever capture the genius laid out by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

But we are on the crux of what appears to be a slavishly faithful adaptation of comicdom’s greatest work. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the ultimate comic book movie. The rest of the world will now see what the comic book is truly capable of.  I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping that, now, comic books will get a modicum more respect than they currently get.

Seventy years ago this evening, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre Of The Air radio program presented their Halloween episode, an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ (no relation) novel War Of The Worlds.

Much has been written, and not all of it is true, about the panic that is said to have been caused by the show’s faux-newscast approach. While the opening of the show does tip the fact that what was to follow was nothing more than a fiction, many listeners came to the show late, having first been tuned to rival network NBC‘s The Chase And Sanborn Hour featuring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy for the opening monologue. It was easy to see how they might have been duped by the show’s “We interrupt this broadcast…” conceit, as there was no commercial break for the first half of the hour-long episode.

But the power of the Mercury Theater’s cast is what really sells the show. And what a cast. Many of them, most notably Joseph Cotton and Agnes Moorehead, would follow Welles to RKO Studios and Hollywood for Citizen Kane before going on to their own successful careers. But it was the notoriety that Welles would receive from this special Halloween episode that would generate for Welles the invitations to come to Hollywood to try his hand at movies. The rest, to coina phrase, is history…

(Of course, fans of The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The 8th Dimension know that the broadcast was really a news report of the escape from their extra dimensional prison of the evil red lectroids of Planet 10 and the Welles was hypnotized into covering up the incident by saying it was “just” a radio show…)

You can hear the complete broadcast for yourself at the Internet Archive. The Archives also has the Mercury Theatre’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is pretty scary in its own right.

Beauty may have killed the beast, but it did not silence “The Transmitter”. In fact, RKO Pictures became one of the most famous picture-makers during Hollywood’s Golden Age. RKO formed in 1928 after a successful merger was engineered in order to create a credible market for sound pictures. Warner Bros. might have been credited for pioneering sound technology, but the men at RKO were sure they could muster up some quality films. Little did they know they’d create two of the greatest films in cinematic history.

This year RKO Pictures is celebrating its 80th anniversary and every Wednesday in the month of October Turner Classic Movies will be showcasing the films made famous by the revered studio. Little known films like King Kong (1933) and Citizen Kane (1941) can be seen alongside 1939’s Gunga Din and Hitchcock’s classic 1946 thriller, Notorious (1946).

Movie lovers will also have the opportunity to catch five of the six “lost” pre-code RKO pictures TCM acquired the copyright to in 2006 – the uncensored version of Double Harness (1933), with William Powell and Ann Harding; Rafter Romance (1933),  a light comedy with Ginger Rogers; One Man’s Journey (1933), a brisk drama starring Lionel Barrymore and Joel McCrea; the William Wellman directed Stingaree (1934), a whimsical Western adventure musical with Irene Dunne (in her first major singing role) and the handsome Richard Dix; and A Man to Remember (1938), with Anne Shirley – and all films will be presented fully restored on new 35mm prints.

You can check TCM’s schedule here for more information and showtimes.
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