Bringing Up Baby

Last year, the BBC put 39 classic films from RKO – one of the major studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age – on iPlayer. Here are some of the highlights of the

strand:

Citizen Kane

Silver

Often held to be the best of the ten films Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made together, this 1935 musical has a silly romantic plot, great music by Irving Berlin, and some of the most breathtaking dance numbers ever captured on film.

Howard Hawks’s 1938 screwball comedy stars Cary Grant as a stuffy palaeontologist and Katharine Hepburn as the unhinged heiress who turns his world upside down. Involving a pet leopard called Baby, it’s a heady mix of manic dialogue, madcap plot and wild physical comedy. Cary Grant fans will find much else to enjoy in the selection, including

Suspicion.

Although butchered in the editing suite by studio bosses, Orson Welles’s 1942 film, about the decline of an “old money” Midwestern family, has many of the qualities of his first,

(which is also available on iPlayer).

Released in 1948, John Ford’s western stars John Wayne and Henry Fonda as frontier cavalry officers who clash over policy towards the local Apache. It is the first and arguably the greatest in his informal Cavalry trilogy. The second film,

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

is also on iPlayer, but the third, was not made by RKO.

Rio Grande,

Robert Mitchum plays a family chauffeur who gets embroiled in the murderous schemes of his employer, an angel-faced femme fatale (Jean Simmons), in this noirish 1953 crime thriller. The film is made all the more riveting by director Otto Preminger’s brilliantly cold, restrained approach.