Cinema: Golden Eggs

RKO has stopped whistling in the dark room. The once-bust studio has two grade-B pictures, made on what Hollywood calls a shoestring, which are outgrossing nearly every A-picture in a boom year.

Hitler’s Children and Behind the Rising Sun are war babies. They are, in fact, the second generation from such World War I monstrosities as The Kaiser—the beast of Berlin. And their infantile crudeness is the essence of their appeal. Hitler’s Children (TIME, Jan. 18) features de luxe penny-arcade thrills like the threatened sterilization of Bonita Granville as a creature “unfit to be a Nazi mother.” The climax of Behind the Rising Sun is a fight between a Japanese wrestler and a U.S. boxer which epitomizes in terms of the rawest violence the popular notion of the difference between the two nations.

Hitler’s Children cost only $175,000 to make and was the biggest low-budget money-maker in screen history until Behind the Rising Sun (cost: $210,000) outshone it by covering production costs in New England alone. In any normal year only a very few expensive films will gross as much as $3,000,000. Gross estimates on each of RKO’s two sleepers, for the first time in screen history, run anywhere from $2,000,000 to $3,500,000.

Frenzied Finance. When Gregor Ziemer’s book Education for Death was en capsulated in Reader’s Digest (February 1942), Hollywood had already passed it up. But one Manhattan movie man was interested. He was Edward A. Golden, a chubby, John Bunnyish old gentleman who had been a dentist for five years, a film distributor for 30. Distributor Golden had taken a shy at production not long before with a for-adults-only sermon on syphilis entitled No Greater Sin. The minute Golden read Education he knew it would make a picture. He even knew the title: Hitler’s Children. That afternoon he gave Author Ziemer’s agent $250 for a month’s option on the film rights. Next day he started making the rounds of Hollywood’s Manhattan story editors. He got nowhere, renewed his option twice, was $750 in the hole and all but broke when RKO’s then-President George Schaefer decided to chance it. Golden closed the deal with Ziemer’s agent for $5,000—which Ziemer graciously accepted in lOUs. From the Guaranty Trust Co. Golden got a verbal commitment for financing up to $100,000.

At that moment President Schaefer was ousted in one of RKO’s then-frequent studio shuffles, and Golden had to start from scratch with pro tem President Ned Depinet. Mr. Depinet assigned an obscure script writer, Emmet Lavery, an equally obscure director, Edward Dmytryk, to make Hitler’s Children, and the picture went into production with RKO’s and Golden’s money in partnership. After two days’ shooting Golden was informed that the Guaranty Trust had decided not to make the loan after all: the war might end and leave the bank high & dry. “What,” screamed Golden, “wouldn’t you spend $100,000 to end the war?”

What More Do You Want? RKO’s newly installed President Charles Koerner saved the day. At considerable risk he scraped the bottom of the RKO barrel to finance the film. But the box-office response immediately vindicated Ed Golden’s original hunch which he used in his sales talk with uninterested Hollywood: “Here’s a picture that’s got real exploitation value. It’s got sterilization. It’s got a lethal chamber. It’s got kids. What more do you want?”

Golden’s Goslings. Currently Golden has an office in the Producers’ Building and is hatching (in partnership with RKO) another Golden egg of which, like a man holding a second winning ticket in the sweepstakes, he says, over & over: “I got another! I got another!” Out of Louis Lochner’s What About Germany? Golden is making a picture called The Master Race.