Columbia Pictures, “the house that Harry built,” celebrates its sixtieth year in 1984-85. From its origins as a Poverty Row studio specializing in programmers (second features and fillers), Columbia grew, under the iron-handed tutelage of Harry “King” Cohn, first into one of the “little two” (with Universal), and then into one of the “big seven” giants of the movie industry. Cohn's reputation as the crudest of the shrewd is now legend, but the reputation of Columbia Pictures itself rests on the home that Harry made for brilliant American directors like Frank Capra, and stopovers from Leo McCarey to Nicholas Ray and Stanley Kramer...the list goes on and on....and for the writers who gave the American films their voice: Capra-collaborator Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the blacklisted Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson (who just received posthumous Oscars for Bridge on the River Kwai).... In our two-month long Tribute to Columbia Pictures, we hope to honor these talents and others as we follow the studio through the screwball comedies of the thirties, the forties film noirs, melodramas and musicals, widescreen westerns from the fifties, right on through the seventies, as Columbia continues to release the films of special American talents like Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes.
