MovieChat Forums > Fort Apache (1948) Discussion > The Story Behind the Story

The Story Behind the Story

posted 15 years ago by rajah524-3
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Many oldtimers around Hollywood say that this was the film that drove Howard Hughes to take control of RKO.

Hughes, solidly in the forefront of the anti-communist movement of the time and one of the biggest war profiteers then (as his companies continue to be now), was very upset with what was going on at the studio that had been releasing his own films. He saw RKO (under Merian C. Cooper, the producer of hits like "King Kong") becomming another "commie" Warner Brothers.

The more mature point of view about the Indian wars that was taken in both Warners' "They Died with Their Boots On" and RKO's "Fort Apache" upset this scion of the military-industrial complex. And he meant to put a stop to such stuff during the paranoia of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy era. Hughes didn't want to see America "go soft."

[–] zorbear 14 years ago

"Fort Apache" was released in 1948 and Hughes bought RKO that same year. He almost immediately shut down the studio for several weeks while doing interviews and background checks on all the employees (stars included), looking for communist sympathizers.

So you could either say that Howard Hughes was ahead of the rest of the country (the rest of us didn't jump on the "red baiting" bandwagon until 1950), or that he showed just how nuts he would become a lot earlier than you might have guessed.