Robert Riskin

It is one of film history's quiet injustices that the mood we label Capraesque was in large part the invention of Robert Riskin. A New York garment worker's son turned successful Broadway playwright, Riskin arrived at Columbia Pictures in the early 1930s and formed with director Frank Capra one of the most fruitful writer-director partnerships the movies have known.

Riskin's screenplays gave Capra's optimism its spine and its skepticism. He wrote It Happened One Night, the runaway-heiress comedy that swept the major Academy Awards in 1934 and won Riskin the Oscar for its screenplay, inventing much of the grammar of romantic comedy in the process. He wrote Lady for a Day and Broadway Bill, and then the great populist parables: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, in which a small-town innocent shames a cynical city; the utopian fantasy Lost Horizon; the ensemble charmer You Can't Take It With You; and the darker, more troubled Meet John Doe, which wrestled honestly with how easily good feeling can be manipulated.

His dialogue was clean, funny, and humane, and his structural instinct was superb. Crucially, Riskin brought a needle of doubt to Capra's sentiment, the awareness that the crowd could turn ugly and the common man be conned, which kept the films from tipping into pure syrup. During the Second World War he ran the overseas film unit of the Office of War Information, producing documentaries to present America to the liberated world.

Riskin married the actress Fay Wray, of King Kong fame, and seemed set for a long postwar career. In 1950 a devastating stroke silenced him, ending his writing at the height of his powers. He lingered, incapacitated, until his death in 1955. Capra's reputation towered on, but any fair accounting hands a large share of that legend to the writer who put the words in the mouths of Deeds, Doe, and the runaway bride.