Allen Rivkin on AllMovie

American screenwriter Allen Rivkin was steadily employed in Hollywood from 1932 to 1958. Hopscotching from Fox to Columbia to Warners to Republic and back again, Rivkin specialized in rapidly paced newspaper and crime yarns. During the early '40s, he scripted two of MGM's most celebrated B-pictures, Kid Glove Killer (1941) and Joe Smith American (1942). His later A-efforts included RKO's The Farmer's Daughter and Columbia's Dead Reckoning. One of the earliest organizers of the Screen Actors' Guild, the politically moderate Allen Rivkin decided he didn't care for the left-wing stance of many of his colleagues, making his opinions public in the early '50s when he headed the strongly anti-communist Motion Picture Industry Council.