I seem to have stumbled on a strange bug with rtl_sdr when requesting 131,072 samples. The device seems to hang forever, though altering that number by 1 (i.e. 131071 or 131073) works fine. Since 131072 is precisely 2^17, I figure it might have something to do with a buffer of fixed length.
Here's the command I'm running:
rtl_sdr -f 1420400000 -d 0 -g 49.6 -p 0 -S -n 131072