All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!

The alleged musical rape in The Artist

2012-01-25T17:03:00.000+01:00

There is an ongoing debate surrounding the choice of music in the French Oscar-nominated silent film The Artist. Legendary actress Kim Novak is accusing the French director Michel Hazanavicius of musical rape because of his use of a snippet of Bernard Herrmann’s score from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. This is an opportunity for me to give my thoughts on the recycling of music in the movies

Bernard Herrmann's score to Vertigo (1958)

First some background:
In the dawn of film there were no particular scores, theme songs or soundtracks. But as the films didn’t have a soundtrack the air had to be filled with something. Music was of course a natural choice. The smaller houses had a pianist or a couple of musicians at most, maybe a trio that also worked at the nearby restaurant. The bigger cinemas often had orchestras. Sometimes a band of 8 to 12 players if it was a medium sized city theatre. If the cinema also doubled as a regular theater or music hall venue the orchestra could be bigger. The really big palaces that were built after WWI could house a full size symphony orchestra. The Roxy in NYC opened in 1927 had a very large orchestra of more than a 100 players.

The cinema often had a musical director who in most cases also was head of the orchestra. The musical director took bits and pieces of well known classical music that fitted particular scenes or emotions and put together a program of sorts for each film. The use of already existing music was thus commonplace from the very beginning of film history.

The Scala Theater in Brighton UK 1930

With time, the bigger cinemas developed a quite vast musical library to use. Well known pieces by Verdi, Wagner, Beethoven and other masters were used to the extent that they became synonymous with particular moods or scenes in the movies. The more creative musical directors sometimes also wrote transitional music to fill out the gaps.

By 1915 the studios had become aware of the importance of music as it clearly had become a part of the movie going experience. It was at this time the first commissioned scores appears (Read more about the early days of movie scores and theme songs here)

This was also a time when the hit songs were born. Some songs could sell a million copies in sheet music alone. With the portable phonographs of the late teens records became more common. Records had been more or less a luxury item up until this time. A single sided opera record could sell for as much as $6 in 1910. (that would be about $100 today). Then came radio and the modern music business was born. The hit songs now quickly found their way into the movies.

It was more common that the songs went through a music publisher rather than through the movie studio. The studio could often commission the song but didn't own the rights to sell sheet music or records. With the advent of the talkies the music could be nailed to the filmstrip. The studios set up musical departments almost immediately.

Prolific song writers of Tin Pan Alley in NYC were hired and often got very lucrative deals with the Hollywood studios that now had a never ending need for songs and scores.
This is why the early musicals (pre 1934) have so many good songs. Hollywood hired the best composers and lyricists they could find. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and teams like the Gershwins, Freed & Brown or Brown DeSylva & Henderson.

Business as usual at a Tin Pan Alley music publisher in 1929

Most of these songs are still evergreens. There was an avalanche of hit songs that got even more power from radio performances. All this marketing power made the songs stick in peoples ears forever. The movies the songs first were used in were quickly forgotten but the songs themselves lived on and still does.

Incidental music and scores that was not considered stand alone songs however, did not have the same life or commercial value. The songs were usually commissioned from someone like Cole Porter, but the incidental music was written by a staff composer, sometimes using the themes from the different commissioned songs, sometimes not. The composer to the incidental music often never received any credit in the final product as he was on a monthly salary at the studio. It was the stand alone songs that were important.

Marion Davies, Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed (1934)

It goes on more or less like this until Orson Welles commissioned an entire score from newcomer Bernard Herrmann for Citizen Kane in 1940. No hit songs, just a great big score by Herrmann alone, including a fabulous aria from a fictitious Opera - Salammbô, written in the strict post-romantic style of Richard Strauss or Giacomo Puccini. Spotify link: Salammbô's Aria from Citizen Kane
To me this is the birth of the modern film score that had begun with the commissioned scores to the silent movies 20 years earlier. The composer now also recived credit, sometimes even on the poster.

Bernard Herrmann in the 1940's

The case with The Artist:
I think it's difficult to re-use a score or pieces of it as this often instrumental music more or less serves as a backdrop to the scenes in the movie. In that respect I give Novak a point. It would be awkward to use really prolific scores like Star Wars or Jaws for other pictures that are not parodies of the original films.

If the composer to a new score use a few bars or a theme from an old score as a nod or homage to the original composer I think it should be considered a nice gesture rather than a rape situation. It's all a matter of style and how it is done. In the Artist it is beautifully done and clearly serves as homage to Herrmann. What is even more important is that Hazanavicius has permission from Herrmann's estate and his publisher to use the music in his film.

Herrmann used bits and pieces from the great masters himself. There is a lot of inspiration from both Mahler and Strauss in many of his early scores. Another great composer, John Williams is often stealing bits and pieces from others to his scores (which I often think are better than the films they were created for). The best example is perhaps Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score for Kings Row (1942). If you listen to the main theme you hear a mix of Superman and Star Wars both written 35 years later by Williams. Spotify Link: Kings Row (Main Theme) - Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Songs on the other hand can be used many times in many different films. The important thing is that they fit in. In Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, the filmmaker makes a statement by only using modern hit songs, most certainly to attract a younger audience to a period film. I think that is incredibly cheap! Imagine a 1940's film with a contemporary score by Gaga, Beyonce or 50 cent, it would be totally wrong.

Singin In The Rain from Hollywood Revue of 1929

The use of old songs in Singing In The Rain is a celebration of the first hit composers and the songs that were used in the first talking pictures. Singing In The Rain by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown was a hit in 1929 because of it's inclusion in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, but became an even bigger hit in Singing In the Rain in 1952. Many songs used in movies didn't become hits until they were re-cycled in other movies. This go way back, I have no good examples here but an instrumental theme used in a 1942 film could very well get lyrics and be re-used in a 1948 movie and then become a major hit.
I have no problems with that. The difficult task is to use the right music at the right time.

Conclusion:
Dear Kim Novak, I’m sorry to say it but the use of Bernard Herrmann’s score in the Artist is definitely not a rape situation. Not even a slight groping to put it bluntly.

A French behind the scenes featurette in color from The Artist 2011

Mamba at the Astor in Melbourne - Part 2

2011-11-17T00:46:00.001+01:00

This post is continued from last weeks post about the Mamba world premiere at The Astor in Melbourne on Nov 21 at 8pm.

In the first post I wrote about Mamba's and Tiffany Pictures historical background. In this post I will write about the actors in the leading roles of the film. Unfortunately they are almost forgotten today, at least if you compare them to superstars like Garbo or Gable.

Mamba was very well received by the audience as well as by the press. Tiffany had made sure the film would become a smash hit by hiring some of the most prominent actors at the time for the lead parts.

Jean Hersholt 1927

August Bolte - Jean Hersholt
Jean Hersholt was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1886, the son of Clair and Henry Hersholt, both actors at the Danish Folk Theatre. From an early age young Jean went on tour performing with his family all over Europe. Back at home in Copenhagen he went to art school and soon got recognition for his fine pencil drawings.

Hersholt drawing von Stroheim (1923)

But it was the acting that really got him. After some years at the art school he went on to acting school at the Dagmar Thaatre in Copenhagen. In 1906 he had roles in three of the earliest films produced for the Danish market. Those were all short comedies, very typical of the times. At 22, in 1908 he left Denmark for Canada and settled down first in Montreal then on to New York. In 1914 he left New York for Hollywood. In 1915 he was hired as responsible for the Danish pavilion at the Pan Pacific exhibition in San Francisco. It was at this time he met Thomas Ince, a Hollywood producer and director. Ince soon realized Hersholt was made of the right stuff and hired him as one of his regulars. Hersholt played in most of Inces films 1918-22. He even got to direct some of the films he played in. Ince is mostly known today because of the scandal surrounding his death in 1924 when he suposedly was killed aboard W.R. Hearst’s yacht.

Thomas Ince

Hersholt’s career took a big leap in 1922 when he got one of the leading roles in John S. Robertson’s Tess of The Storm Country with Mary Pickford. Then on to von Stroheim’s giant epic Greed, in which he played Marcus Schouler, the villain. Showing he was capable to shine in almost any role given to him he quickly became a regular first at Goldwyn and Paramount and later at MGM.

Greed (1924)

Hersholt made the transition to talkies without any difficulties, his Danish accent was no problem. With the arrival of the talkies his roles shifted from villains to caring father figures, teachers and European noblemen. At MGM he had big supporting roles in prestige productions like Grand Hotel (1932) and Dinner At Eight (1933). He was Shirley Temple’s grandfather in Heidi (1937).

Grand Hotel (1932)

But it was the role as a doctor that would provide a continuing vehicle for Hersholt and something of a fateful direction for the actor. The mid-30s were abuzz with the births of the Dionne Quintuplets in Canada. Hollywood jumped on, highlighting the story and the officiating obstetrician, Dr. Dafoe, who was translated into Dr. John Luke, in The Country Doctor (1936). Hersholt brought the right ingredients to the part of Luke and two years later a sequel followed, Five of a Kind (1938). Hersholt was enthusiastic about a series of movies, but Dafoe himself blocked this idea. Nevertheless, in 1937 Hersholt had already germinated a new radio series to continue portraying a dedicated and kindly small town doctor. For a character name Hersholt turned to his most beloved author, his countryman, literary light Hans Christian Andersen, for a name-Dr. Christian. It was a hit and, and he convinced RKO Radio Pictures to bankroll a series of six Dr. Christian films (1939-41). The radio series stayed on the air every week for 17 years, about 800 episodes.

In the early 1940's Hersholt more or less left the movies but stayed in the business working with many different charity projects. In 1939 he funded The Motion Picture Relief Fund, an organization that helped to support industry employees with medical care when they were down on their luck and was used to create the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA. This led to the creation in 1956 of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian an honorary Academy Award given to an "individual in the motion picture industry whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry". Hersholt was President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 1945-49. Another lesser known function he had was as Chairman of the Hollywood chamber of commerce in the early 1950’s and as such he helped negotiate the rights for the Scandinavian Airlines transatlantic flights in 1954. He was very proud of being Danish, throughout his life he helped spread Danish and Scandinavian culture to the world. One of his major achievements was translating all of Hans Christian Andersens stories to the English language. His translations are still regarded as the best.

Jean Hersholt's home in Hollywood

Jean Hersholt made 443 films, got two honorary Oscars and is one of few who has two stars at the Hollywood walk of fame. One for his contributions to Motion Pictures, the other for his extensive radio work. Jean Hersholt died of pancreatic cancer in 1956, only months after having introduced Dr Christian to TV.

Eleanor Boardman - Photoplay January 1928

Helen von Linden - Eleanor Boardman
Born in Philadelphia 1898 to strict, Presbyterian parents. After graduation from The Academy of Fine Arts in her home town she left for New York hoping for a career on Broadway. When that didn’t work out as expected, she became a model for Kodak. This worked out splendidly and she eventually became the official Kodak Girl. With her face on posters all over the country she was of course hoping for some movie mogul to spot her and take her to Hollywood.

Eleanor Boardman early in her career

After some time as Kodak girl she heard that the Selwyn Organization, a major producer of Broadway plays, was looking for girls with no stage experience. Since she was more than qualified in that respect, she tried out for the job and before she knew it she was in the chorus line of a production called "Rock-a-Bye-Baby" until the show closed three months later. Unfortunately she caught laryngitis and temporarily lost her voice, making it difficult to continue on the stage. It was at this time that a casting director for Goldwyn Pictures hit the Broadway scene looking for new faces. She tested for him and impressed him enough that he finally picked her out of a pool of more than 1000 young girls who tested for the opportunity to go to Hollywood.

Well in Hollywood followed months of fruitless effort until one day Rupert Hughes saw her riding a horse and gave her a part in a film and she quickly began to attract audiences. She was chosen by Goldwyn Pictures as their "New Face of 1922", through which she signed a contract with the company. After several successful supporting roles, she played the lead in 1923's Souls for Sale. Her growing popularity was reflected by inclusion on the list of WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1923. Her contract was renewed in 1924 when Goldwyn merged with Metro and became MGM.

Souls For Sale (1923)

She appeared in fewer than forty films during her career, achieving her greatest success in Vidor's The Crowd in 1928. Her moving performance in that film is widely recognized as one of the outstanding performances in American silent films. She ultimately stayed with MGM until 1932. Boardman retired in 1935, and retreated completely from Hollywood and public life. Her only subsequent appearance was in an interview filmed for the Kevin Brownlow and David Gill documentary series Hollywood in 1980.

With James Murray in The Crowd (1928)

1926-31 Boardman was married to the film director King Vidor, with whom she had two daughters, Antonia born 1927, and Belinda born 1930, just before shooting of Mamba started . In September of 1926 fellow actors John Gilbert and Greta Garbo had planned a double wedding with them, but Garbo broke off the plans at the last minute. Boardman's second husband was Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast to whom she was married from 1940 until his death in 1968. She died in Santa Barbara, California at the age of 93.

Eleanor Boardman and King Vidor

Eleanor Boardman has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to Motion Pictures.
Mamba was her first talkie and the only film she made in color.

Ralph Forbes by Clarence Sinclair Bull (1928)

Lieutenant Karl von Reiden - Ralph Forbes
There is a lot of confusion about Forbes birth date. The date varies from 1896, 1901 to 1904. According to the Civil registration records in the UK, September 30, 1904 is the correct date. Born in an acting family in London, England. Both his parents and little sister were stage actors so the choice of profession might have been easy for young Ralph. He started his career on stage as a teenager in London. This led to some roles in British films, among them the early color movie His Glorious Adventure, shot in Prizmacolor 1922, and also a Swedish version of Charley's Aunt shot in England and Sweden between 1922-26 before leaving for Hollywood in 1926 to play fellow Englishman Ronald Coleman's brother in the Paramount big budgeter Beau Geste.

Beau Geste (1926)

In 1924 Forbes married the celebrated Broadway actress Ruth Chatterton who was eleven years his senior. The couple settled down in Hollywood and Chatterton soon also made her debut on the silver screen.

Ralph Forbes and Ruth Chatterton

Forbes striking looks made things easy and he got quite important roles almost immediately. He was cast against many of the biggest names right from the start. Norma Shearer, Lon Chaney, Dolores Del Rio, Clara Bow, Corinne Griffith and so on.

Forbes and Clara Bow in Her Wedding Night (1930)

Ralph Forbes was perhaps not one of the bigger names in Hollywood, some might even describe him as an MGM bit player, but considering he made about five films a year throughout the 30's and who he made those films with I think it's fair to call him a true movie star.

Forbes about to hit John Barrymore in the face in 20th Century (1934)

Forbes and Chatterton divorced in 1932. Forbes Movie career basically ended in the early 40's but got some new life with the arrival of TV and the Playhose series. In 1951 Forbes fell ill and passed away far to early, he was 46.

Eleanor Boardman and Jean Hersholt in Mamba

Mamba is a phenomenal early all color talkie that deserves its place in Movie history. Come see for your self and have a chat with me on Monday night at the Astor in Melbourne. Tickets are still on sale!

Mamba World Premiere in Melbourne Nov 21

2011-11-04T01:19:00.001+01:00

It's not without pride I can announce that Tiffany Pictures 1930 all color triumph Mamba will be shown in public for the first time in about 80 years. This very special event will take place at The Astor Theatre in Melbourne, Australia November 21.

My collaborator Paul Brennan and I will be there in person to present the film together. It was Paul who found the long thought lost nitrate reels in 2009, I then edited the whole thing together into a presentable format. Since 2009, when Mamba was found, the complete soundtrack has been added to the film elements thanks to a kind contribution from the UCLA Film & Television Archives.

With all the different elements in place Mamba is now ready to be properly restored. However, when the opportunity to present the film before a live audience came about, and at such a wonderful place as The Astor we immediately decided to share this remarkable discovery even though it's still a work in progress.

"The Astor was built in the 1930s and still retains the art-deco charm of that period. The theatre is a classic, single-screen cinema with stalls and a dress circle, the overall seating capacity of 1,150 is reduced from the original 1,700 - and the auditorium has the same, soft ambience that you will have enjoyed in the foyers. Beautiful curtains cover the screen - there are no jarring, advertising slides to greet you!

But there is nothing "old-fashioned" about The Astor's facilities. The fully air-conditioned cinema boasts a state-of-the-art sound system and now has Australia's first installation of the superb, Barco 4K Digital Projector which is capable of providing resolution that is up to four times higher than the industry standard."Thus a splendid venue for such an important event.

This is the first of two articles about Mamba, it's importance in film history and more information about the people who made it. The story about how the film was found can be found here.

Mamba is one of the earliest all talking all color features ever made that also survives complete. The use of color throughout an entire talking feature was something completely new in 1929 and for such a small studio as Tiffany it was unheard of. It’s clear Tiffany decided to take a risk with hopes to become a bigger player in the Hollywood studio system. In the fall of 1929 Hollywood was not only a turmoil of sound but also color. Every studio of note was wiring for sound and the bigger players also wanted color in their productions, if only just short sequences.

One should note that at this time only about a dozen Technicolor cameras were available in Hollywood altogether. The studios had to battle to use them and the schedules were tight. The big studios monopolized the color cameras quite thoroughly but Tiffany got lucky, probably by some sort of divine intervention and could shoot an entire feature in color. All color talkies was clearly the next big thing and Tiffany decided to go all in right from the start. They were even planning to take technology a step further and shoot it in 3D according to this article in the Film Daily published Nov 12, 1929

Mamba was shot during approximately 10 weeks, from the end of September to early December 1929. At the time production begun, only two all talking, all color features had been released. Those were two backstage musicals from Warner Bros, On With The Show! released in July and Gold Diggers of Broadway in late August. None of the two have survived intact.

When production wrapped in December, two more WB musicals were ready for release. The two hour extravaganza The Show Of Shows opening late November and the Jerome Kern operetta Sally starring Marilyn Miller just before Christmas 1929. These two have survived in black and white only, save from short fragments in color.

The fifth all color talkie The Vagabond King from Paramount had its NYC gala premiere late February 1930 (it wasn’t released to the general public until April). It has survived and has been restored by UCLA. Then comes Mamba, released March 10, which makes it the sixth all color talkie ever produced, and the earliest known all color talkie that wasn’t a musical or came from a major studio. It is intact and in quite good shape but it needs to be restored.

Tiffany Pictures was formed in 1921 as an independent production company by silent superstar Mae Murray and her then husband and director Robert Z. Leonard. Probably inspired by United Artists, formed two years earlier by Pickford/Fairbanks/Chaplin/Griffith, Tiffany's main goal was to produce Mae Murray vehicles, distributing them through Metro. After having made eight features together, Mae Murray divorced Leonard and left Tiffany for MGM in 1925. She eventually came back to Tiffany in 1929 to remake her 1922 success Peacock Alley as a talkie. It didn't work out well and Murray's talkie career was more or less over within a year. She sued Tiffany accusing the company having ruined her career. She lost the case and eventually left the movie business. The rest of her life is a mentally unstable, rather sad story. Mae Murray left us in 1965, a year after her last attempt for a come-back at 75. She was the real Norma Desmond.

Mae Murray in The Merry Widow 1925

What happened to Tiffany Pictures right after Murray's departure is somewhat unclear. My guess is that it was in limbo for a while until someone decided to pick up the pieces. There are indications of Tiffany being reformed from the scraps of the MGM merger in 1924. Considering its close relationship with Metro, many redundant people left over from Metro (and Goldwyn) who wasn't transferred to MGM was probably hired by Tiffany. With a new management and a staff of skilled craftsmen the company was ready for big business.

Tiffany is often referred to as a poverty row studio. I'm not sure if the term poverty row is a correct label for a company like Tiffany. I think independent studio would be more suitable. After all, they had their own studio from 1927, The Reliance Majestic Studios which had been the home of DW Griffith. The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance and Broken Blossoms were all partially or fully shot at the studio.

The Tiffany-Stahl Studio 1929

Poverty row units normally had to lease facilities, often cameras and other equipment, sets and sometimes even actors from other studios when they wanted to make a picture. The classic poverty row production was generally a poorly funded venture with very unclear distribution. In an era when the bigger studios also owned the major theatre chains, getting an independent picture into movie houses was a challenge. I guess the Tiffany studio may have served as a base for other smaller companies, thus linking it to the poverty row epithet.

With the acquisition of the Reliance Majestic in 1927 came the new boss the MGM director and producer John M. Stahl who stayed in power until 1930 when he sold his interest in Tiffany and became a director at Columbia. I guess Stahl was largely responsible for the "New expanding Tiffany" as it coincides exactly with his time as CEO. Stahl was generally considered a really competent and nice man, liked by both staff and actors.

From August 1929 Tiffany had a very lucrative agreement with RCA. The deal was very straight forward - If a cinema owner agreed to book a block of 26 Tiffany films, RCA would wire the theatre for sound for $2,995, which was a bargain for most managers. By February 1930 no less than 2,460 theaters had signed up for the deal. Tiffany had thus a distribution network, at least for a while.

John M. Stahl

After Stahl left Tiffany in 1930 the company sunk back among the B-players concentrating on westerns, shorts and cheap monkey movies. They finally went out of business in 1932, much because of the ongoing depression, a general lack of funds and a hard time getting their films out to the theaters. According to my sources the main reason for their demise was because "they had no profitable distribution network." So I guess the departure of Stahl also ended the profitable RCA distribution agreement. The studio was sold and the main part of the Tiffany legacy, including most of the original negatives went up in smoke during the filming of Gone With The Wind in 1939.

John M. Stahl later directed several great pictures for Columbia in the 1930's and later for 20th Century Fox, his best known film is the brilliant Technicolor noir Leave Her To Heaven. 1950's melodrama master Douglas Sirk remade no less than three of Stahls pictures from the 30's. Magnificent Obsession is one of them.

My next post will give you more Mamba magic. Stay tuned!

The Artist (2011)

2011-07-20T09:07:00.014+02:00

Just before the holidays I heard about a new film that had had its premiere at the Cannes festival in May. Normally I don't comment on movies made after 1935 but in this case I have to make an exception. French director Michel Hazanavicius new movie The Artist is a silent movie with synchronized score and sound effects and a short scene with dialogue at the end, just like if it was made in 1928. Technically it's thus a part-talkie, but it doesn't stop at that. The story takes place in Hollywood 1927 where swashbuckling film star George Valentin is facing the arrival of the talkies. A film about the transition to talkies naturally has its place on this blog.

Unfortunately I had no possibility to attend the Cannes festival premiere and the movie does not become available to the general public until this fall so I haven't actually seen it yet, but I found this nice review by Sukhdev Sandhu in the online edition of the UK paper The Telegraph.

"Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a dashing and rather arrogant actor whose dynamic, swashbuckling roles in films such as A Russian Affair and A German Affair have made him a huge star of the pre-talkie era. But he’s caught off-guard by the arrival of sound: “If that’s the future, you can have it!” His roles dry up, his wife leaves him, and a move into directing doesn’t work out.

All he has left is his Jack Russell terrier and is his memories of the delightfully-named Peppy Miller (Berenice Bojo). She’s the all-smiling, high-stepping would-be actress with whom he’d fallen in love even before her career went into overdrive. They’d never done anything untoward together, but they’ve always looked at each other longingly. Now that he’s seen as “old meat”, now that he’s yesterday’s news, a relic of an abandoned art form, will Peppy still remember him? Does she still carry a flame for him?

The Artist is not a film that thinks it’s superior to the movies it evokes (I was going to use the word 'pastiche', but that seems inappropriate; 'pastiche' sounds cold, a touch heartless - the very opposite of what this is). Hazanavicius has evidently immersed himself in the silent period, seeing in it liberation rather than restriction: he’s in love with its melodramatic intensity, its lack of irony, the importance it places on lighting and photography. Cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman, drawing on deathless classics such as Murnau’s City Girl (1930), makes black and white look wonderfully warm rather than austere. Ludovic Bource’s score is charming and amplified by two exquisitely clever breaks in the film’s otherwise complete eschewal of natural sounds.

Dujardin and Bojo excel together, reining in any desire to compensate for their lack of dialogue by exaggerating the physicality of their roles, and offering up some delightful dance routines too. Hazanavicius himself is wise enough not to stuff the screenplay with lots of dialogue just to placate audiences unused to watching silent; the intertitles are kept to a minimum. By the end, it’s all you can do not to cheer on the seemingly star-crossed lovers and not to sigh about how they don’t make films like this anymore. Except, of course, Hazanavicius just has."

Let's take a look at the trailer. It gives you a good idea of the style. The trailer editor's choice of music is a bit odd though. I don't see why they went for Louis Prima's swing classic Sing Sing Sing written in 1936 instead of a peppy 1928 fox-trot. But I guess you can't have it all. I will definitely watch the movie as soon as I possibly can and I advise all transition geeks to do likewise.

Rio Rita - Lost footage found on You Tube

2011-06-09T11:07:00.016+02:00

Original promotional material published in Film Daily in July 1929

The other day I got a mail from my friend Brian who told me about a sensational find he had made on You Tube. Someone had decided to upload two fragments from the supposedly lost 1929 version of Rio Rita. To me this is a sensation! Judging from the number of showings it has, not many people have found it yet. There is almost no information about it other than the uploader says the footage comes from a reel of film he found in an estate sale a while ago.

The two snippets Mr McClutching has posted are indeed from the original 1929 version of Rio Rita. The footage is not present in the 1932 re-release version that is in circulation today. The snippets seems to be filmed straight off a screen or a wall but look fantastic nevertheless. The film elements appears to be in almost perfect condition considering its age. The color depth looks amazing, almost too good to be true. Let's take a look at it!

The first snippet comes from the beginning of the movie where Dorothy Lee is introduced with a little number called The Kinkajou. As I understand this was the first musical number in the movie. It has been entirely removed in the 1932 version.

The second clip is a fragment from the latter half of the Sweetheart We Need Each Other reprise aboard the pirate barge. This clip comes from the massive color segment towards the end of the movie.

The beginning of the number and more information about the cut/uncut version of Rio Rita can be found in my previous post about cut musical numbers.

Watching these resurfaced fragments it becomes somewhat easier to understand why this footage was cut in the 1932 version. The most obvious reason was of course the running time. A 105 minute move was (and is) an easier sell than a 140 minute movie. But which scenes could be cut without crippling the plot too much? The easiest way was of course to cut songs as they usually don't move the plot forward. But this must have been difficult since Rio Rita was an operetta. Why was the peppy Kinkajou song cut and other slower songs saved? The Kinkajou was after all a major hit and one of the better known songs from the 1927 Broadway show. My guess is that it has something to do with the performance.

Here's a Ampico piano roll of The Kinkajou published in 1927, recorded by Ferde Grofé

In 1929 talkie musicals were something completely new. Methods of cinematography and sound engineering had not found their final form. The crew that made Rio Rita were pioneers in many ways. They had no recipe, they had to improvise.
In 1932 however the movie musical stood before its second coming. Almost every aspect in moviemaking had evolved incredibly fast during the three years between the two versions. What was groundbreaking in 1929 was not even yesterdays news in 1932.

My guess is that most of the cut material in Rio Rita was considered old-fashioned. Let's face it, Dorothy Lee was adorable in almost every way, but her rendition of The Kinkajou seems a bit clunky and the choreography isn't exactly top notch. The staginess of parading chorus girls walking up and down stairs in the second fragment is very 1929 but had no place in 1932. The 1932 audience was experienced and probably found Rio Rita quite dull even after it had been "modernized". Let's hope these fragments ends up in a complete 1929 version soon. Until then, it feels great knowing they exist and appears to be in great shape.

The 1929 trailer for Rio Rita

A stolen waltz

2011-04-02T10:39:00.015+02:00

In 1929, when the talkies flooded the world, all the musicals produced had to be filled with songs. Naturally all these musicals became a fantastic opportunity for aspiring songwriters to get recognition. Sometimes the songs were brilliant, sometimes not. The music publishers quickly hired songwriters who wrote songs more or less off the cuff. The need for songs seemed never ending. Inspiration wasn't always at hand, so some of the songwriters recycled chord progressions and even parts of melody that had worked before, if only to get a song placed. The songs at this time had to fit the three minute limitation of a record, the radio and now the talkies. Basically, a quite strict template for hit songs was created. This template would be used more or less untouched until the advent of Television and Rock'n'Roll.

Many of the late silents and early talkies indeed included some brilliant songwriting. Many of the songs became evergreens even if the film it was performed in quickly fell into oblivion. One of the most popular types of theme songs in the late 20's was the romantic waltz. Ramona, Diane, Charmaine, Coquette to name a few, almost every film had one. The theme song was often performed throughout the picture in many different versions and styles just to show off how versatile it was. Very often it was even turned into a snappy fox-trot. The goal was of course to induce it as much as possible to get it to stick properly with the audience. It was important to get a hit song. With the increasing output it became more and more difficult to tell which songs would work the best. Sometimes publishers were even lurking outside the theatres just to pick up which songs people were humming when leaving.

The theme song in Our Dancing Daughters in 1928 was no exception to the rule. I Loved You Then As I Love You Now, written by the team Axt-Mendoza-MacDonald is perhaps not well remembered today but it’s still a very efficient song that is very characteristic. There are several 1928 recordings of it so it was definitely a hit back then. Here is the fox-trot rendition of it from the party scene in the movie:

The chorus works rather well as a fox-trot even if it was conceived as a waltz. If we slow down the tempo a bit, change the meter to ¾ and attach the verse, in its original form it sounds like this, performed by Louis Wick:

Our Dancing Daughters was released early September 1928 in the US. It was a silent movie but it had a rather elaborate soundtrack, still not synchronized but it included some off camera dialog.

Now we fast forward about six months. The young Swedish songwriter Jules Sylvain was hired to write some songs for the first Swedish talkie Säg Det I Toner (Say It With Songs) in the summer of 1929. Sylvain had seen The Singing Fool in Berlin late 1928 and immediately understood where it all was heading. According to Sylvain's memoirs the occasion was not only the first time he saw a talkie but also the premiere of talkies in Europe all together. On his return to Stockholm he immediately started lobbying for Swedish talkies. Naturally he saw the opportunity to promote his own songwriting. So when SF, the leading studio finally decided to make a talkie it was quite obvious which composer to hire for the project.

However, Sylvain apparently had trouble finding appropriate songs for the picture. He even admits it in his memoirs. After all he had no experience writing for movies. To get the hang of it he saw as many talkies he possibly could. When shooting was to begin he was over in London where it was much easier to catch a talkie than I Stockholm where only one cinema had installed a Vitaphone system.

This might sound controversial but I think he must have seen Our Dancing Daughters sometime during the summer of 1929 and contrary to the official story he more or less nicked the theme song from it to use in “his” film. Judge for yourself but I think the similarities are apparent.

Sylvain’s theme song to Säg Det I Toner is in the same key, the verse has basically the same melody and the general feel of the songs are very much alike even if the chorus is different in the Swedish song. I'm sure he thought the original was a great waltz and believed he would get a away with murder borrowing parts of it. Actually, I think he did!

Sylvain wasn't the only one who borrowed stuff from fellow composers. Here's another example, not as evident but every time I hear one of these songs I always sing the melody to the other one on top just because it can be done, well almost.

Tip-Toe Through The Tulips With Me (Burke-Dubin) From Gold Diggers Of Broadway (1929)
Performed by Nick Lucas and chorus.

Everyone Says I Love You (Kalmar-Ruby) from Horse Feathers (1932)
Performed by The Marx Bros.

A special thank you to Aubyn/Rachel at The Girl With the White Parasol presenting me with a Stylish Blogger Award!

Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) Star struck classical composer

2010-09-06T13:17:00.014+02:00

This summer I have been away on paternal leave for almost three months. Most of the time was spent in the south of France. Most French cities have a public médiateque, a library not only for books but for movies and records as well. This allows the curious person to get a fuller picture of whatever interest one may have. It's simply brilliant to be able to get several dimensions of a subject going at the same time. I guess some would call it synergy effects. You can for instance read a biography, then complete it with a movie or a soundtrack, take everything with you for further studies at home, all for free.

In my case I wanted to know more about the obscure classical composer Charles Koechlin who lived alongside giants like Claude Debussy (born 1862) and Maurice Ravel (born 1875). Koechlin's teacher was Gabriel Fauré so I wanted to investigate why Koechlin, who had a very big output was so little known. Koechlin wrote in almost any style. Ranging from very strict almost Bach-like counterpoint to outbursts of very spaced-out modernism. One could easily describe him as somewhat of a musical chameleon and as such very hard to put in a certain genre.

Koechlin was no salesman and not very good at promoting himself. He was a respected teacher, wrote several important books on musicology and also the first biography on Gabriel Fauré. Koechlin was a modest man, almost a recluse, who lived uniquely for his music. Some would say he was obsessed with music and tonality. in today's vocabulary, a music nerd. I'm not going to write his biography, it can be found here.

So what has this to do with classic movies and early talkies in particular?

In the early 1930's when Koechlin was in his mid 60's he decided to visit one of the Paris cinemas to see what talking pictures were like. Probably by coincidence he ended up watching a movie featuring the British born German actress Lilian Harvey. He became obsessed with her screen persona. The old man was completely star struck. He went to see her movies over and over again. Almost immediately he started to write music in her honor.

One of the movies Koechlin saw in 1934

The Lilian obsession led to many many nights in different Paris cinemas. While seated in the flickering darkness of the cinema admiring Lilian Harvey, Koechlin found that many of the musical scores were ill fitting. He started to take notes and in some cases even composing music he found better suited for particular scenes. This odd behavior led to several imaginary film scores. He sent several pieces of his music to Lilian Harvey who of course was flattered at first but soon realized the old Frenchman was obsessed with her.

Koechlin was very timid and kept a low profile but when it came to Lilian Harvey nothing could stop him. At one point he even showed up at her summer residence in the south of France with hopes of proposing to her. After a while (and some serious stalking) I guess he soon realized marriage or even an affair with Harvey was out of the question. To my knowledge they never met in person.

However, all the movie going produced some very fine music. In most cases Koechlin's movie related music is a beautiful cross breeding of high and low culture. The finest piece is probably The Seven Stars Symphony which isn't a symphony in classical sense but a collection of tone-poems representing seven movie stars of the day. Douglas Fairbanks, Lilian Harvey, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings and Charlie Chaplin.

Plese listen to some excerpts of it:

The Seven Stars Symphony (1933)
3. Greta Garbo

The Seven Stars Symphony (1933)
5. Marlene Dietrich

Koechlin wrote music in homage to other movie stars as well, usually chamber music and often incorporating unusual instruments in classical music like the Saxophone, Celesta or even Ondes Martenot. When Jean Harlow passed away in 1937 he wrote this absolutely beautiful epitaph.

Epitaph For Jean Harlow (1937)

My favorites among Koechlin's music are the Danses Pour Ginger op 163 (1937-39) for two pianos, which in some cases have almost Satie-esque qualities.

At the time movie-stars were often seen as pop-stars with questionable lifestyles by the cultural elite and almost as royalty by us others. To Koechlin the talking pictures and the movie stars served as a main inspiration for over ten years. Did he care he was a well respected composer and teacher in the high brow cultural community of Paris? Was he at any time afraid to fall from grace? Probably not. He just did what he had to do. What do you think?

Thanks to Wellesz for the fine You Tube clips

Color in the movies - Part 2 - Chronochrome

2010-05-12T15:12:00.019+02:00

The additive color processes were many and all fairly alike. The basic principle of an additive color system consisted of black and white film stock that was treated with some sort of filters or sequence of filters when shot and up on projection the same filters were applied. Most of the problems with the different processes boiled down to getting the colored filters in perfect sync with the running film. While Kinemacolor had some success it wasn't the best looking additive color system. From a technical point of view it had quite a few shortcomings, most notably the irritating flicker and the limited color spectrum it offered.

The best looking and probably most advanced additive color process was French inventor Léon Gaumont's Chronochrome, patented February 11, 1911. Chronochrome was a three-color system where the three different color images were shot simultaneously rather than in sequence. The camera was equipped with three lenses and three filters, blue, red, green. The resulting positive was then projected by a machine also equipped with three lenses and filters.

Léon Gaumont

Léon Gaumont was born in Paris 1864. He grew up in a family of humble origins. His mother was a maid and his dad a Paris cab driver. In 1876 young Léon had the oppportunity to enter the Collège Sainte-Barbe, probably with the financial assistance of his mother’s employer, the countess of Beaumont. He was forced to leave school at the age of 16 when his parents separated.

Gaumont continued educating himself by attending classes at different public Paris institutions. In 1888 Gaumont married Camille Maillard, who brought as her dowry a piece of land on the rue des Alouettes, near the Buttes Chaumont, the eventual site of the Gaumont studios and of the 'cité Elgé'.

When Gaumont was offered a job at the Comptoir géneral de photographie in 1893, he jumped at the opportunity. His decision proved fortunate when two years later he was given the chance to acquire the business. In August 1895, he partnered with Gustave Eiffel (the creator of the tower), the astronomer Joseph Vallot and the financier Alfred Besnier to make the purchase. Their business entity, called L. Gaumont et Cie, has survived in one form or another to become the world's oldest surviving film company extant.

The company sold camera equipment and film, but in 1897 inaugurated a motion picture production business. Initially, Gaumont made films for the picture arcade business such as those operated by the Lumière brothers, but it was under the direction of Alice Guy, originally Gaumont's secretary made head of production that they began making short films based on narrative scripts.

Alice Guy

Alice Guy is considered to be the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filmmaking. She was also one of the pioneers in the use of sound recordings in conjunction with the images on screen in Gaumont's Chronophone system, which used a vertical-cut disc synchronized to the film. An innovator, she employed special effects, using double exposure masking techniques and even running a film backwards. Alice Guy pretty much set the standards for what could be done technically at the time. More about the Chronophone system and an example of Alice Guy's phonoscenes can be found here . She left Gaumont in 1906, before most of the experiments in color film took place.

In papers found after his death Leon Gaumont described the Chronochrome process like this:

“Each image appearing on the screen in natural colors was formed by superimposition of three images, violet, green and orange. The combined radiation of these three colors results in the reproduction of natural colors. The image was photographed on the film by three objectives placed one above the other, each provided with a glass color filter. These three images were were projected in superimposition through carefully aligned objectives and filters. In this process the single image of ordinary motion pictures is replaced by three images simultaneously projected and superimposed.
If these three images had the same dimensions as used in ordinary motion pictures, 18 by 24 mm each, each scene would require three times the length of film ordinarily used, and would necessitate very rapid movement of the film. Therefore, it was decided to reduce the height of the film by one quarter. By this method, the film length was approximately two and one-half times that of ordinary film.”

Three images in different colors would thus overlap on the screen. A servo engine installed on the projector would correct parallax problems. The chronochrome frame measured only 12 mm in height (the standard was 18 mm), which resulted in a panoramic format on the screen. The purpose of the truncaded height of the image was purely economical as less film were used because of this. Three frames were shot on the same space as two with normal height. One could argue that the dimensions of the Chronochrome image was a forerunner to wide screen film of later years.

The most fascinating thing about the Chronochrome process is that it still looks so good. Let's take a look at some of the Chronochrome films which was included in the first public presentations of the system. Ten short films were showed before an amazed audience in Paris, November 15 1912. It was a great success. In June 1913 the system was ready for export and thus presented in New York. The New York show contained slightly different snippets than the Paris showing and contained 16 scenes. To really show off the possibilities of the system both showings started with studio shots of flower and fruit arrangements.

The next segment showed what 1912 French beach life was like. In this clip there's also some footage used in the New York presentation. The Carnival in Nice, early spring 1913, some shots of Venice and a military parade in Berlin celebrating the wedding of Princess Victoria Louise of Preussia and Ernest Augustus Duke of Cumberland in May 1913.

At the outbreak of the first world war the Chronochrome and many other techincal innovations were either completely forgotten or put on hold. This snippet was shot at the Victory parade in Paris July 14,1919 and is one of the last scenes filmed in the process before it was finally abandoned in the early 1920's.

Color in the movies - Part 1 - Kinemacolor

2010-03-18T13:44:00.017+01:00

Since my second child, my beautiful daughter Juni was born January 22 there has been little time left for writing. Now things are slowly finding their tracks and new routines are being created. Uninterrupted sleep really does wonders for the creativity!

This is thus part one of a series I have planned for a long time. Many people seems to believe the first color feature was Gone With the Wind in 1939 which of course is untrue. In the series I will try to explain and show examples of some of the early color systems, all of them predecessors to 3 strip Technicolor (the system that was used in GWTW). I will try to leave out most of the technical details and concentrate on the basic principles in each system. Enjoy!

”3D films will be the next big thing”. It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I wonder if this modern day tagline was used in September 1922 when the first known 3D film opened. The film was called The Power of Love and was shot with a modified Prizma color camera. Prizma color was a primitive color system that was invented in 1913, but color movies were of course yesterdays news even in 1913.

The first successful color motion picture process was Kinemacolor. From the start it was a three color system. The roots of the system dated back to the work of Edward R. Turner, a British inventor who had received a patent for a three color motion picture system in 1889. This is really interesting since a working three color system for motion pictures didn't hit the public until 1932. Turner's early three color method was based on a mid-19th century discovery that virtually all colors could be produced by a combination of the three primary colors red, green and blue. This additive principle (bringing together the separate color parts to create a composite full color result) would be the inspiration for Kinemacolor.

In 1901, Turner went to Charles Urban, an American businessman residing in London, to request assistance in developing the patent, in return for exploitation rights. Urban was instantly enthusiastic, and got his engineer Alfred Darling to design a camera and projector. Research to produce a workable three color system went on for a year until early 1903 when Turner suddenly died of a heart attack in his laboratory. A few individual frames and one short strip of film show that the camera could take pictures, but in projection the images were almost impossible to enjoy because of the heavy flickering.

This short fragment shows the earlier three color experiments of Edward Turner. Note the distinct presence of the blue color in the footage.

To obtain a normal projection speed of 16 frames per second Kinemacolor had a speed of 48 frames per second, one frame for every color that was projected in sequence red, green and blue.

Charles Urban and George Albert Smith

Charles Urban quickly bought up the patent rights and set his associate George Albert Smith to work on the project. Several more years of trying to put three colors on the screen failed to yield acceptable results. Ultimately a simpler system using two colors was developed in 1906 and the results were deemed workable. The Kinemacolor system was born.

One impediment to producing natural color motion pictures had been the fact that existing film stocks were orthochromatic which means they were basically insensitive to red light. This was probably the major reason color film wasn't invented earlier. Until the commercial availability of true panchromatic black and white film that was equally sensitive to light of all wavelengths in the mid 1920s, color pioneers had to chemically sensitize their film so that it would record more or less of the entire visible color spectrum. Thus Smith and Urban had to make their own panchromatic film stock.

The Kinemacolor camera and projector

The Kinemacolor camera exposed black and white film through alternating red and green filters so that alternate frames were exposed through either the red or the green, but resulting in a black and white positive. The camera speed was 32 frames per second. The blue element in the earlier version was left out which also as a bonus meant less flicker.

In projection the movie was shown through a filter wheel, similar to that in the camera. The filters added the red and green tints to the successive frames. The results were remarkably good, but like all sequential color processes, Kinemacolor suffered from color fringing when objects moved, since the two color records were not recorded at the same time. Many color processes used this approach and all suffered from fringing on moving objects. The images demanded a stronger light in the projector but were often still seen as rather dark and muddy. Sometimes the film was not loaded in the projector in appropriate sync with the color wheel. This gave a undesired almost psychedelic effect. None of the two-color processes could reproduce blue or pure white, but various tricks were used to fool the eye into thinking it was seeing a neutral white.

Here is a 1906 demonstration of the two color Kinemacolor.

The first motion picture exhibited in Kinemacolor was an eight-minute short filmed in Brighton titled A Visit to the Seaside, which was trade shown in September 1908. On 26 February 1909, the general public first saw Kinemacolor in a programme of twenty-one short films shown at the Palace Theater in London. The process was first seen in the United States on 11 December 1909, at an exhibition staged by Smith and Urban at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Kinemacolor projectors were eventually installed in some 300 cinemas in Britain, and 54 dramatic films were produced. Four dramatic short films were also produced by Kinemacolor in the United States in 1912–1913, and one in Japan, Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura (1914).
However, the company was never a success, partly due to the expense of installing special Kinemacolor projectors in cinemas. Kinemacolor in the U.S. became most notable for its Hollywood studio being taken over by D. W. Griffith, who also took over Kinemacolor's failed plans to film Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, originally intended as a color feature. The project eventually became The Birth of a Nation (1915) but the color was left out.

Urban's greatest triumph was the Kinemacolor film of the Delhi Durbar. This spectacular ceremony, held in Delhi in December 1911 to celebrate the coronation, was filmed by several film companies, and their black-and-white records had already been seen in Britain by the time Urban returned from India with his team of eight and many thousands of feet of colour film of the ceremonies. The film opened at the Scala on 2 February 1912, and many felt that the filmgoing public would now be tired of the Durbar. Urban proved them very wrong. Offering the public an unprecedented two and and a half hours of film (16,000 feet)was unheard of at the time when a feature film rarely had a duration of more than 50-60 minutes.

Urban presented the film with a stage setting that represented the Taj Mahal, and accompanied it with a 48 piece orchestra, a chorus of 24, a fife and drum corps of 20, and three bagpipes. Its success was phenomenal. Patriotic London flocked to see it, and the proceeds from the Scala run and five road shows made Urban a wealthy man.

A Kinemacolor fragment of Lillian Russell from 1913.

Kinemacolor was quite successful in Europe and promised to grow and improve. However two events ultimately killed the company. First, another excentric British inventor, William Friese-Greene sued for patent violation. Friese-Greene claimed to have invented virtually everything relating to motion pictures but he lost his suit through all the lower courts in England. He finally did win when he appealed the lower court decisions to the House of Lords. Friese-Greene had discovered a technicality that made the original patents "incomplete" according to British law. This didn't get Friese-Greene anything but it did open up the Kinemacolor technology so that anyone could take advantage of it. The second event was World War I, which nearly destroyed all the European film companies. By the time Europe started to make a comeback Kinemacolor was nearly defunct and Technicolor in Boston, Massachusetts had taken the lead in producing a workable color process. Other additive color processes were also waiting in the wings.

More on those in part 2 so stay tuned.

Most of the information here is to be found on Luke McKernans brilliant site about Charles Urban. Please visit it for the full story about Urban and Kinemacolor.

Metropolis 2010

2010-02-10T22:48:00.004+01:00

Hot off the press! Here's a four minute snippet from the newly restored original version of Metropolis which will premiere friday night at the Berlin Film Festival. For those of you who have access to the French/German TV channel ARTE, stay tuned tomorrow night 8:45 pm CET for a Metropolis evening with two documentaries on the subject.

Here's a link to the ARTE special Metropolis site. It's in French but still worth a visit. I think there is a German version of it too but my German is sadly nonexistent.

I've had some busy times lately becoming a father for the second time but I expect to back with some regular posts shortly.

Metropolis restored

2010-01-08T13:06:00.007+01:00

Newsflash!
The restoration of Fritz Lang's Metropolis is well under way. Please read some info and see a short example of the work at the Algosoft website.

Fritz Lang’s original cut of Metropolis from 1927 will return to the screen at the 60th Berlin International Festival in 2010. At a gala presentation in the Friedrichstadtpalast on February 12, 2010, the classic silent film - reconstructed and restored by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation – will celebrate its premiere 83 years after the original version had its world premiere. Based on the original score by Gottfried Huppertz, the screening will be accompanied by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under the direction of conductor Frank Strobel.

After the opening ceremony on February 12, the world premiere of the restored original version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis will be transmitted live to the public from the Friedrichstadtpalast to a screen at the Brandenburg Gate. The public is invited to enjoy this significant moment in the history of film – free of charge – at this very special setting.

While I'm at it, please take a look at this:

The Movie Preservation Blogathon is hosted by:
Marilyn & Roderick at Ferdy On Films, etc
Farran - The Self Styled Siren
Greg from Cinema Styles also participates.

Visit the National Film Preservation Foundation here.

Paramount On Parade 1930 - A lost Swedish version

2010-01-01T02:27:00.018+01:00

80 years ago, in January 1930 a huge movie revue was in mid production at the Paramount lot. Paramount on Parade was their contribution to the revue craze that was going on at the time. The movie was made in several different languages, a quite common procedure, except this time they decided to make a Swedish version (!). This fact is not very well known here in Sweden since the Swedish version of the film is considered lost since the early 30's. The Swedish film institute has no idea where the film took off, there's no trace of it here apart from a box of stills. In some Swedish filmographies it's even stated that the film was never made. I know for sure it was made, shown and reviewed in the Swedish papers. The US version opened in April '30 and the Swedish version somewhat later. Below is a publicity for it dating from May'30, saying it "will certainly be the attraction the coming fall".

In 1929 Paramount had approached Ernst Rolf, the Swedish king of entertainment since almost 20 years. In many ways he was the equivalent to Florenz Ziegfeld with the distinction he also was a performer. Rolf signed a lucrative contract with Paramount running for two years. In January 1930 he and his soon to be wife Tutta Berntzen boarded the liner Annie Johnson heading for Hollywood. They were to stay about ten days in Hollywood shooting some six to ten numbers for the production. Rolf was given Skeets Gallaghers's role as Master of Ceremonies in the Swedish verson. According to the reports Rolf raised hell on the sets, running around blowing in some sort of navy whistle in a very demanding manner. This behavior so impressed the Paramount executives that he was soon allowed to shoot stuff for his own use while he had the technology at hand. For this task Paramount appointed no other than George Cukor as Rolf's personal director.

Rolf and Tutta in Hollywood 1930

Paramount on Parade was a giant production, it was Rolf's third movie and it had been five years since his last. He was by no means an actor. I will even extend that to say he couldn't act at all. He was mainly a singer, made around 900 recordings and was gifted with a photographic memory for lyrics. He had a fantastic sense for finding hits and spotting talent. He discovered many of Sweden's top entertainers for years to come. Rolf always kept a notebook where he jotted down text lines and ideas for others to materialize for him. British band leader Jack Hylton once said he had only met one true entertainment genius in his life, that genius was Ernst Rolf.

Rolf and Clara Bow on the Paramount lot.

Unfortunately Paramount On Parade was the only movie Paramount made with Rolf due to the depression and the studio halting or cancelling all planned musicals during the summer 1930. Since Rolf was a song and dance man who couldn't act he stayed on the roster as long as he could as he got a steady income from it anyway and without being forced to be available in Hollywood.

Rolf, Mitzi Green, Clive Brook and Tutta.

Another thing which is intersting is that Paramount really loved Rolf's wife Tutta and apparently offered her an even better contract which would make her the new Nancy Carroll. Rolf however, didn't allow her to accept it. I guess he couldn't stand the idea of his wife becoming a bigger star than himself.

Rolf and Tutta fraternizing with the Paramount stars.

My main interest is to locate all the "Swedish" footage. Some of it have survived but about two thirds is missing and has been missing since the thirties. Was something shot in color? Since Rolf had a total craze for anything modern and any possible trends, I'm absolutely sure he at least tried to persuade Paramount to shoot a scene or two in color, but maybe he didn't manage, I don't know. I know he bought some novelty shorts in 3D to show in his 1930 summer revue though.

Anyway, The Swedish version of Paramount On Parade was definitely made and shown here but flopped hard. Whatever happened to the film after this is completely in the dark.
Let's take a look at a snippet of the survivning footage from the Swedish version of Paramount on Parade directed by George Cukor. Ernst Rolf singing "Jag Är Törstig Efter Kyssar (I'm thirsty for kisses)" written by Rolf and Fritz-Gustaf.

Unfortunately Rolf died from a suicide attempt that ended up successful on Christmas day 1932. Tutta Rolf later married choreographer Jack Donohue whom she had met in Hollywood. Her son with Ernst Rolf, Tom was about four when he followed his mother to Hollywood in 1935. Tom Rolf later became an award winning film editor and is still living in Hollywood. I'm sure Tutta would have made it in Hollywood but she didn't get a second chance.

Stills from one of the lost Swedish numbers -

Gör Någonting

Until 1996, the only available prints of the American version of Paramount on Parade were missing all the color sequences, each of which was a major musical number: "Sweeping the Clouds Away" with Chevalier; "Isidore the Toreador" with Harry Green; "Nichavo" with Dennis King," "Come Drink to the Girl of My Dreams" with an all-star cast; and "Torna a Sorrento" with Nino Martini. (Fortunately, "Sweeping the Clouds Away" survived in a black and white version.) The running time of this cut version is about 77 min. This version is the one doing the rounds among collectors today.

Rolf presenting "Dancing To Save Your Soul"

In 2007 the UCLA reconstructed a nearly complete print, using new-found sound track recordings and most of the missing color footage. (One scene has soundtrack only plus still photos, another has image only without sound.) Please read Jeff Cohen's walk-thru of Paramount on Parade here. Until we get it on DVD it's the best description available of it.

What happened to the Swedish version is a complete mystery. Here's a song that Rolf and his wife recorded for the movie but where the footage is lost.
The song is "Gör Någonting! (Do something!)" written by Karl Wehle and Tor Bergström.

An early talkie Christmas - Part 2

2009-12-08T21:35:00.023+01:00

Just when we thought we had seen it all Warner Archive is releasing yet another batch of four totally brilliant early talkies to add to your wish list in the "must have" section.

The Show Of Shows (1929) was Warner's contribution to the revue craze that had begun a few months earlier with MGM's Hollywood Revue. However, this revue is probably the least magnificent of them all. It's incredibly stagy and drags on for just over two hours. All of it but the prologue was originally in color but the only color sequence still present in most prints is the Chinese Fantasy featuring Nick Lucas and Myrna Loy. I have heard rumors of more existing color footage but I have never seen any of it. Winnie Lightner's rendition of Singing In The Bathtub surrounded by a troupe of all male bathing girls is probably the most memorable number from it.

So Long Letty (1929) This is a must for all of us fans of Charlotte Greenwood and it's her talkie debut. There are actually two So Long Letty movies based on the same play by Oliver Morosco and Elmer Harris. The original play opened at the Broadway Shubert Theatre in 1916. Charlotte Greenwood did Letty on stage and the role was something of a breakthrough for her. In the first movie version made in 1920, Greenwood was overlooked and the role instead went to Grace Darmond. I guess Charlotte may have been located at the east-coast at the time. The 1920 version is still very interesting as it is one of Colleen Moores earlier pictures. As far as I know it's believed to be lost, like so many other of Colleen's movies are.

Both movies are pure farce. The basic plot is a wife-swapping game. Two couples are next door neighbors. Although Harry loves his sweetly domestic wife Gracie, sometimes he longs for somebody a little more festive. On the other hand, Tommy wants nothing more than a lot of well-cooked meals while his spouse, Letty would rather go dancing. The two men get together and decide they'd be better off if they switched wives and work on encouraging their better halves to get divorces. But Letty and Grace catch on to their plan and spoil it by suggesting a one-week trial. During that week, they treat their temporary husbands so abominably that the men are more than glad to have their original wives back. The 1920 version sticks fairly close to the Oliver Morosco play on which it was based. The talkie version directed by Lloyd Bacon adds a few plot twists, is slightly modernized and contains some catchy songs. Here's Charlotte in one of them, My Beauty Shop.

Let me see your bald spot - it fascinates me!

We move on to some pre-code grit with Ann Dvorak, one of our favorite pre-code actresses who just a few years earlier had been one of MGM's leading chorus girls and dance director Sammy Lee's assistant. In the spring of 1932 Ann Dvorak made three movies that definitely made her go from chorus girl to character actress. Scarface, The Crowd Roars and The Strange Love of Molly Louvain. The last of them is now finally out on DVD. Directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), it is an odd story about a woman torn between different but equally bad guys. Lee Tracy is memorable as the reporter who tries to save poor Molly from the gutter.

Ann Dvorak as Molly Louvain

The best thing with Molly Louvain is the theme song written by Val Burton and Will Jason, When We're Alone or Penthouse Serenade as it often is called. An absolutely beautifully written song with clever lyrics. Please listen to this fine rendition by The Arden-Ohman Orchestra with vocal stylings by Frank Luther.

Today's last entry is They Learned About Women (1930) Real-life vaudevillians Gus Van and Joe Schenck, whose piano act carried them to fame in the Ziegfeld Follies footlights and on early-radio airwaves, headline this spirited 1930 musical that combines World Series heroics with the quest for romance (The Broadway Melody’s Bessie Love plays the female lead). This is a unique opportunity to see vaudeville veterans Van and Schenck in action. It's their only full length feature and also their last joint effort on film. Six months after the premiere Schenck died of a heart attack in Van's arms at the age of 39. During production it changed title several times like the ad below indicates. Other working titles were "Take It Big" and "Playing The Field". They Learned About Women served as blueprint for Take Me Out To The Ball Game (1949)

Publicity material for They Learned About Women

Warner's are on a roll! Will there be even more?

An early talkie Christmas!

2009-12-03T12:53:00.015+01:00

Today Warner Brothers announced the release of some really interesting titles in the fantastic Warner Archives series. In this latest batch we find some absolute necessities for the early talkie fan. Below I have selected seven titles I would buy at once if I resided in the US (which I don't) as the Warner Archives series is only available to film fans in the US.

The Hollywood Revue Of 1929 A very prolific movie, instrumental to the movie revue and musical craze of 1929-30. It is unique in many ways. It was the first attempt at filmed musical revue and features all your favorite MGM stars except Lon Chaney and Greta Garbo. It is also the only movie in which you get a good glimpse of Queen Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in living color. Cliff Edwards is performing the original version of Singing in the Rain, a song that was written for this film. Be sure to get a copy of it!

Next in line and equally important is the first all color talkie ever made, On With The Show! (1929) Unfortunately, all color prints are lost since long but at least the film survives intact. Among the many great songs we find Am I Blue performed by Ethel Waters.

"With unpaid actors and staff, the stage show Phantom Sweetheart seems doomed. To complicate matters, the box office takings have been robbed and the leading lady refuses to appear. Can the show be saved?"

A personal favorite I have mentioned many times on this blog. Rio Rita (1929) was the biggest hit of the 1929-30 season. This is the 1932 re-release print I wrote about in my last post, but until the original 1929, 140+ minute version resurfaces it will have to do.

Rio Rita helped put RKO on the map and paved the way for a string of no less than 22 Wheeler & Woolsey comedies between 1929 and 1937. It was much thanks to the success of those early films RKO was able to give us all the fantastic Fred & Ginger movies during the later part of the 1930's. Say thanks by getting yourself a copy of Rio Rita, the film that started it all!

We move on to two movies which both opened in December 1929. The first It's A Great Life (1929) Starring Rosetta & Vivian Duncan (in their only full length feature) and Lawrence Gray. A very typical 1929 musical including three great Technicolor sequences. Let's hope the last of them hasn't been cut like it has been on several occasions when aired on TCM.

Sally (1929) Ziegfeld superstar Marilyn Miller in her first film of three. Sally was a no expenses saved all color talkie which used the biggest indoor sets ever built to that date. Sadly the color prints are lost except for a fragment of four minutes I hope is included in this Warner Archive print.

Show Girl In Hollywood (1930) See Alice White play Dixie Dugan. A totally charming musical showing how a musical talkie was made from the inside. Don't miss it! The final reel was originally in color but now we'll have to do with Alice White in grayscale.

Golden Dawn (1930) Another all color talkie musical. Golden Dawn is probably the most bizarre musical ever made and deserves a post of its own. Set in German East Africa we get Noah Beery in blackface singing a strange song to his whip. Marion Byron beating up her beau Lee Moran etc. Good score and wonderful songs by Stothart and Hammerstein but it stays a very peculiar picture.

Cut musical numbers in 1930

2009-11-01T23:41:00.044+01:00

The first life of the Hollywood movie musical ended in the summer of 1930. The movie goers were fed up with backstage dramas and movies built around a generous bouquet of songs. The songs could be great but plots were often thin and it was hard to tell the difference between two films. The studios were taken by surprise by this sudden change in behaviour. They were convinced they had found the ultimate form of entertainment. Something quickly had to change, it was inevitable. The musicals that were already made waiting for release were put on hold, in hope the reluctancy towards musical films would wear off. Many of the musicals in pre-production, or projects that were planned for the 1930-31 season were canceled. The most ill fated and expensive of the aborted projects was of course MGM's The March Of Time which has a post of it's own.

Some studios, most notably Warner Bros, came up with a third solution: They simply cut out as many songs as possible turning a would be musical into a comedy. Sometimes it almost worked, mostly it didn't. This is the reason many movies of this period are very short. If a 1930 movie end up with a running time of something between 60 or 70 minutes one can be quite sure there were cuts, most certainly songs.

This was the case with First National/Warner's Top Speed that opened almost songless late August 1930. Joe E. Brown and Jack Whiting play two clerks who poses as rich playboys at a swanky summer resort. (The movie was shot almost entirely at the Norconian Resort). One of them falls in love with a millionaire's daughter who has a very disapproving father, until he wins, through fate and fortune, the Big Boat Race, in the vessel owned by his sweetheart's father.

The Norconian Resort in Top Speed 1930

Top Speed had been shot as a full musical containing ten songs, some of them quite big production numbers. When it opened only three songs were left. With a running time of 73 minutes my guess is that the seven cut songs equals about 20 minutes of footage. This treatment of course paved the way for comedians like Joe E. Brown who had three musicals turned into comedy in 1930. But for other performers it was a sad experience. Singers like Bernice Claire had many of her best moments cut, ending up on the cutting room floor. Look at this very fine example of how this was carried out:
Bernice is just going to sing a fine song to her beau Jack Whiting, "As Long as I Have You and You Have Me". The music cue fades up, but just as she is about to open her mouth... Cut!

Earlier blockbusters were also tampered with at this time. Rio Rita, the big Christmas success of 1929 was re-released in 1932 in what was called a "modernized version". The modernization consisted of cut musical numbers. Rio Rita was a mammoth picture running in "massive 14 reels" which means that it had a running time of about 140 minutes. With the coming of the talkies a standard running time of 8-10 reels was quickly established. The silent movies had often been much more extravagant and extreme running times were common during the silent era. Rio Rita was one of those really extravagant movie operettas with the distinction it also was hugely successful. The earliest talkies aged very quickly, Rio Rita was no exeption. With it's rather slow pace, it had in many ways the form of a silent movie. To make this giant work wonders again something had to be done.

The missing pirate girls in the 1932 version of Rio Rita

It's been said that the cuts to Rio Rita which formed the 1932 re-release version were done by the hand of none other than David O. Selznick, but whether true or not, the fact remains that the film was slashed by somewhere between four and five reels in length, amounting to at least 40 minutes of deletions. The Rio Rita seen today is thus about two thirds of what it once was. Let's examine what we have and see if we can find any obvious cuts:

Just as the color portion begins we find one of the ugliest cuts. The anonymous singer has just finished crooning when we can see an acrobat act entering the stage. We also see a mass of chorus girls towering at the back of the stage. Cut!

Luckily most of the soundtrack to the 1929 version has survived. It's in terrible shape, but after some heavy filtering the truth emerges, the missing two and half minutes are there:

Another cut in Rio Rita is a giant production number of Sweetheart We Need Each Other. Look first at the 1932 version, just after the risque hint of male kissing both couples fall overboard... Cut!:

Then listen to what is happening on the 1929 soundtrack:

I'm positive I'm not the only one who would like to see that number.
Let's hope that 1929 original version of Rio Rita resurface some day soon. My firm belief is that it has just been replaced or mislabled, sitting on a shelf in an institution somewhere. The latest public showing of the original Rio Rita I have heard about took place around 1980.

Let's end this post with one of the three songs from Top Speed that was considered too good to cut. Laura Lee and Joe E. Brown perform Knock Knees by Al Dubin and Joseph Burke. The dance director is of course Larry Ceballos.

Mamba (1930) - Lost and Found

2009-10-21T22:20:00.028+02:00

In the summer of 1929 poverty row studio Tiffany Pictures decided to put all their eggs in one basket when they embarked on what was to become their biggest project ever. Warner Bros had done a similar move when they went all in with the Jazz Singer in 1927. Luckily the world embraced sound with open arms and Warner's got a place in the movie studio Pantheon.

Inspired by "Warner's Supreme Triumph" Tiffany Pictures decided to go all color, all the way. They had done short subjects in Technicolor before, but never an entire feature. The only two all color talkies that had seen the flickering lights from the projectors at the time production on Mamba began were On With The Show, that had opened in July 1929, and Gold Diggers Of Broadway that opened a month later. Both were musicals. There were three more all color talkies in production or slated for release at this time, they were all musicals. Mamba was thus to be the first all talking, all color drama to be produced.

Production was cumbersome and Mamba kept running out of money. In order to fool the creditors, the production kept two sets of identical costumes available so that the cast and crew could keep working in case one set was confiscated. Production cost landed at about $500,000 which was an enormous amount for Tiffany, a studio that was used to make movies at a fifth of this cost.

Mamba is mentioned in a Technicolor ad in the May 1930 issue of Photoplay. Note that the Weeler & Woolsey movie Radio Ramblers mentioned in the ad was never shot.

(click image for a bigger view)

Appointed director Albert S. Rogell's speciality was tight action dramas and westerns, this made him well suited for the task. The main characters were played by fine actors, Danish character actor Jan Hersholt (Greed 1924), Eleanor Boardman, star of her husband King Vidor's The Crowd (1928) and British born Ralph Forbes who did lots of supporting roles at MGM both before and after Mamba. The sets were elaborate, camera work and editing very fluid and suprisingly modern. Tiffany had their connections to MGM and it showed. All in all Mamba was a swell film that clocked in at 78 minutes.

Plot: August Bolte (Hersholt), the richest man in Neu Posen, a settlement in German East Africa in the period before World War I, is called "Mamba" by the locals, which is the name of a deadly snake. Despised by the locals and the European settlers alike for his greed and arrogance, Bolte forces the beautiful daughter (Boardman) of a destitute nobleman to marry him in exchange for saving her father from ruin. Upon her arrival in Africa, she falls in love with an officer (Forbes) in the local German garrison. When World War I breaks out, Bolte, unable to avoid being conscripted, foments a rebellion among the local natives.

Mamba opened March 10, 1930 at the Gaiety Theatre in New York. It was the sixth all color talkie ever made and the first that wasn't a musical. It got great reviews, broke the box office record and ran for over two weeks, which was long in 1930. With the demise of Tiffany Pictures in 1932 Mamba quickly disappeared into oblivion for almost 80 years. Its fate wasn't helped by the fact that most of Tiffany's original nitrate prints were used as fuel in the burning of the Atlanta depot fire in Gone With The Wind. Yes, it's true, a lot of invaluable movies went up in that fire.

Mamba review in the May 1930 issue of Photoplay.

(click image for a bigger view)

Mamba was considered lost until early 2009 when my friend Paul Brennan, film assessor for events at heritage cinemas in Sydney, Australia stumbled upon an entry at the IMDb messageboard.

”I have just had the opportunity of viewing the complete 1930's Tiffany Production of Mamba… …Unfortunately, this was seen without the accompanying Vitaphone [RCA Photophone] disc soundtrack… The early two-colour Technicolor was amazingly bright and made this screening a surprisingly pleasant experience. …according to the authors of Forgotten Horrors, "only about 12 minutes of silent footage remain." I can refute this information as there exists in Australia a complete 35mm version of this film, in good condition.”

Paul contacted the author of this post and after some time he was able to verify that it was true. A complete nitrate print of Mamba was found in a collection that had been inherited by an old cinema projectionist and was now located in an old warehouse in a remote area in Australia. All nine reels were in great shape. They were even stored in original Tiffany cans. Sadly only four of the nine soundtrack records were to be found.

Why did Mamba end up in Australia of all places? There is actually a logical explanation for this, Australia (and New Zealand) was the end of the distribution line. Sometimes it took years for a movie to reach this far from Hollywood. The prints were often in bad shape or incomplete when they finally showed up. My hypothesis why Mamba survived intact is that it reached Australia quite quickly and in good shape. It had it’s run but when it was to be shipped back to Hollywood Tiffany Pictures simply had ceased to exist.

Jan Hersholt

Mamba isn’t the only presumed lost movie that has shown up in Australia. Many cinema owners were and are also film collectors. When they returned their shown films to the renting office they used to go through the scrap heap of films that weren't to be sent back to the US. Therefore many movies marked for destruction ended up in the collections of cinema owners in forgotten desert towns throughout Australia. Paul had seen this quite often and went to the press to tell this story. The result was a new rule that no films was to be destroyed but instead donated to archives in Canberra and Melbourne.

Eleanor Boardman and Ralph Forbes

Paul managed to get copies of the film elements and the remaining sound disks and sent them to me. I then synchronized the sound with the images. This wasn't an easy task. Leaving out technical details, basically when a movie is transferred to DVD the frame rate of the movie is automatically changed to comply with the standard for TV signals. With the result that in most cases the movie runs about 4% faster on a DVD than at a cinema. This gives that the separate soundtrack had to be sped up accordingly. I lined up the picture elements and the separate soundtrack reel by reel on my computer.

I immediately ran into trouble, a classic problem with the sound on disc process and also the main reason it was given up in the early thirties: If a single frame or even a sprocket hole is missing in the film strip the sound inexorably goes out of sync. On the other hand, the discs could become scratchy or break, also making the film unwatchable. I worked it through reel by reel fending eventual jumps and cuts the best I could, ending up with four full reels of Mamba magic in both sound and color.

It's not without pride I can present to you, exclusively for this blog, two snippets from Mamba, one of the earliest surviving complete all color talkies we have left.

Excerpt from reel 5

Take a close look at the editing in the following clip. I think it's rather modern looking for a movie produced in 1929!

Excerpt from reel 8

Mamba is a truly astonishing find because of the Tiffany Studio rarity and the sensational quality of the production. Also it represents the best technical qualities of the period, quite a gamble for such a small studio and its attempt to leap into A studio status.

Paul and myself naturally wants to see Mamba restored, new 35mm prints struck, the film presented at film festivals in 2010 (for its 80th anniversary) and presented as a shining fascinating example of the joys and necessities of film history restoration. Because the film is actually really exciting and well produced. It delivers the goods as a piece of spectacular entertainment, and in glorious Technicolor. It truly is a seriously terrific surprise for any public film festival audience. A prestige DVD release with all sorts of Tiffany tales and surviving studio film clips would be a great collectors piece and would add lustre to the value of film preservation and restoration. We each have a massively exciting opportunity to promote and grip the public's interest. All that is missing now is funding.

Great thanks to Bob at the ever splendid Allure for the Photoplay scans.

Colleen bobs her hair

2009-10-08T22:14:00.013+02:00

The cover of the May 1920 issue of Saturday Evening Post
in which Fitzgerald's short story first was published

When F. Scott Fitzgerald published his short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair in the May 1920 issue of Saturday Evening Post, little did he know about the stir it would provoke. Up until this time, long, glorious, pampered hair was a key component of traditional feminine beauty. The idea of bobbed hair, which came into style after the first world war was considered scandalous and, as Bernice herself jokingly comments in the short story, even "unmoral". The fact that a simple hair cut could so upset an entire town may seem ludicrous to us now, but if we consider it in the context of the changing social period Fitzgerald lived in, it makes more sense. Long hair represented both a woman's beauty and her virtue – and bobbing one's hair simply wasn't seen as something a respectable, well-bred girl would do.

Enter the flapper. I will not turn this post into a feminist manifesto but some events were crucial for the flapper to appear like Phenix from the flames. The first world war forced the women out of the house and into society. With the right to vote - the modern woman was born. Suddenly women had an independency they never had experienced before. With this independence also came the desire to express their personalities in a new way. The women freed themselves from bustles and corsets, cumbersome attire which in many ways had been a prison sentence of about 500 years for all womanhood. Skirts went up, knees were shown and the long glorious hair was cut off.

A flapper gets a haircut.
Illustration by John Held j:r (Life Magazine, 1926)

The first actress who adopted the new style on a broad scale was Colleen Moore. She was born Kathleen Morrison 1900 (some sources say 1902) in Port Huron, Michigan. Her family later moved to Florida and that's where she grew up. The family summered in Chicago, where young Kathleen nourished her acting dreams in the company of her Aunt Lib (Elizabeth, who perhaps inspired by the times had changed her name to "Liberty" Lib for short) and her uncle Walter Howey. Howey was an important newspaper editor in the publishing empire of William Randolph Hearst, and he was the inspiration for Walter Burns, the fictional Chicago newspaper editor in the play and the 1931 Lewis Milestone film The Front Page.

Somehow uncle Walter knew D.W. Griffith and Aunt Lib had him arrange a meeting with Kathleen who had decided she wanted to go Hollywood at age 15. Griffith agreed to a screen test to see if her eyes (one brown, one blue) would photograph close enough in darkness as not to be a distraction. Her eyes passed the test, and so she left for Hollywood with her grandmother as chaperon and her mother along as well. Her name was changed to Colleen Moore and she debuted as such in The Bad Boy in 1917. Colleen was a smart girl and slowly moved up in the budding studio system. She proved to have great comic timing and got gradually bigger and better parts. Her big break came in First National's Flaming Youth (1923).

The poster for Flaming Youth (1923)

In Flaming Youth Colleen plays a vivacious flapper and had to cut her hair short to fit with the image. The idea for how it should be carried out is almost too simple to be true. In her autobiography Silent Star, published in 1968 Colleen tells us all about it. Her mother had a Japanese doll which she loved dearly and simply suggested that Colleen cut her hair to resemble it for the role as the flapper. Colleen agreed and the result is history.

Colleen Moore 1927

Flaming Youth made both Colleen Moore and her haircut overnight superstars. As important a film Flaming Youth was for the Jazz Age, as sad is the loss of it for us today. Only one reel of it is reported to exist in a vault somewhere.

Colleen Moore is one of those screen legends that is almost totally forgotten today because most of her movies are lost. Of her about 60 movies we only have a little more than a handful left to enjoy. One of them is Ella Cinders from 1926, a wonderful "modern day" Cinderella tale where Colleen makes good use of her comic talent and striking looks. Here's a clip from it. Please enjoy Collen Moore at the height of her career:

The bobbed Japanese doll haircut soon became synonymous with the flapper image and was copied by girls all over the world. One actress who took this hairstyle to another level was of course Louise Brooks, who used it to charge her appearence with allure and enigma. But she didn't bob her hair until 1926.

Louise Brooks 1929

Both Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks left their incredibly successful silent movie careers around 1930. Colleen made her last film as Hester Prynne in a poverty row production of The Scarlet Letter in 1934. She married a stock broker and learned how to invest her fortune. At the height of her fame, Moore was earning $12,500 per week. She was an astute investor, and through her investments remained wealthy for the rest of her life. Throughout her life she had a fascination for dolls (probably also their haircuts). Over the years, starting in her childhood she spent a fortune on a gigantic dollhouse, a fairy castle which still can be visited at The Museum Of Science and Industry in Chicago. In the 1960's she ran a television production company together with King Vidor. In her later years she would frequently attend film festivals, and was a popular interview subject always willing to discuss her Hollywood career. She was a participant in the 1980 documentary film series Hollywood, providing her recollections of Hollywood's silent film era. Colleen Moore left us in 1988, probably aged 87.

Louise Brooks hit the silver screen for the last time in 1938 with the forgettable western Overland Stage Riders. Contrary to popular rumor, this was not intended to be her "comeback" to Hollywood, she made it simply because she needed the money. She then opened a dance studio in Beverly Hills. It failed because of a financial scandal involving her business partner. In 1940, Brooks boarded a train back to Kansas, leaving Hollywood for good. She opened a dance studio in Wichita and wrote a book, "The Fundamentals of Good Ballroom Dancing". She later became a quite successful writer and painter. Louise Brooks left us in 1985, aged 78.

Let's end with a citation from the writer who started it all:

"I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble"

- F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The title picture of this blog is a poster for the 1927 movie Twinkletoes starring Colleen Moore.

New York Nights (1929)

2009-09-25T12:51:00.019+02:00

New York Nights is one of those early talkies that has survived but in severely truncated form. It's hard to tell exactly what was cut but it seems to be quite a lot. The print in circulation, the 1938 re-release clocks in at a mere 64 minutes compared to a reported initial length of 82 minutes. Some sources even state it ran for a staggering 102 mins.

I suspect the cuts made must have been some musical numbers from the Broadway show now only mentioned in the plot. One of the cut numbers is a cameo appearence of Al Jolson singing a number, unclear exactly what as with the rest of the cuts. In the beginning of the picture there is a nice songwriting scene also pictured on the poster above. The song performed is A Year From Today, written by Al Jolson, Dave Dreyer and Ballard McDonald. This is interesting because it is a very nice little song and the only song now present in the movie. The song is used in several different versions throughout the picture. Maybe the cut Jolson number is his rendition of his own song? Here's a little montage to show how a song was plugged in a non musical in 1929. It was important to show how versatile the song was and that it could be played in many different ways. I appologize fore the terrible sound quality:

New York Nights, is a sort of gangster drama starring Norma Talmadge who definitely was one of the talkie casualties. So was her sister Constance who made some 80 silent pictures but no talkie. Norma Talmadge's fall from stardom is seldom mentioned in the litterature because her career ended for no reason. Her acting is fine, her voice is great, it just didn't work. I guess her ended career possibly can be blamed on bad scripts and bad direction. Maybe also her age played a part. In 1929 Norma Talmadge was 36 and had done 160 movies. New York Nights is her first talkie of two and she even gets to sing in it.

A Year From Today - Sheet musc cover

The story is simple...
Joe Prividi (John Wray) is a mobster who happens to be backing a Broadway show. He has the hots for his leading lady, Jill Deverne (Talmadge), who only has eyes for her song-writer husband, Fred (Gilbert Roland). Prividi engineers a chorus girl into Fred's drunken arms at a speakeasy one night and arranges for a raid. Jill won't believe her husband to be innocent and she dumps him. Months later she is Prividi's mistress and after a shooting during a party is taken along with Prividi to the police station. There she discovers her husband, a down and out tramp without her. They patch up their differences and plan to escape New York to begin life anew, but Prividi has other plans for Fred...

Lilyan Tashman, Norma Talmadge and John Wray

80 years after its release, it is impossible to determine what sank this wonderful little film at the box office. But, sank it did.

A promotion failure? Did the rumor mill kill it? It's clear it didn't live up to the public's expectations. The only thing I can figure about the original failure of this film is that people had a certain idea about their silent stars and, for the most part, giving them a voice just took away the magic and made them seek out new faces - Cagney, Blondell, Tracy, and Hepburn among others. Very few weathered the transition and Norma Talmadge was among the many casualties. It doesn't take much more.

After one more picture, the glittering career of Norma Talmadge, a star that shone so bright would be extinguished. Her sister Constance didn't even get to make a talkie, her career ended in France with a forgettable late silent in 1929, she was 32.

Norma and Constance Talmadge

If you're a fan of the early talkies I recommend you check this one out if you get the chance. It's a rare opportunity to see Norma Talmadge in a film since so very few of her silent films survive. That's too bad since she was one of the most popular dramatic actresses of the silent era.

Here's a nice and snappy version of A Year From Today played by Leo Reisman and his orchestra. The recording was made by Victor in October 1929.

To colorize or not?

2009-08-24T11:03:00.011+02:00

It feels good to be back in business after a vacation in the tropics. I direct a heartfelt thanks to Raquelle who wrote a nice guestpost on The Trial Of Mary Dugan, Norma Shearer's first talkie during my absence. Thank you Raquelle!

Let's stay a while in 1929. This week it will be 80 years since one of the biggest hits of 1929 opened. Gold Diggers Of Broadway, the second all color talkie ever made. Now more or less a lost film as only the two last reels or about 15 minutes of it still exists. During the spring and summer of 1929 color became an indispensable ingredient for all major studios starting in july when the first all color talkie On With The Show opened to mixed reviews. Color quickly became the next big thing after sound had come to stay. At the end of 1929 this ad was published in many movie related magazines to further emphasize the importance of adding color to the movies:

(Click on image for a larger view)

Sadly, no color prints have survived of On With The Show but bits and pieces are found here and there from time to time. The latest find from it was a 20 second snippet found in a toy projector when it was sold at an auction. Luckily someone recognized the strip of film and turned it in to the UCLA. Here's a frame from the color snippet found of On With The Show

Isn't it sad the first talking picture ever made in color only exists in black and white save for a 20 second snippet? The second all color talkie doesn't even exist in black and white!
Let's have a look at one of those fragments from Gold Diggers Of Broadway, an absolutely charming number, make way for Nick Lucas singing his signature tune Tip Toe Through The Tulips:

The third all color talkie was Warner's giant revue The Show Of Shows which I have discussed and shown a number from earlier. Only about 10 minutes of its over two hours still exists in color.

Let's move on to the fourth, Sally, opening in December of 1929 starring Marilyn Miller, a true superstar of the 1920's who was given the opportunity to turn her legendary stage performance of 1920 into a big budget movie in both sound and Technicolor. Miller's movie career was short, Sally was her first movie of three and the olnly one shot in color. Unfortunately only four minutes of Sally's all color splendor is left for us to enjoy but those four minutes are fabulous. In this clip the color fragment has been spliced in in the otherwise black and white print. Another interesting detail is that the original soundtrack disks have been used for the color footage but not for the rest of the movie. I don't know if this was done to further enhance the magnigifence of the fragment or if the old optical soundtrack from the 1950's transfer had to stick around for economical reasons. In either case here is The Wild Rose with music by Jerome Kern. This particular scene was the largest indoor set ever built in 1929

The oldest all color talkie that has survived is the fifth, The Vagabond King, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Dennis King. It has been restored but is very rarely shown.

This leads to a question which is more of a dilemma really.
We are all familiar with digital colorization of classic movies. This was a quite popular fad in the late 80’s when a lot of old movies were colorized this way. I didn't like it then and don't like it now. I will always prefer the original black and white versions of these movies no matter what.

Colorized Stooges

But what about movies originally made in color where the no color prints have survived to our days? Like On With The Show or Sally. Would it be completely wrong to colorize them? I’m not sure I think so. If proper research was carried out it might actually work. Maybe the results could turn out just fine.

Let’s say there is also surviving color fragments of the movie in question, like with Sally for instance. Would it be blasphemy to colorize the rest of it in the same hues and style? I think not. A movie shot in two-strip Technicolor should naturally be colorized in the limited spectrum two-strip color offered. Every measure should of course be taken to do the colorization as close as possible to the original.

When releasing colorized movies on DVD a choice should naturally always be an option for those who prefer watching the "original" version. I'm not interested in any color if the movie originally was shot in black and white. Like Casablanca for instance, I know a colorized version was made of it 20 years ago. I still don't want to see it colorized. Two-strip Technicolor movies made "full color" isn't better. It's trying to make it something it never was.

My question is simply if the movie originally was made in color, like On With The Show or Sally, and where no color prints has survived to our times, could a computerized colorization be seen as some sort of restoration? I my opinion it could, if it was done with a great sense for what the original could have looked like. What do you think?

Guest Blogger Raquelle ~ The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929)

2009-07-30T03:59:00.005+02:00

You are probably wondering where Professor Jonas has disappeared to. The self-proclaimed Talkie King is gallivanting around in exotic Thailand with his family, eating his way through the delicacies of the country and getting custom 1920's style suits fitted to his Swedish frame. Before he left, I promised Jonas that I would write a nice guest post for him to keep his blog active and so that he would have a nice little present waiting for him when he got back. Jonas recently sent me a copy of The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929), starring my favorite actress Norma Shearer so I thought I'd write about this film, as it's an important part of early talkie history. And here it is! Enjoy.
Raquelle - Out of the Past ~ A Classic Film Blog

The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929)
When you think of early talkies, musicals immediately come to mind. What better way to celebrate the marriage of light and sound on screen, than to have music, singing and dancing? In February of 1929, MGM premiered it's first all-talking picture Broadway Melody (1929). It was an extravagant film that spawned a series of sequels as well as a host of other pre-code musicals. While most hardcore film buffs know about Broadway Melody, they may not be as familiar with MGM's first all-talking dramatic film, The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929) which was released in April of 1929.

Now what doesn't come to mind when you think of early talkies is courtroom drama. But why not? A Courtroom drama is one of the best ways to take advantage of the talking picture form. The action during a trial is strictly dialogue-driven. Lawyers, judges, witnesses, jurors and defendants are all talking their way to the story's climax and resolution. While courtroom dramas were not common in silent film format, they were perfect fodder for live theater. When talking pictures became all the rave, film makers had a wealth of material in the form of plays, many of which came with a security blanket of having their own history of success.

When Paul Bern suggested making The Trial of Mary Dugan into a film, MGM Producer Irving Thalberg didn't want to take any chances. While the play had been a Broadway hit, he proceeded cautiously and had a shortened version of the film with select scenes shown to a live audience to gauge their reaction before he went full steam ahead with the film. When the audience reaction proved to be favorable, Thalberg went searching for the perfect actress to play the title role of Mary Dugan. He didn't originally have his wife, Norma Shearer, in mind although it was pretty clear that she was hungry for the part. At first Shearer's arch rival Joan Crawford was considered, but director Bayard Veiller didn't think she would suit the character's delicate nature. Thalberg suggested Shearer to Veiller and Veiller had her try out some of the dialogue on one of MGM's new sound stages. Shearer was absolutely terrified and after rehearsing one quick scene, Veiller shooed her off set. While Shearer thought she had failed, her petrified and distraught audition was just what Veiller was looking for. Mary Dugan is on trial for a murder and depending on the outcome of the case, she could either have been executed or set free. Fear and panic in her voice would be absolutely necessary to convey this on screen. So Norma Shearer was chosen and filming began.

I can't continue on with this post without talking about the sound elements of the film. Professor Jonas would wring my neck if I neglected this. The Trial of Mary Dugan was one of the first films, legendary sound and recording engineer Douglas Shearer (brother of Norma Shearer) worked on in his long career at MGM and in Hollywood. The film was shot almost simultaneously with Broadway Melody. This was also one of the few MGM films recorded with sound on discs. Throughout the movie there are breaks in the sound which serve as signals for theaters to change the records. Also, because the new sound equipment was so expensive, the film had to be shot as economically as possible. Filming only took 19 days and there were lots of long takes, few camera tricks and most of the film is shot in one courtroom.

If you are lucky enough to watch this rare film, you'll notice that MGM really experiments with sound. In one scene, an empty courtroom is suddenly flooded with loud and boisterous people. They are all excited about watching a salacious trial unfold and nearly trip over themselves to get to their seats and fill the courtroom with chaotic and raucous sound. Then the scene switches drastically to stark silence as Mary Dugan sits quietly in her jail cell waiting to be beckoned to the courtroom.

Norma Shearer brings her dramatics from her silent picture days but is a visual and aural delight in talkies. Her voice, tinged with a slight twinge of a Canadian accent, worked beautifully in talkies. If anything, her career skyrocketed when she successfully transitioned to talkies. She achieved more success in talkie form than she did with all of her silent pictures combined. The Trial of Mary Dugan helped earn Norma Shearer the title The First Lady of the Talkies.

The story of The Trial of Mary Dugan seems rather irrelevant to the film as an entity. It's main draw, at least for me, is what the film represents at a critical moment in the history of film. It showcases how film studios had to drastically change their approach to films as silent movies quickly faded into the past. These studios had to radically alter everything they did and forge ahead into unknown territory. However, what they had was the potential to make serious money as audiences were hungry for talking pictures. At this point, they could really afford to experiment and to make mistakes, because even a poor quality film, would make money simply off it's novelty. However, the film industry was still a business and they knew that they couldn't just throw money to the wind and had to make serious and clear-headed decision on those early talkies. While The Trial of Mary Dugan made $400,000 profit to Broadway Melody's $1.5 million, it was still a success and it demonstrated that MGM had a bright future in making all talking dramatic pictures.

~Raquelle for Jonas~

A Lovely Award and vacation

2009-07-16T13:05:00.004+02:00

I just got an award! Or two to be honest. The Lovely Blog Award was given to me by Lolita of Lolita's Classics and Louie of Give Me The Good Old Days

Thank You both! Your blogs are definitely among my favorites!

The rules: Accept the award and post it on your blog with the name of the person that gave it to you. Pass on the award to as many bloggers as you wish and let them know you chose them for the award.

As usual I'm the last one in line and everyone I know already got multiple awards, so I give this blog to all bloggers who writes about classic movies, silents, talkies, silents and talkies, film noir or particular stars of the classic era. Congratulations all of us! We make the blogosphere so much more interesting!

Right now I'm on an extended holiday in the far east, but will soon be back in business with more old news. One or two surprises might turn up during my absence though, so stay tuned.

Jonas

Sammy Lee at MGM 1929-30

2009-06-27T17:41:00.012+02:00

It's time for a lighter post consisting of rare clips from even rarer movies. I have chosen a bunch of numbers made during the musical craze of 1929-30 featuring some of the most bizarre choreography ever to be produced on film during the early days of talking pictures. This was just before Busby Berkeley introduced a more cinematographic approach to dancing on film. The routines carried out often seems really awkward but are still very enjoyable, sometimes almost psychedelic in their craziness. The performers often had very limited dance training and the choreographers didn't always have the required experience, especially not transferring something that might have worked on stage to the screen. Usually there wasn't very much time for rehearsals and the production schedule was often very tight.

One of the more experienced choreographers however, was Sammy Lee, dance director at MGM. He started his career as child dancer in one of Gus Edward's Kid acts. He came to New York to work for the great Ziegfeld and became dance director of the highly successful Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. After contributing dance routines for Ziegfeld's famous productions Rio Rita (1927), Showboat (1928) and the last of the Midnight Frolics (1929), he signed with MGM studios early in 1929.

Let's start our Sammy Lee exposé with a color sequence taken from It's A Great Life one of his first movie musicals opening in December 1929. The number is The Hoosier Hop, written by Dave Dreyer and Ballard MacDonald, performed by Rosetta and Vivian Duncan. Behind them we see the MGM chorus with Ann Dvorak in pole position. Rumor has it that this specific number also was choreographed by miss Dvorak herself, even though Sammy Lee got the credit as dance director. Ann Dvorak was Lee's assistant choreographer in most MGM musicals produced between 1929-31.

Let's move on to the fall of 1930 and Good News with music and lyrics by Brown, DeSylva and Henderson. Here we find Ann Dvorak again center stage. This number one of the most wonderful early talkie scenes I know. It's raw, unpolished and full of pep. The tune is a smash, there's a lot of creative cinematography that even includes a short animation sequence. Dorothy McNulty (who later changed her name to Penny Singleton) goes bezerk at Tait Collage among with her fellow students. The number is of course The Varsity Drag.

Good News had its final reel, shot in Technicolor, a reel that today is missing from all known prints of the movie, making it almost impossible to show it in public. This is very sad as it is one of the better musicals made in 1930.

Two weeks later saw the premiere of Love In The Rough, a golf musical starring Robert Montgomery, Dorothy Jordan, Benny Rubin and Penny Singleton (again). This time We have to look at two numbers both written by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh.
First out is Dorothy Jordan in I'm Doing That Thing (Falling In Love). Watch out for Bob Montgomery's bare legs and speciality dancer Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker in the second half of the clip.

Now it's time for Robert Montgomery to both sing and dance!
I'm Learning A Lot From You, a number featuring some especially funny routines from Benny Rubin and Penny Singleton. I don't believe Robert Montgomery did much more singing or dancing than this. Good choice Bob!

Dorothy Jordan was cast as Honey Hale in Flying Down to Rio (1933) but backed out of the role to go on her honeymoon with Merian C. Cooper. This gave way to Ginger Rogers who got the role instead, her first with Fred Astaire.

Sammy Lee was nominated twice for an academy award for best dance direction, in 1935 for "King Of Burlesque", and 1937 for "Ali Baba Goes To Town", both at 20th Century Fox. He would return to MGM after a stint at RKO (1937) and directed shorts and choreographed war time musicals. Smaller studios benefited from his talents in 1944 and 1945. During this time he choreographed Columbia's "Carolina Blues" and Republic's "Earl Carroll's Vanities" before he retired with Paramount's 1945 release, "Out Of This World". Sammy Lee's productive career spanned an impressive sixteen years in Hollywood, and gave us many of cinema's most entertaining moments!
Sammy Lee left us in 1968, aged 77.

Thanks to Richard Unger, who contributed with info on Sammy Lee's career.

Queen Kelly - A talkie that never was.

2009-06-09T19:25:00.016+02:00

Much have been written about and attributed to this 1928-29 mammoth production, definitely one of the greatest productions Hollywood had seen at the time. However, it's mostly remembered for being unfinished and that it crushed at least two brilliant careers. I guess we have all heard at least one story about why it went down like the Titanic. One thing is certain, what was planned to be a fantastic queen dressed in full gala turned out a dismembered peasant in the end. I will try to give some background to this giant project and give a possible reason why it was unfinished and ended up in the darkest corner in the back yard of movie history.

Gloria Swanson and Walter Byron as Kelly and Prince Wolfram

Let's go back and have a look. What we have is this:
Joseph Kennedy (JFK's dad) was to finance a big film through Gloria Productions, a company he set up for Swanson on the FBO (Film Bookers Office) lot. Yes, Kennedy and Swanson were having an affair at the time. Both Kennedy and Swanson wanted a special project for their first collaboration together and they were both impressed by Erich von Stroheim, the brilliant Vienesse director who had made masterpieces like Greed (1924) and The Wedding March (1928). A preliminary meeting was held and at this meeting von Stroheim, who was out of work at the time told Swanson and Kennedy about an original story that had had written called The Swamp.

Gloria Swanson and Joseph Kennedy

Set in Kronberg, a fictitious 'Middle European' kingdom, the first portion of von Stroheim's screenplay tells a fairy tale-like story of an innocent convent girl, Patricia Kelly, who becomes involved with Prince Wolfram, a playboy who unbeknownst to her, is already betrothed to the reigning Queen. At first the Prince wants only to toy with Kelly, but in the course of their one evening together he sincerely falls in love with her. Unfortunately, the mad Queen Regina learns of the affair and literally flogs Kelly out of the palace. Kelly attempts suicide, but is rescued and abruptly sent to German East Africa, where her dying aunt runs a brothel. She is forced to marry a syphilitic plantation owner and eventually winds up successfully running the brothel herself, under the ironic moniker Queen Kelly.

Both Kennedy and Swanson were impressed and agreed to take on the project even though both were aware of von Stroheim's excessive and painstaking habits while filming. The Swamp was announced in July 1928.

The press releases published in the summer of 1928 show that Swanson was specifically recruited by FBO to make a sound film, and that The Swamp was envisioned from the start as at least part-talking: "Gloria Swanson's next for United Artists will have talking sequences. Voice tests are now being made and the leading man will be chosen with suitable attention to his vocal ability." This was a little tricky since United Artists who Gloria Swanson had an exclusive distributing deal with wasn't permitted to use the sound system that was going to be used by FBO-Gloria Productions.

Erich von Stroheim - Director

With a budget of $800,000, production started November 1, 1928, as a silent movie. At this stage the title was changed to Queen Kelly because everyone involved (except von Stroheim) felt that The Swamp was a bad title. Von Stroheim was a meticulous director and he would shoot thousands of feet of film and redo scenes over and over again until he felt that they were perfect. Queen Kelly was also shot in sequence, which means it was shot from start to finish, the scenes in right order. This is a very cumbersome and expensive way to make a movie and thus very rarely used.

Swanson was worried about Stroheims methods from the very beginning but since Kennedy was not concerned, she let it slide. At one point she even told her assistant that she saw this film as a child that didn't want to be born. Both von Stroheim and Swanson despised the new talking pictures but Kennedy was getting cold feet. Was it even going to be possible to release a silent film of this caliber in 1929? Kennedy imagined Queen Kelly as at least 40% talking. The director and co-producer-star were making a very long and expensive silent film while the main investor saw a talkie. There was definitely a problem here. Another problem was von Stroheim's habit of constantly changing the script, usually made to inject more explicit scenes to the picture.

Take a look at this dramatic scene where the Mad Queen Regina (Seena Owen) discovers her beloved Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron) in bed with Kelly (Gloria Swanson). This is pure Stroheim at the height of his powers and also one of the best scenes in the movie.

Filming progressed through December '28 and mid January '29 until it came time for the African sequences. It was already clear that the project would not be completed for several months because the production was going at a snails pace. It was now January 17, 1929 at a cost of $400,000. More than 200,000 feet of footage directed by von Stroheim, with little more than one-third of the scenario shot. Kennedy called for a meeting telling Swanson that they now had to convert Queen Kelly into a talking picture. Kennedy insisted on incorporating dialogue. Kennedy's views were presented by E. B. Derr, his chief of staff. Also present was Edmund Goulding, who had just written The Broadway Melody. The changes made in the script included adding scenes with "synthetic sound," that is, post-synchronized effects and vocal dubbing. Apparently von Stroheim wasn't present at this meeting.

The mad Queen flogging poor Kelly out of her palace

Some days passed. January 21, 1929. The marriage scene in the African brothel, when von Stroheim was instructing actor Tully Marshall how to dribble tobacco juice on Swanson's hand while he was kissing it, she stormed off the set, called Kennedy and demanded that the project be stopped. Kennedy arrived in Los Angeles to confer with Swanson during February 1929. They decided to shelve the project for the time being and write off the $750,000 that Kennedy had invested. An advertisement in Film Daily on 28 February stated: "Gloria Swanson, talking and singing in Queen Kelly, vitalizes the drama." There were definitely plans of making Queen Kelly a talkie, but how?

There are different views on what caused Gloria Swanson to stop the production that January day in 1929. Gloria Swanson always stuck to her version. She gives her explanation in an intervew with Dick Cavett in his TV-show aired august 3, 1970. Jump to 1:45, that's where it's getting really interesting.

While Queen Kelly was still visible on the shelf Swanson and hired sound specialist Edmund Goulding and convinced Kennedy to finance a new all-talkie to be called The Love Years, if only to give Gloria's fans something before the eventual completion of Queen Kelly that now definitely had to be turned into a talkie. This filler was written and directed quickly by Goulding and released as The Trespasser in October 1929. It became one of Swanson's biggest hits.

The Queen Kelly cast reassembled in December 1929 (without Stroheim of course) to make some singing inserts in an effort to salvage the movie by reincarnating it as a musical (I suspect it was too late even for that by this time). The musical numbers was directed by Richard Boleslawski. Film Daily now reported that "Queen Kelly, the Gloria Swanson picture shelved some time ago and lately revived for production by Pathé as an operetta, will be released through United Artists. The picture will have color treatment by Pathe multicolor method."

Kennedy thought he had commissioned Franz Lehar, the Austrian composer of The Merry Widow, to devise the music. But Lehar wrote only one song. Goulding, meanwhile, now called it quits and wanted nothing further to do with this fiasco. Then Kennedy finally walked away from what was now an $800,000 debacle. The musical version of Queen Kelly would probably have been as odd as turning Bergman's The Seventh Seal into an operetta. it simply couldn't be done. The song and musical scenes were naturally never completed or used.

Swanson continued hiring writers, technicians, and consultants to save the film. On November 24, 1931, a rewritten ending in which the Prince discovers that Kelly has successfully committed suicide by drowning was shot by cinematographer Gregg Toland and directed by no other than Irving Thalberg (whom von Stroheim had had so much trouble with before). This version was released in 1932 but only in Europe and South America due to a clause in Stroheim’s contract. The "Swanson version" had a score but no dialogue, "synthetic" or otherwise.

A scene from Queen Kelly shown in Sunset Blvd. (1950)

Queen Kelly remained unseen in the USA until a TV screening of the Swanson version in 1966, almost ten years after von Stroheim's death.
Some of the silent footage had found its way into Sunset Blvd. in 1950, where it represents the glorious stardom of Swanson's Norma Desmond, watched by her icy butler played by von Stroheim. When the fictional silent star Desmond visits the Paramount studio, she symbolically pushes an annoying mike on a boom away from her face, "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" She conveniently ignores the fact that Queen Kelly was, from the start, probably supposed to be a talkie.

I'm quite convinced that the reason Queen Kelly didn't happen was a combination of all these things. von Stroheim had no experience in making talkies and was certainly not willing to learn. He had no intention letting talk besmirch his art and just kept on going, despite the orders from above. Swanson was certainly concerend about how much of the picture would end up on the cutting room floor but most of all I think both Swanson and Kennedy feared that Queen Kelly would become far too expensive. With the advent of sound big silent pictures was no longer making money.

Read my review of Sunset Blvd. at Raquelle's Out Of The Past - A splendid blog not to miss!

A restoration of Queen Kelly was produced by Dennis Doros of Kino International in 1985 and is available on DVD.

Alice White - Showgirl In Hollywood

2009-05-27T21:32:00.008+02:00

I have mentioned Alice White several times before in my posts, so I think it's about time she had her own entry. Alice was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1904 (some sources say she was born in 1907). Still a child when her mother died she moved to Hollywood to live with her grandmother. After college she started to work as a secretary and occasional script girl in different productions. I guess it was a job like any other. Most people living in Hollywood worked in the movie business at this time and still does. One could easily say the movie studios in Hollywood were like the steel mills or textile factories of other towns.

Alice got lucky to work as a script supervisor for well known director Josef von Sternberg in the 1926 movie A Woman Of The Sea, made for Charles Chaplin Productions. Von Sternberg eventually fired her and sent her back to the office. According to von Sternberg she wasn't serious enough for the job. I guess it was because of this incident she was sent in to have a talk with Chaplin himself. Chaplin who had a soft spot for young perky girls liked her style and thought she would do better in front of the camera than behind. Chaplin pulled some strings and got her to do bit parts in different productions starting with The Sea Tiger for First National Pictures in 1927.

In her seventh film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), made for Paramount she finally got a leading role. This got her a real contract with First National who had decided they needed an "it-girl" of their own. The choice fell on Alice who indeed had much of Clara Bow's youthful pep but perhaps a little less of the "it". However, Alice's career didn't really want to take off in the silent world. Perhaps she wasn't a very good actress but she definitely had something. When Warner Bros bought the control of First National in September 1928 they decided to make Alice a talkie star. Her 15th picture, Hot Stuff (1929) was a part talkie and the 16th, Broadway Babies became her first 100% talkie. Alice White had finally found the missing part of her jigsaw puzzle. As Clara Bow's star fell with the advent of the talkies, Alice White's started to rise.

Broadway Babies was a smash! It tells the story of the "three Broadway musketeers" trying to break into showbusiness. While Alice is more interested in the showbusiness part, her two musketeer friends, played by Marion Byron and Sally Eilers, are only in it to nab rich boyfriends. Alice eventually gets her break, a wealthy potential lover and bootlegger, but naturally she also have a real sweetheart waiting in the wings. Alice finally admits her love for her sweetheart to the wealthy bootlegger, and having a big heart he releases her, clearing the way for a happy ending. Let's take a look at Alice White strutting her stuff in the final number in Broadway Babies, The song is called Broadway Baby Dolls and was written by George W. Meyer and Al Bryan:

Alice's next big musical was Showgirl In Hollywood which I have shown a clip from in my post about the static talkie. It tells the story of Dixie Dugan a Broadway showgirl who is lured to Hollywood by the empty promises of a pompous film director. Well in Hollywood she meets and becomes friends with Donny Harris (played by Blanche Sweet), a once popular film star. Dixie finally gets her break but ruins Donny's chances for a comeback. Devastated, Donnie attempts suicide but is saved. Dixie realizes her selfishness and convinces the studio bosses to "go on with the picture", for Donny's sake. Showgirl In Hollywood is in many ways a remarkable picture. It was adapted from two quite risqué novels written by J.P. McEvoy. Show Girl (1928) and Showgirl In Hollywood (1929). It was the first all talking movie which actually showed what it was like to make a talkie rather than a stage production.

With the sucess of the movie the McEvoy novel was turned into a comic strip where Dixie Dugan was modeled after Alice White's character in the movie but with Louise Brooks' hair style. The comic strip was to bacome the most well known version of the Dixie Dugan character.
Let's take a look at the final number from Showgirl In Hollywood, a sequence originally filmed in Technicolor. The clip is also interesting as it features cameo appearences from several big Warner stars of 1930. The song is Hang On To A Rainbow written by Sam H. Stept and Bud Green. Being a no expences saved movie it was decided Alice White's singing voice wasn't good enough for this picture. Therefore she was dubbed by Belle Mann, a house vocalist at Victor who did quite a few recordings with the Ben Pollack Orchestra.

Alice continued to make sucsessful talkies until 1933 when she was victim to a tabloid press scandal having alleged affairs with two men at the same time, her then boyfriend, actor Jack Warburton, and her future husband Sy Bartlett. She made occasional movie appearances until the late fifties but her days as a movie star were then long gone. Alice White left us in 1983.

Fellow blogger Jeff Cohen of The Vitaphone Varieties once described Alice White like this: "From this vantage point --- so distant to 1929, perhaps the most enjoyment that can be had in watching Alice White in her surviving early talkies is that she's so utterly unlike the vast majority of her peers. There's neither forced raucous demeanor, nor transparent attempts to appear cultured and refined that just come across as creepy --- no, she's simply herself: good, bad or indifferent. Mostly indifferent. Never seeming to quite connect with her surroundings or co-stars, or even fully understanding the lines she's speaking for that matter, Alice White defies the odds and manages to charm rather than repulse or dismay, and that's no small feat."

My Dad - A Pioneer

2009-05-23T11:09:00.005+02:00

Inspired by my fellow blogger Raquelle at Out Of The Past, I thought it might be a good idea to share some cool images I have of my dad. This post has nothing to do with either talkies or even films at all.

These images were taken in the summer of 1962. My dad was almost 20 years old and had just done his military service up in the north of Sweden. In the fall of '62 he was going to vocational school in Uppsala to become a confectioner. He was in the middle of what must have been his last real summer holiday.

The reason why the photos were taken is quite special. My dad was considered quite odd and daring going down town in shorts and sneakers. This was something out of the ordinary at the time, something you didn't do. Look at the other people, the women have neat little dresses and matching gloves, the appropriate attire for men was naturally a suit. Looking at these images today my dad seem very modern as his outfit fits modern times better than it did in 1962. Being a sporty character I suppose he just felt more cofortable dressed like this. In retrospect one could say he was ahead of his time.

The first picture above was taken on Kungsgatan, just outside the Stockholm Concert house, where the Nobel Price ceremony is held annually. The second image below was taken further down the road at Stureplan. I guess my dad is looking at some news paper placard, to his right we see the sign of Sturehof a well known fish restaurant still there totay.

The static talkie

2009-05-07T22:00:00.004+02:00

I feel there is a talkie myth I have to kill. Almost everything written concerning the early talkies states them as static, stagy, non moving, stale or plain dull. This seems to be the common view of what an early talkie is like. Well, I don't agree. I think there lies more behind the staginess than the fact that the camera was stuck in a booth and nailed to the floor. There are of course certain films that are incredibly static and non moving because they simply were bad films, done by directors that didn't know better. But there is a particular reason for the staginess in certain pictures no one seems to think of.

The most static of them all is probably Warner's Technicolor Extravaganza The Show Of Shows from 1929. It's almost unwatchable for a modern day audience, especially since all that is left of it is a foggy black and white print made for TV in the 50's. This seemingly endless, over two hour long revue belongs to the bunch of films that didn't age well. Let's take a look at the only preserved color sequence from it that has reached the public eye. A Chinese Fantasy or "Li-Po-Li" written by Edward Ward and Al Bryan, featuring Nick Lucas and Myrna Loy.

The staginess is frightfully apparent here because it is a stage presentation that has been filmed straight up. All the big revues of 1929-30 are static seen through the eyes of the modern day spectator, but to say that the early talkies as a whole had this problem is unfair. Imagine the effect a number like this had on a 1929 audience. I guess it must have been mindblowing, and in color too!

There are quite a few movies from 1929 that are very mobile and full of movement. Cecil B DeMilles Dynamite is one example. Let's take a look at a scene from another 1929 talkie, MGM's Their Own Desire, a film that opened December 27th 1929, two days prior to The Show Of Shows. We'll see Robert Montgomery picking up Norma Shearer at a very stylish party, all set to a beautiful and catchy tune, The Night Is Blue, written by Fred Fisher.

I don't find this especially static or stagy, It could have been filmed in the 1950's if you ask me. No, I think the static staginess should be looked upon as almost a genre in itself, a style that developed during the musical craze of 1929. After all, most of the early musicals were either revues or backstage dramas.

Four months later, in April 1930 Warner's takes the genre even further in Show Girl In Hollywood where perky Alice White is lured to Hollywood to make a talkie. What we have here is a meta-film. The audience are invited on the set. Quiet! Camera! Action!

I come to the conclusion that most musicals were basically filmed theatre because Broadway shows was something everyone wanted to see at the time. Putting a Broadway show on film was also simple and economic for the studios. With sets, songs and routines already worked out, the only thing left to to was to film it. They were meant to be stagy because they should give the audience the illusion of attending a Broadway show, not a movie.

The real movie musical came a few years later with Busby Berkeley's almost psychedelic settings in 42nd street. Berkeley was the first director who saw the musical genre as something uniquely cinematographic. His production numbers were always a feast for the eye, showing the audience things that never could be experienced when sitting in the stalls at a theatre. Let's take a look at the earliest example of Berkeley's work, it's not exactly as psychedelic as his later numbers but not that static either. Stetson from Whoopee (1930) Ethel Shutta and the Goldwyn Girls are all over the place. (Thanks to Matt for the video)

Many of the earliest musicals are lovable and sweet in all their innocence and they often contains wonderful songs, some of them still sung today.
I end this post with a superb song from the wonderful 1934 movie Kid Millions. Eddie Cantor introduces Ann Sothern and George Murphy who sing the Burton Lane classic Your Head On My Shoulder. Not exactly an early talkie but an example of brilliant songwriting.

The Love Trap (1929)

2009-04-28T13:07:00.013+02:00

Laura LaPlante 1930

Part-talkies are really hard to find these days but lately, when exploring the territory I found a few and enjoyed most of them. The Love Trap (1929) from Universal is something so utterly rare as a half-talkie. The first forty minutes of the film is all silent with intertitles. The second half is a fullblown talkie. The silent part has a beautifully synchronized score filled with sound effects, the only thing missing is the dialogue. It all works very well and I didn't think much of the lack of dialogue. The latter half, the talkie part starts with a quite long scene in total silence. This is very effective and cleverly done and helps the suspense building. The story is engaging and at the end of the film you don't realize the first forty minutes of it was silent. As a whole it must be one of few part talkies that really worked. Maybe because the sound enters at a critical moment in the picture and only takes the film to another level just as a film done partly in color would.

The Love Trap opened in August 1929 and was directed by William Wyler, a German born director who started his career at Universal making silent westerns in the mid 20's. He would later have the distinction of directing more Oscar-nominated acting performances than anyone else (31), a record still held by him today. His second to last effort was directing Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl in 1968. Other notable films directed by Wyler are Roman Holiday which made Audrey Hepburn a superstar in 1953 and the all time favorite epic Ben Hur from 1959.

The Love Trap tells the story of Evelyn Todd (Laura La Plante) a bright-eyed dancer who is fired from her chorus line job, and since she needs the money, accepts her friend's invite to a party of swells, where she will make some dough just for showing up. At the party she's cornered by a sly womanizer (Robert Ellis) and when she finally finds her way home she finds she's been evicted from her apartment, the furniture thrown out in on the sidewalk in the rain. In the depths of her despair, she is rescued by a handsome Prince Charming Peter Harrington (Neil Hamilton), who turns out to be a wealthy young businessman.

The tale switches to light comedy, as the two fall in love and marry, then it's back to melodrama as Peter's stuffy mom feel her son has married beneath his station. The worst thing is that Peter's uncle (Norman Trevor) recognizes Evelyn from the wild party both had attended earlier. Unable to explain her innocence, Evelyn sets an elaborate trap for the old aristocrat, in hopes that she can expose his error in judgement and regain the confidence of her husband.

For being a relatively innocuous "Cinderella" tale, The Love Trap contains a few moments of sexual intrigue, such as when Peter's snootie sister (Rita La Roy) tells the family she cannot be bothered with Evelyn's sordid situation, and as the family leaves to rescue Peter from the gold digger, the camera lingers on the sister climbing the stairs, soon followed by a slyly winking butler.

Laura LaPlante retired from the screen in 1935 and left us in 1996 aged 91. Her best remembered film is arguably the silent classic The Cat and the Canary (1927).
The Love Trap has been released on DVD by Kino and it also contains a wonderful documentary on William Wyler.

The Part-Talkies of 1928-29

2009-04-17T04:00:00.003+02:00

The part-talkies were a quite exclusive bunch of movies that came out just when the transision from silent to talking pictures was taking place. We all know that the talkie craze started in october 1927 with the Jazz Singer which in fact was the mother of all part-talkies and thus the first film in this very exclusive club of films. The Jazz Singer was a part-talkie as only the songs in it had synchronized sound.

Soon every studio wanted to explore the new technique and of course also make a profit on the talkie fad. However, technical limitations prevented most studios from making all talking pictures at once. There was almost no sound stages built yet because most studios still didn't take sound in motion pictures very seriously so the shortage of equipment was very comon as well. The major studios thought that including talking sequences in their movies would do fine for the time being. Sound was clearly a fad after all and would soon fade away, or so they hoped.

At this point, early in 1928 no one knew that talking pictures were here to stay. During a very brief period of about 18 months from mid 1928 to the end of 1929 quite a few part-taklies saw the flickering light of the projector. Most of them are forgotten or incomplete today.

Let's have a look at the part-talkie as a genre. As such it can be divided in three distinct types. The first type is a film that was meant to be a part-talkie from the start. Essentially it's a silent picture which has been graced with certain scenes with synchronized sound, often songs. I don't count the silent movies with a recorded score as part-talkies as there are no talking in those. Sometimes, as in the case of The Jazz Singer, they actually contain very little sound. The Jazz Singer only have about 15% of its running time in synchronized sound. With The Singing Fool it's the inverse as it contains very few silent scenes, about 70% are sound scenes. They are still both good examples of this first type.

Warner's head sound engineer George Groves recording

Fanny Brice in the part-talkie musical 'My Man' (1928)

The second type is a silent film with an added, often lengthy talking prologue where the actors present the movie or as in the case of the British film Piccadilly in 1929, one of the key players recollects the story and what the audience is about to see. The film itself becomes a giant flashback. The talking introduction served as a nice addition to the plot and it worked rather well. It could also be omitted quite easily without affecting the movie. Douglas Fairbanks made a talking prologue for The Iron Mask, which also included a prologue to the second act of the film.

The third type is a silent movie where talking sequences have been spliced in here and there, seemingly out of context because the picture itself were shot as 100% silent. Sometimes the talking sequences were added months after the completion of the silent picture. I think this hybrid usually stands as the example for how bad these films could turn out. They are often labeled as "grotesque curios" and mostly very rightly so. This kind of movie was never meant to be talking in the first place but it was made talking because of the ongoing talkie craze. Usually the talking sequences doesn't move the plot forward at all but halts the flow of the picture almost completely. In many cases the talking sequences were shot without the lead players and contained very banale dialogue, or simply a song with no connection to the movie what so ever.

Noah's Ark, one of Warner's bigger productions towards the end of 1928 was turned into a part talkie well after its initial premiere. For it's rerelease in the 1950's the talking sequences were considered so odd that they were cut from the film. In the recent print that airs on TCM from time to time most of the talking sequences has been restored. The brilliant MGM comedy A Lady Of Chance starring Norma Shearer had talking sequences added but according to my information Norma didn't get to talk. A Lady Of Chance only exists as silent today.

Another quite bizarre movie that was in production for so long it had to be made in to at least a part-talkie was The Mysterious Island (1929). Production started in 1926 and it was intended to be MGM’s high-budget answer to First National’s hit The Lost World (1925) and UFA’s Metropolis (1927). It was originally budgeted at a million dollars, shot in two-strip Technicolor and was to feature extended sequences of cutting-edge undersea cinematography. But the production was seemingly cursed — churning through countless rewrites that led it ever further from its source material, originally Jules Vernes books. It came to have three very different directors, one of then the Danish rather excentric Benjamin Christensen. The production suffered from very difficult weather conditions that thoroughly destroyed the expensive underwater sets on location in the Bahamas. As it limped to completion, the advent of sound changed everything and necessitated a cast change and still more rewrites and reshooting. Talking scenes were added, other scenes lifted. It was a complete mess.

When it finally premiered as a part-talkie in October 1929 it was way behind its time technically, a reported $3 million over budget, just a few weeks before the stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression. The worst timing possible. Despite positive reviews in the popular and industry press, The Mysterious Island bombed at the box office and earned back only a tiny fraction of its production costs. Believe it or not, it didn't turn out a total failure artistically. In many ways it's a fascinating film. Too bad no color prints survive.

Jane Daly is getting some help putting on her swimming suit

when filming The Mysterious Island sometimes 1928.

The part-talkie was an overgoing fad that soon was replaced by all talking pictures. There is however an example of a silent picture that was turned into a full talkie, The Canary Murder Case from 1929 starring Wiliam Powell and Louise Brooks. Most of the film was re-shot for sound but Louise Brooks was filming Pandora's Box in Germany when reshooting took place. She refused to return to Hollywood for re-takes and dubbing. She couldn't be replaced so the people at Paramount had to be very creative when they had Brooks silent scenes dubbed by Margaret Livingston. The editing is not the best but it works. Paramount spread the rumor that Louise Brooks didn't have a voice and with that her career in pictures was over.

The last movie that can be considered a part talkie was Chaplin's Modern Times from 1936. It contains some talking scenes, none by Chaplin but he get to sing his famous gibberish song "Je Cherche après Tétine" in synchronized sound.

When Greta Gustafsson changed her name

2009-03-30T11:29:00.004+02:00

While trawling the internet I recently stumbled on a brilliant Garbo site. The site is hosted by two German guys and is called Garbo Forever. At the site the visitor finds just about everything concerning Greta Garbo, her life and times. All together a splendid site. The site also contains scans of some very interesting official documents. I found this document particularly interesting since its an old Swedish document and there is no full interpretation of it on the Garbo Forever site.

The document concerns Greta Gustafsson's change of last name to Garbo.

In 1923, when Greta Gustafsson was a budding Swedish film star, ready to meet the masses in her first major film The Saga Of Gösta Berling. the director of the film Mauritz Stiller who also was her mentor (and lover) at this time thought that a name change would be appropriate for the release of the film.

Greta Gustafsson wasn't exactly a glamorous name as it sounded very common and was a name held by thousands of girls only in Stockholm. Early in 1923 she had allready made a small change in her last name omitting an "s" in Gustafsson. It looked slightly more international but was still not uncommon. This minor change wasn't enough for Stiller who thought of something far more exotic. He was a fan of names with alitteration like "Charlie Chaplin" so he came up with the Hungarian sounding "Gabór". Rumor has it that it was Greta's friend Mimi Pollack who then switched the letters making up "Garbo".

Greta liked Garbo better than Gabór and presented Mimmi's idea to Stiller who approved. Thus, a name petition was made and sent to the Swedish authoroties in mid November '23. This is the document shown above. Let's take a closer look at it.
The text reads like this:

To the Governor General.

I, undersigned humbly ask permission to let my unmarried daughter, miss Greta Gustafsson change her family name to Garbo.
Birth certificate enclosed.

Stockholm, November 9th, 1923.
Anna Gustafsson
Witnessed by: Monica Mårtensson - Ragnar Ek

My mother's petition is approved by me,
Stockholm, November 9th, 1923.
Greta Gustafson
Witnessed by: Monica Mårtensson - Ragnar Ek

If we look further in the details we can see that neither Greta or her mother Anna have written the petition themselves. Probably they let a family solicitor or a lawyer write it for them. It's written in a quite sloppy fashion so it's clearly done by someone who is very used to write such things. The signatures of both Greta and her mother tells us that neither of them was particularly used to write in ink. One can see that they have written their names quite slowly. Another interesting detail is that Greta's mother spellt Gustafsson with two s for both herself and her daughter. The document was clearly written in advance and the two women probably had an appointement with the solicitor just to sign the document. The two witnesses are probably people working for the solicitor. The solicitor then sent the document to the Govenor General.

It is stamped by the Governor General's office the 13th November 1923. It's filed as the 223rd dossier that year. It tells us that The Governor General's office made a research on the name and came to the conclusion that the name was free to use. There was no one with the name of Garbo in Sweden. A scribbling tells that there is one family called "Garbom" though.

The Govenor General then sent the document to the Department of Justice for final approval. A stamp tells us that it arrived there December 4th 1923.
The Department of Justice found nothing strange with it and finally approved the "birth" of Greta Garbo December 21, 1923.

Forgotten Star - Lawrence Gray

2009-03-17T14:19:00.008+01:00

This is an expanded version of the post made on my Swedish blog in 2008 to celebrate Lawrence Gray’s 110th birthday.

Lawrence Gray was one of the more prominent figures in the early talkies. It’s actually hard to miss him if you like me really like the 1929-30 films in particular. During the 1929-30 season he appeared in no fewer than eleven pictures, most of them from MGM.

He was born July 28th 1898 in San Francisco. In his early twenties he went to Hollywood, drawn to the budding movie industry as so many youngsters at that time. He quickly got a job as an attributor at Paramount. Larry was a very handsome young man with an easy going attitude which soon led to a place in front of the camera instead of among the props.

He made his debut in The Dressmaker From Paris 1925, starring Olive Borden. Almost by accident young Larry became a rising movie star. He got bigger and bigger parts in what was to become important high budget pictures. His third film was The Coast Of Folly (1925) starring Gloria Swanson. In Stage Struck (1925) Larry became Gloria's leading man, her love interest Orme, a “flap-jack-flipper”. Later that same year he did The American Venus with Esther Ralston and Louise Brooks. Both of these films had lavish color sequences.

In 1926 Lawrence Gray was cast alongside Eddie Cantor and Clara Bow in the comedy classic Kid Boots. For some reason he had a hard time getting the really big parts. Larry was bought over to Fox, where he made seven films during 1927-28. Also in 1927 he made his debut at MGM in After Midnight in which he shared top billing with Norma Shearer, the Queen of MGM. 1928 was a good year for Larry but a real mess studio-wise, working for several studios including Fox and Tiffany Stahl. He made Oh Kay with Colleen Moore for First National, The Patsy with Marion Davies for Cosmopolitan Pictures, then back to Fox for two films and finally ending up at MGM. In the spring of 1929 Larry made his last silent movie, Trent’s Last Case, starring Raymond Griffith and Marceline Day.

In august 1929 it was time for Larry to make his talkie debut in Marianne together with Marion Davies. In my opinion Marianne was an odd choice for a first talkie. Marion Davies really goes out on a limb and speaks every line with a very thick homegrown French accent. Keep in mind that almost every movie star at the time was absolutely frightened to be deemed not ”having a voice”. Larry, who had shown much skill as a comic actor during the silent days is perfectly cast as the American doughboy who falls for the French local girl, Marion/Marianne. he also got plenty of opportunities to show his finely tuned singing voice. The funny business was handled by two of MGM's newest acquisitions, Yiddish dialect comedian Benny Rubin and ukulele-playing Cliff Edwards.

Let’s take a look at some scenes from Larry's talkies. We start with Marianne, where Larry gets to sing for the first time on the screen. First out is Blondy, written by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed:

We move on to one of the best scenes in the film and a song that later became a classic tune. Here it is, for the first time, Just You, Just Me, written by Jesse Greer and Raymond Klages, performed by Lawrence Gray and Marion Davies. Note the accent!

Larry’s next film was It’s A Great Life, the consolation price The Duncan sisters got for missing the leads in Broadway Melody, remember. In this film Larry plays Jimmy Dean, an upcoming songwriter for a sister act played by The Duncans. There’s several color sequences in the film, this clip is the last of them and the big finale of the picture. I’m Sailing On A Sunbeam Music and Lyrics by Dave Dreyer and Ballard MacDonald.

We continue to 1930 and the First National musical Spring Is Here where Larry plays a minor role as the mysterious stranger. Spring is Here is a forgettable bagatelle but contains some good songs, among them one true evergreen written by Rogers & Hart. With A Song In My Heart, performed on the screen by Lawrence Gray and Bernice Claire.

Larry made six pictures during 1930 most of them musicals like Children Of Pleasure. He was teamed up with Marilyn Miller for Sunny and once again with Marion Davies for the Floradora Girl. As 1930 ended, the spotlights faded for Larry. Musicals were falling out of fashion and his character type was no longer wanted. Among his last pictures for a major company was Man Of The World (1931) which he made on loan to Paramount in 1931. It was a total failure.

Larry soon ended up as a bit player at poverty row studios like Victory Pictures, Liberty Pictures and Conn Pictures often playing singing Cowboys in B-westerns until he finally left the acting business in 1936 and his last film role in In Paris A.W.O.L. for William Rowland Productions.

Lawrence Gray left Hollywood to settle down in his wife’s home country Mexico. He set up a distribution business working as a liaison between American and Mexican film companies. He stayed in Mexico for the rest of his life. Lawrence Gray left us in 1970, far away from Hollywood.

My Talkie Lair

2009-03-09T01:20:00.007+01:00

Raquelle of Out Of The Past urged her fellow bloggers to take pictures of their entertainment centers. Naturally I have to answer to such an urge. Here goes!

Here's the center itself. My TV-set is an old Philips Widescreen I bought in France 10 years ago. I thought of changing it for a flat screen when it brakes down but it's still as good as new so I guess that will have to wait. All my friends have had flat panel TV's in road sign sizes for years but I don't care, since the talkies I watch often are quite flaky in quality and only have glorious mono sound. The toy stove is not mine. It belongs to my son who was watching a French "dessin animeé" about insects when this picture was taken earlier today.

Let's pass through the kitchen and look what we find on the other side.

This is where I make up my stuff and where I am right now. When the picture was taken I was not. Most of my silents and talkie collection is kept in unsexy albums like the red one that rests on a pile of junk to the left. As most films from the 1925-35 period awaits DVD releases you have to collect copies on home made DVD's from all over the world. Let's turn around instead and watch where I keep some of my officially released stash...

I have DVD's hidden in every space imaginable in my appartment, but this is the core of my collection. Mostly classic movies and European art films like Bergman and Fellini.

I have one thing in common with Raquelle here... We are both labeling our beloved VHS casettes with plain white labels on the short end of the box. I don't know if this is common practice. I don't know anyone else who does it except for me and Raquelle. It saves space so I thought it was a good idea back in the 80's when I started to do it. I bet Raquelle came up with the same idea.

On the other side there's more VHS and some records I'm probably ashamed of having in my collection...

When I am seated at my desk this is what I see...Records and occasionally some sunshine. Ooops! a pair of shorts! OK I'll leave those for documenatry values. Swell!

My next post will be up in a few days. It will be a recycled but slightly expanded version of my erlier Swedish post about Lawrence Gray, a forgotten talkie personality and singer of unforgettable songs.

The First Talkie

2009-02-27T23:28:00.015+01:00

Ever since The Jazz Singer opened in October 1927 it has been labeled "The first talking picture" which of course is untrue. It was in fact far from first or even a true talking picture. About 75% of it was silent as only the songs had synchronized sound. So when did filmmakers start to put sound to their pictures? Which was the first talkie? The truth is that sound was there from the very start. The moving picture as we know it was invented around 1890. Experiments with synchronized sound took place almost immediately. One could suppose that the moving picture never was intended to be silent but that it became silent for technical reasons.

At the turn of the century the sound and picture elements had to be separated as there was no way to put the sound in perfect sync on the film itself. It would have been cumbersome and expensive for the exhibitors to have at least two different machines going at the same time. There was no electronics at hand to amplify the sound and no easy way to obtain a fool proof synchronization of the machines involved. The film itself, without sound was such a sensation that it really didn't need the sound to make its mark. So instead of solving the problem the filmmakers left both sound and synchronization in the laboratory. After all it was the moving pictures that had the novelty value. Sound recording was yesterday’s news even in the 1890’s.

Not many of these really early sound pictures have survived. I have only managed to find one really early example, made by William K.L. Dickson at the Thomas A. Edison laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey in the fall of 1894. The film was made in the Kinetophone process, a technique developed by Edison which basically consisted of hooking up the movie camera to a phonograph. No electricity was involved and the synchronization was far from perfect.

The film shows Dickson playing the violin into a phonograph horn making the sound recording while two of his pals are dancing beside him. The soundtrack to the film, a phonograph cylinder was considered lost until the 1960’s when researchers managed to track it down. The cylinder was badly damaged and unplayable. In 1998 it was possible to put the pieces together with help of some computer magic. This is probably the earliest existing film with a synchronized soundtrack.

In Europe early experiments were carried out all over the place. Many different processes were tried, most of them very similar to the Kinetophone process but with different names like the Vivaphone in England or the Chronophone system developed by Léon Gaumont in France. The Chronophone used sound from a disc rather than from a cylinder, very much like the Vitaphone system used by Warner Bros in the late 20's.

The Chronophone machine

Most Chronophone films were done playback, the same technique as used in modern day rock-videos where the artist simply mimes to an already made recording. The effect is still striking and appears very life like. Let’s take a look at a “Phonoscène” made by female pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché, head of production at Gaumont and one of the very first directors. The film shows the well known French vaudeville artist Polin in one of his most celebrated numbers. The film was made in 1905.

About a hundred Phonoscènes were made in the Chronophone process between 1902-1910, almost all of them are showing vaudeville acts or songs. This was how the synchronized sound was used until the mid 20’s when Warner Bros went “all in” with Vitaphone and the Jazz Singer.

Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968)

However, The Vitaphone process of having the sound and film elements separated was already old fashioned in 1927. One of William Dickson’s assistants at Edison's lab, French born Eugène Lauste actually patented an optical sound-on-film system as early as 1907 but didn’t manage to get enough funding to develop it further, and in 1914 the First World War came in the way.

Eugène Lauste working on a talking picture in 1911

Around 1920 Lee DeForest and Theodore Case developed Laustes ideas of an optical soundtrack into what was to be known as the Phonofilm. The process was bought by Fox in 1926 and renamed to Movietone. The Phonofilm/Movietone process is very similar to the method still used for sound in moving pictures. The first showing of the Phonofilm took place in 1922 and one of the first talkie stars to be captured on a Phonofilm was Eddie Cantor. Here’s “A Few Moments With Eddie Cantor” made in 1923.

As we can see, not much had changed artistically since Alice Guy made her Phonoscènes in 1905. We still have a performer and a camera that doesn’t move an inch. Most of the early Phonofilms shows vaudeville acts and doesn’t even try to be fancy. What about titles like “Miss Manila Martin and Her Pet Squirrel” and “Chinese Variety Performer with a Ukelele”. Have a look at this incredibly strange Phonofilm from 1925 showing “Gus Visser And His Singing Duck”. It’s not exactly high brow entertainment, but fun, in a sort of perverse way.

Why is The Jazz Singer considered as the first talkie then? It’s actually quite simple, Warner Bros was the first studio that took the talking movie seriously and also managed to commercialize it with great success. One should have in mind that the main purpose of adding sound was to provide music for the silent films and not for dialogue. Sam Warner’s vision was to provide the splendor of a big orchestra even to the smallest cinemas in every corner of the world. This could only be made by adding a soundtrack that accompanied the picture. Unluckily Sam Warner died the day before the premiere of the Jazz Singer, his vision died with him as the world soon decided to use the sound in a different way.

The Vitaphone system demonstrated by E.B. Craft 1926

Update:
Naturally I should add that the first all talking feature film was Warner Bros. The Lights Of New York, starring Helene Costello, Cullen Landis and Eugene Palette. It opened in july 1928 and was directed by Bryan Foy.
From the start it was intended to be a two reel musical short but Bryan Foy took advantage of Jack Warner's absence and expanded it to six reels. It was shot in one week at a minimal cost of $23,000. When Warner discovered Foy's expansion he ordered him to cut it back to the original short. Only when an independent exhibitor offered $25.000 for the film Warner agreed to take a look at the film. It went on to make a staggering gross of $1.3 million making it one of the most profitable movies made to that date considering its initial cost.

Seen with modern eyes it is an extremely stagy piece, with acting that ranges from passable to pure lumber. The script feels improvised, the visual style is non existent (apart from the shooting scene done in silhouette) and scenes grind on interminably with incredibly slow dialogue making the mere 57 minutes feel like one big tailback.

Bryan Foy later become a successful producer. Among his most memorable productions we find Bonita Granville's Nancy Drew suite from 1938-39.

Original scores and theme songs - Eternal hits in quickly forgotten films

2009-02-13T23:00:00.016+01:00

The 1923 Skandia Cinema, Stockholm

The silent film was never silent. Even the first public showings of motion pictures at the end of the 19th century often had a musical accompaniment of some sort. At the beginning not much attention was given the music as it served only to break the silence of the flickering images on the screen. Within a few years this random procedure found something of a standard formula in the accompaniment furnished by a house pianist. The honky-tonk piano, slightly out of tune soon became the most common apprehension of what a silent movie sounded like. It still is.

The untuneful hammering was the experience most people had when going to the movies as a majority of the cinema goers were living in small towns or villages. In the big cities a visit to the cinema often was something completely different. Many big city cinemas were palaces with an in house orchestra of sometimes as much as over a hundred musicians. The big cinema orchestra quickly became an attraction in itself. For people of lesser means, the cinema orchestra was probably their first encounter with “high-brow” culture, and must have been a wonderful experience to a person who wasn’t used to attend regular symphonic concerts.

The orchestra pit at the New York Roxy in 1927

Nearly every large cinema theatre had a musical director who arranged the movie scores from week to week. For this purpose the biggest cinemas had enormous libraries, some of them containing as many as 25,000 pieces of music. Normally, a silent film score consisted of different bits and pieces of music to fit the mood of the scene. Most commonly used were symphonic extracts from the old masters as Bach, Mozart or Brahms but also ballet music and interludes from operas and stage plays. Folk tunes and popular melodies quickly found their way to the movies. All these pieces were then carefully patched together by either the musical director or a hired arranger. When the musical director couldn’t find satisfactory music for a certain bit of action, he was often obliged to compose some himself.
It was at this point the film score as we know it was born.

To gain control of the overall impression of their movies, some studios started to commission scores, and had those sent out with the prints. An original score craved its composer. A two hour movie required as much music as an average opera. One of the first original scores was written by Victor Schertzinger for the movie Civilization in 1916. Schertzinger later turned into a director of many silent pictures, most notably Redskin (1929). Among his talkies The Road To Zanzibar (1941) is probably his best work. He kept a foot in the music department throughout his career. He got his biggest hit with the song Tangerine which he wrote for the noir classic Double Indemnity (1944).

The original score became more and more common practice for the biggest movies. The Frank Tuttle movie Puritan Passions (1923) had a score by Massachusetts born Frederick Shepherd Converse, his only credit in the movie world. The Marion Davies vehicle Little Old New York (1923) and Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924) both had original orchestral scores, both of them are apparently considered lost today. By the mid 20's, many bigger European productions also had original scores written. Gottfried Huppertz wrote a huge, almost Strauss-like score to Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Giuseppe Becce who usually worked on a smaller scale wrote almost 200 scores during his career from 1913-59, among them several for F.W Murnau.

Chaplin composing

The films with a smaller budget usually settled for theme songs instead of an original score. One of the first who used specifically written theme songs in his movies was Charlie Chaplin, who even early on frequently composed music for distribution with his films. In many cases the sheet music to the theme songs was for sale in the lobby. Many of these theme songs became big hits, several of them even bigger hits than the films themselves.

Let’s have a listen at some of the most well known theme songs from the late 1920’s.

Charmaine - What Price Glory? (1926)
Written by Lew Pollack & Erno Rappee
Played by Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians (1927)

Charmaine later became Mantovani's signature tune, and with that a true elevator classic.

Diane - Seventh Heaven (1927)
Written by: Lew Pollack & Erno Rappee
Played by: Nat Shilkret & His Victor Orchestra

Diane was recorded by Jim Reeves in the 50's and by Miles Davis in the 60's making it a clssic in many different genres.

Ramona - Ramona (1928)
Written by: Mabel Wayne & L. Wolfe Gilbert
Performed by Gene Austin to Nat Shilkret & His Victor Orchestra

Ramona is probably the most well known of all the silent theme songs. This version sold more than a million copies. Ramona has been used many times in many different movies. In Europe the Dutch/Indonesian duo, The Blue Diamonds had a huge hit with an uptempo version in 1960.

Weary River - Weary River (1928)
Written by: Louis Silvers & Grant Clarke
Played by Jan Garber & His Orchestra

Weary River has been recorded so many times it has become a true evergreen.

Should I - Our Modern Maidens (1929)
Written by: Nacio Herb Brown & Arthur Freed
Played by Jesse Stafford & His Orchestra

Should I was also the theme song for the 1930 talkie Lord Byron Of Broadway and has been recorded in many different versions ever since.

It was 80 years ago today...

2009-02-08T12:00:00.006+01:00

Broadway Melody, the first talkie musical had its celebrity premiere February 1st 1929 at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The public premiere was held a week later, February 8th in New York, making it exactly 80 years ago today. Historically, Broadway Melody is a very important movie, not only for movie musical lovers but for numerous other reasons as well.

Broadway Melody was the first talkie to have a score and songs specifically written for it by a songwriting team set up by a major studio. Former vaudeville artist Artur Freed wrote the lyrics and former tailor shop owner Nacio Herb Brown wrote the music. The two were hired by MGM in 1928. The story was written by Edmund Goulding and adapted for the screen by Sarah Y. Mason, Norman Houston and James Gleason. Harry Beaumont directed the picture. The three leading roles were played by Bessie Love, Anita Page and Charles King. Broadway Melody was shot on 26 days between September and November of 1928.

Bessie Love & Anita Page

At this time MGM only had one operable soundstage so Broadway Melody had to share space with the studio’s first all-talking dramatic film, The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929), starring Norma Shearer. During the morning and early afternoon, the Trial of Mary Dugan company would use the studio, and in the evening, the Broadway Melody cast and crew moved in.

Typical talkie set 1929

This is the original backstage musical and it tells the story of Hank and Queenie Mahoney, a sister act arriving in New York hoping to hit it big time on Braodway. Bessie Love plays Hank, the pepperpot of the sisters who's also running the act. She is in love with Eddie Kerns, an upcoming songwriter (Charles King) who eventually falls for Queenie, the younger sister (Anita Page). Rather than hurt her sister, Queenie starts running around with a scummy playboy. The truth about who loves who finally comes out and Hank backs off in a very memorable heart-breaking scene, giving up Eddie and the act, and clears the way for Queenie and Eddie.

The story is said to be loosely modeled on the life of The Duncan Sisters who also were sought after to play the leads in the movie. But for various reasons the leads instead went to Bessie and Anita. The Duncan's later got a consolation price in It's A Great Life which had a very similar plot but lacked the novelty value of its predecessor. It's A Great Life was to be The Duncan's only full length feature.

Bessie Love was nominated for an academy award for best actress in a leading role but lost to Mary Pickford in Coquette. Broadway Melody had three nominations and won the Oscar for best picture 1929-30.

Let's take a look at one interesting scene.

The movie starts off with a firework of sound at a Tin Pan Alley music publishing company. If we look closely we can see the composer Nacio Herb Brown at the piano and a glimpse of Arthur Freed as a spectator towards the end of the clip. The sound is noisy, the cutting is rough but the use of sound like this in a motion picture was something completely new to the audience.

The scene was orchestrated by the pioneering and inventive sound engineer Douglas Shearer who by no means was an experienced sound man at this time. Shearer was running the sound department at MGM as a one man operation and this was his third assignment. Maybe it tells something about MGM's look at the new talkie fad.

A proud Douglas Shearer with his 1930 Oscar for The Big House

Douglas Shearer was Queen Norma's older brother who came down to Hollywood from Canada one day to visit his sister. Norma quickly got him a job at MGM and almost by mistake he was chosen to set up the brand new sound department. As talking pictures was something new both to Shearer and to the world he had to be resourceful. In what seems to be a couple of weeks Shearer more or less invented how to make talking pictures.

A color frame from The Painted Doll number

Originally the film included a brief color sequence. The Wedding Of The Painted Doll, a ballet number sung by James Burroughs off camera. The sound was fine, however the dancers were not well rehearsed so Beaumont ordered a retake, but instead of letting the orchestra work overtime Douglas Shearer came up with the idea to use the soundtrack of the first take and let the dancers dance to the music coming from a loudspeaker. No one had an idea that the sound actually could be stiched on afterwords. Douglas Shearer had just invented the audio dubbing, a technique used in almost every single motion picture made ever since.

Broadway Melody is available on DVD

20 Favorite Actors Meme

2009-02-01T23:39:00.010+01:00

Raquelle of Out Of The Past smacked me with her trusty wrench once again. This time it was the actors that came to me in living color.

In no particular order and with many fine names left out, here goes...

Spencer Tracy

Rudolf Klein-Rogge

Ronald Coleman

Robert Montgomery

Richard Barthelmess

Orson Welles

The Four Marx Brothers

Lawrence Gray

Joseph Cotten

James Stewart

Fredric March

Erroll Flynn

Emil Jannings

Eddie Cantor

Cary Grant

Bela Lugosi

Roscoe Arbuckle

Since everyone I know have been tagged or smacked already, I'm resting my case.

Cliff Edwards - Forgotten superstar

2009-02-01T10:19:00.002+01:00

While strolling around YouTube the other day I found this disturbing clip concerning one of the most prolific entertainers of the early talkies.
No need for an introduction, it's all in the clip:

The saddest thing is that Cliff Edwards isn't the only one who has been erased from public memory. There are so many of these fine entertainers that simply didn't make it to our times. I don't blame all these seemingly ignorant people in the clip. How should they know who Cliff Edwards was when no one is no longer mentioning "their own" Ukulele Ike in the medias.

Mark Twain may be a fine writer but he did certainly not know how to strum a ukelele the way Cliff Edwards did! I think it would be suitable to proclaim a Cliff Edwards Day in Hannibal, Missouri after seeing this clip. A nice ukelele parade could be a fine thing to start it off.

The Premio Dardos Award

2009-01-31T13:28:00.008+01:00

My blog just got an award!

I send my sincere thank you to Jacqueline at Another Old Movie Blog for giving it to me.

No award is complete without a speech so first of all I want to thank Raquelle at Out Of The Past for making me start blogging in English, without her there would be no award and I had probably continued blogging in total darkness and oblivion for the rest of my days. Thanks!

Then I want to thank all my kind subscribers and blogging friends. We are a swell bunch aren't we! Thank you all!

Here follows the obligatory stuff:

"The Dardos Award is given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing. These stamps were created with the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers, a way of showing affection and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web."

And the rules:
"1) Accept the award by posting it on your blog along with the name of the person that has granted the award and a link to his/her blog.
2) Pass the award to another five blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgement, remembering to contact each of them to let them know they have been selected for this award."

Now it's my turn to pass the award on to some of my favorites:

And the winners are:

Raquelle at Out Of The Past - For her ability to inspire and tantalize.

Ginger at Asleep In New York - For her organic writing.

Carrie at Classic Montgomery - For honoring one of the greatest actors of all time.

Jonathan at The Invisible Edge - For one of the most hilarious blogs out there.

Will at A Suitable Wardrobe - For his steady eye on timeless style.

You are all worth it!

Broadway (1929)

2009-01-22T12:20:00.016+01:00

The Swedish poster for Broadway (1929)

Opening May 27, 1929, Universal's Broadway was one of the very first all talking musicals. It was produced mainly during the last months of 1928 and then put on hold until Show Boat was well into release. It was adapted from a two year run, successful Broadway play by the same name, written by George Abbott, Phillip Dunning and Jed Harris. The film stars Glenn Tryon, Evelyn Brent, Paul Porcasi, Robert Ellis, Merna Kennedy and Thomas E. Jackson repeating his stage role as the detective.

Universal and Carl Laemmle paid $225,000 for the film rights, and when it was decided to revise the planned silent picture into a talkie Universal had to pay an extra fee of $25,000 for dialogue rights. This initial cost was one reason it became one of the most expensive films Universal had ever made, ending up at close to $1000,000. The contracts permitted Universal to make both a silent version and a talkie version. This was quite common practice during the first half of 1929 as many talkies were made in both formats. The studios normally took this decision as a security if the talkie fad was to cling off. Well, It' didn't.

The three major 1929 movies from Universal.

Publicity from Photoplay October '29.

Broadway tells the story of underworld criminals dwelling at the Paradise Club. In between musical numbers there are crimes and intrigues involving showgirls and special investigators. Passion, strange business and love affairs are all part of the mix. There are two parallel plots - one involving a hoofer (Glenn Tryon) and his romance with one of the chorus girls (Merna Kennedy), and the other a crime story involving management and bootlegging that relies on feelings of guilt and paranoia to bring the guilty party to heel. Honorable mention goes to Evelyn Brent who is brilliant as the moll.

The director appointed to the project was a Hungarian born bacteriologist, Pàl Fejös, who prior to Broadway had made the much praised part-talkie Lonesome. Fejös trademark was the use of unusual and often stunning visuals. Broadway was no exception. For this production Fejös and his cameraman Hal Mohr constructed a giant crane at a cost of over $50,000. The crane resembled those normally found on a fire engine and could move in all directions at a fantastic speed, scrutinizing every corner of the giant set. The crane was also used to a great extent promoting the picture. However, the crane-shots had to be shot silent with the sound added later making these scenes stick out a great deal from the rest of the movie which is quite static.

Pictures like this of the giant crane appeared in all major film

magazines in the spring of 1929. This photo is taken from

the May issue of Photoplay.

Broadway was considered lost or at least incomplete for over 70 years when a complete silent version of the film was discovered in a film library in Fejös' home country Hungary. Unfortunately the silent version has much of the musical numbers cut but includes the Technicolor finale missing from the incomplete archival talkie print that surfaced at the Library Of Congress. The talkie version clocks in at some 20 minutes more than the silent version. Combining the available sources could possibly result in a complete talkie print as the complete soundtrack survives.

I have managed to get my hands on the Hungarian silent print and the soundtrack separately. With help of a little computer magic I then tried to synchronize a few scenes for your viewing pleasure. It wasn't the simplest thing to do, and no, the sync is far from perfect. Apparently there were quite severe sync problems in the original movie as well, many of the musical numbers were dubbed with mixed results. Both the picture elements and soundtrack are in quite bad shape but it gives you a hint of what Broadway once looked like. All songs are written by Con Conrad, Sidney D. Mitchell and Archie Gottler. Here we go:

We start with the opening sequence, including the Hungarian credits.

The music for the opening scene is Ferde Grofe's seldom heard

Metropolis - A Fantasy In Blue (1928).

We move on to the first musical number which as you will notice is severly cut in the silent version.

Glenn Tryon and Merna Kennedy in Sing A Little Lovesong, a lovely little number.

The most impressive clip, the Technicolor finale, all talking, all singing, all dancing as it should be.

Pál Fejös' Hollywood career ended as suddenly as it had begun. After Broadway he was involved in the production of The King Of Jazz, or rather his crane was, as he didn't get credit for his work. Many scenes in The King Of Jazz bears his trademarks and there's no doubt he must have directed some of the numbers.
Fejös wanted to direct All Is Quiet On The Western Front in 1930 but was turned down in favor for Lewis Milestone. After this deception Fejös returned to Hungary for a while. He also directed films in Austria, Denmark and Sweden before embarking on a documentary filmmaking trip to the Far East, China, and Japan, where he made Black Horizons and A Handful of Rice, among others, most of them for the Swedish company Svensk Filmindustri. In 1941 he joined the Swedish Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York. He spent the rest of his life directing anthropological research. He left us in 1963, aged 66.

Sunnyside Up (1929)

2009-01-16T10:15:00.013+01:00

The Swedish poster to Sunnyside Up (1929)

Raquelle of Out Of The Past got some early talkies in the mail the other day and asked me to write something about Sunnyside Up, a very good choice when it comes to early musicals. Enjoy!

In December 1928, Fox had bought considerable interest in the Brown-DeSylva-Henderson firm by paying them $150.000 in advance for the "book, score and lyrics" to a musical motion picture. They already had a string of successful tunes like Sonny Boy, one of the biggest hits of 1928, written for Warner's part talkie The Singing Fool, one of the most successful films of the 1920's. In 1929 they became superstars of Tin Pan Alley with four simultaneously running revues on Broadway. With all that in the bag, the three gentlemen headed west for Hollywood concentrating on writing musical comedies, Sunnyside Up was their first.

The movie had its premiere in October and the general release was on December 29th 1929. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell had starred as a romantic couple in three silent films, so it must have seemed a "natural" pairing when Fox cast them in Sunnyside Up, their first all talkie musical film. An oddity perhaps but neither of the two had any particular singing or dancing abilities. There were even rumors that they couldn't talk at all. The director David Butler had made nine films prior to Sunnyside Up and was still considered a newcomer. He later did films like The Little Colonel and Calamity Jane.

The story opens with a great crane shot of a lower East Side block, showing the people going about their everyday lives prior to the upcoming 4th of july celebration. Janet Gaynor plays Molly, a working girl who lives a happy simple life. Charles Farrell plays Jack Cromwell, a handsome well known Long Island millionaire who accidently drives into Molly's neighborhood one evening, ending up losing control of his car to avoid hitting a child. He doesn't know, of course, that secretly, Molly has worshipped him from afar after cutting his photo out of the newspaper. Fate brings the two polar opposites together, they click, but for different reasons.
The supporting cast is very well chosen, El Brendel plays the good hearted Swedish grocer, Marjorie White is perfect as Gaynors spunky room mate, and Frank Richardson, the only real singer among the principal players as White's songwriting boyfriend.

Sunnyside Up is subtitled "an original musical comedy", and that’s exactly what it is. This is no run of the mill backstage story in the Broadway Melody tradition, neither is it a reworking of a successful Broadway show as Rio Rita, but a contemporary love story set in the summer where two unlikely dreamers of different backgrounds meet and make sweet music together. Maybe that’s why it works so well.

The first song in the picture became an instant smash. I’m A Dreamer (Aren’t We All) sung by Janet Gaynor to her own autoharp accompaniment. The original script called for a full orchestra but it didn’t work with Gaynor’s weak voice. The final result couldn’t have been much better than Gaynor’s heartbreakingly minimalistic approach.

Sunnyside Up once contained one big color sequence shot in the brand new Multicolor process. Multicolor was, like Technicolor at the time a subtractive two color process but with a difference in the use of blue and red instead of green and red. Multicolor sometimes gave better results than Technicolor. In most cases the Multicolor hues are more realistic and less fluffy-tuff pastel compared to Technicolor. However, all color prints are lost since long. Luckily the movie is still with us, unfortunately in a particularly murky black and white print scanned for Television in the 50's.

The color sequence contained three musical numbers of which one has become a total classic. Turn On The Heat, one of the best production numbers made before Busby Berkeley made art of the whole genre. Sharon Lynn and a wild chorus transform the arctic cold set, complete with igloos into a burning mayhem in what must be one of the raciest musical numbers ever caught on film. Freud would surely have had a lot to say about it.

Sunnyside Up became one of the most successful movies of 1930 and grossed $3,5 million, a fantastic profit at this time. Gaynor and Farrell were teamed for a second musical, High Society Blues, but it was not even close to a success. Janet Gaynor then let Fox know she wouldn't sing any more and that she refused to be cast in more musicals, she got her will.

June Clyde - Sweetheart of the early talkies

2009-01-09T21:23:00.015+01:00

June Clyde can be seen in quite a few movies around 1930. She did mostly supporting roles, characters with names like Polly, Bonnie, Tess or even Toddy. Names normally used for the peppy younger sister in the family. The older sister was always more serious and didn't have a singing voice. I guess June Clyde can be safely put in the ingenue drawer without hesitation.

Unfortunately there's not much information on June Clyde anywhere to be found. She was born as June Tetrazini in S:t Joseph, Missouri in 1909, made her debut as Baby Tetrazini in vaudeville at age seven. In 1929 she was contracted by RKO providing great legs, a pretty face, singing and spunky dancing to some of their earliest talkies. The press people at RKO called her "The Luckiest Girl In Hollywood", mostly because of those famous legs of hers.

The earliest moving images to be found of June singing and dancing is as an uncredited speakeasy singer in her second movie, the crime drama Side Street opening in September 1929. June's only appearence in it is performing Take A Look At Her Now, written by Oscar Levant and Sidney Clare. The reason this clip is quite well known today is because George Raft makes one of his rare appearences as a dancer in it. Who said tough guys don't dance?

June moved on to bigger parts and close to top billing two months later in the hot musical Tanned Legs. Much have been said about this summer resort imbroglio, but in my opinion it captures the essence of 1929 really well. Despite some obvious technichal flaws it still is quite unique as it is one of the very few surviving pictures featuring Ann Pennington (who deserves a separate post). Tanned Legs is also one of only three movies in which we get to see Broadway legend Allen Kearns. Let's have a look at some of June Clydes musical contributions in Tanned Legs. She gets the first number "Come In The Water - The Water Is Fine, also written by Oscar Levant and Sidney Clare.

In the title number Tanned Legs, June and Ann Pennington does this perky duet filled with pep and great legs. Look for the big microphone at 0:26 - 0:28, dropping down twice in the upper left corner of the picture, a very early use of an overhead microphone hanging from a boom.

The next movie June did was Hit The Deck, a part color musical starring Jack Oakie.
Unfortunately it's totally lost. The only known surviving element from it is a small portion of the soundtrack. As it is impossible to even imagine what Hit The Deck was like we move straight on to The Cuckoos, opening in May 1930. The Cuckoos is a great Wheeler & Woolsey comedy that was their return to the screen after the success with Rio Rita discussed earlier. June Clyde has a quite important supporting role and gets to do two really sweet songs together with her love interest, the quite wooden but handsome Hugh Trevor. The first number, All Alone Monday is written by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar.

The second and bigger number is Wherever You Are written by Cliff Friend and Charles Tobias. June and Hugh Trevor again, swooning and planning a secret engagement. "Gee! That's a swell idea!"

At the dawn of the thirties June Clyde met director Thornton Freeland who's claim for fame lies firmly in directing Flying Down To Rio in 1933. They married and moved to England in 1934 and June continued to work on both stage and screen in England.
Here's an example of Junes European work, taken from the British movie Dance Band released in 1935. The movie tells the story of a band contest where the leader of one band, Buddy Rogers, also a US import, falls in love with his competition, the leader of an all girl orchestra. June of course plays this all girl band leader. I suspect June's character and the all girl band was modelled after Ina Ray Hutton & Her Melodears as there is a striking resemblence in both moves (wiggle) and attitude. Buddy and June also get to do a great number together, as double pianists in love. Lovey Dovey, written by Arthur Young.

According to the sparse information I have found, June Clyde and Thornton Freeland stayed married for life. They moved back to the US and settled down in Florida. They both left us in 1987.

Wheeler & Woolsey - A great comedy team

2009-01-04T02:02:00.014+01:00

Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey was the first comedy team more or less made for the talkies. They met on Broadway, in the 1927 Ziegfeld production of Rio Rita. After 494 performances the successful stage show was to be filmed by Radio Pictures (RKO), a studio formed in 1929, the same year as the movie was released.
Rio Rita was RKO’s third picture but their first major production, a production so grandiose their whole existence was at stake. Rio Rita consisted of fifteen massive reels of talkie extravaganza, the last five reels in glorious Technicolor. Luckily the film version became an even bigger hit than the Broadway show. Had Rio Rita been a flop there simply wouldn’t have been any RKO in the thirties, it was that important. Wheeler and Woolsey were the only players from the Broadway show that made it to the screen. One could say that the movie version of Rio Rita was conceived around their characters since quite a lot had been changed and adapted for the screen, their part was more or less left intact.

The Swedish poster to Rio Rita

Wheeler and Woolsey had somewhat similar upbringings. Both came out of profound poverty, were technically orphaned and forced to work very early. Both had also a history in vaudeville dating back to around 1915. Bert Wheeler was born in New Jersey 1895 and had done Chaplinesque numbers together with his wife in the eastern parts of the US. Robert Woolsey was born in California in 1889, started out as a promising jockey but this career ended when a horse fell and young Woolsey broke his leg. Eventually both Wheeler and Woolsey ended up on Broadway, Ziegfeld and Rio Rita.

Rio Rita was a huge success and Wheeler and Woolsey became big stars almost instantly. If the stage version made them famous, it was the movie version that made them real stars. They came to do 21 films for RKO between 1929 and 1937. In most of them they were supported by their perennial leading lady and co-star, the beautiful, petite and ever perky Dorothy Lee, who appeared in 13 of their features, almost making her a part of the team. The athletic Dorothy Lee was born in California in 1911 as Marjorie Millsap and started out as a successful LaCrosse player before singing with Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians. Dorothy Lee was one of the first actresses contracted by RKO and starred together with Morton Downey in the first RKO movie Syncopation (1929).

Dorothy Lee and Robert Woolsey in Half Shot At Sunrise (1930)

Wheeler and Woolsey were among the few comedy teams that did not combine the straight man with a funny man. Like Laurel and Hardy, Wheeler and Woolsey developed individual comic characters that provided an excellent contrast and were likable as well as amusing. Wheeler played the traditional romantic lover, a sweet, naïve, almost childlike character, constantly eating either bananas, oranges, apples or other edibles dreaming of his Dolly. Woolsey on the other hand, the mastermind of the team, always with a cigar, horn-rimmed glasses and a penchant for loud clothes. Wheeler's feminine counterpart, often and best played by Dorothy Lee, combines the innocence of the ingenue with the roguishness of the flapper, creating a perfect match for Bert's personality. Woolsey's feminine partners are often worldly-wise and boldly flirtatious, complementing his characterization. Today Robert Woolsey is often mistaken for George Burns who later used some of Woolsey’s trademarks including the cigar and glasses, and even some of the loud vests.

Here's a risqué little clip from Hips Hips Hooray (1934) where Wheeler and Woolsey tries out a new kind of lipstick, one with a flavor.

Wheeler and Woolsey are often compared to other comedy teams of the thirties, particularly Laurel and Hardy and The Marx Brothers, comparisons that are easy to make but essentially the three teams are very different. The general idea of The Marx Brothers is anarchy and their assaults upon a completely and hopelessly sane and rational society. The comedy of Laurel and Hardy is based on their failure, due to their incompetence, to adjust to a regulated world which they aspire to join.

But with Wheeler and Woolsey, the basis of their world of comedy lays in the belief that the whole world is a crazy place where anything can happen and where every institution is essentially insane. The result is that the comic view of their films emphasizes the absurdities of the institutions with which we live and take for granted as normal. Lawyers, divorce suits, the prison system, the military, big business, all are targets for satire in the Wheeler and Woolsey comedies. The music, song and dance always play a greater part in the Wheeler and Woolsey movies as well.

The team dissolved in 1938 with the premature death of Robert Woolsey. Neither Bert Wheeler nor Dorothy Lee had much success after Woolsey's passing. Bert Wheeler did appear on television now and then throughout the 50's and finally left us in 1968. Dorothy Lee retired from show business in the early 40's but stayed with us until 1999.

Let's enjoy some selected clips.

One of the most moving scenes in Rio Rita (1929) is this little number written for the movie version. Sweetheart We Need Each Other, written by Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy, performed by Bert Wheeler and Dorothy Lee.

Weeler and Woolsey figthing over Dorothy Lee in Dixiana (1930). We also get a wonderful romantic duet, My One Ambition Is You written by Harry Tierney and Anne Caldwell.

Also from Dixiana (1930), Here's Robert Woolsey on his own trying to impress the ladies, eventually ending up in song and dance, but also a glimpse of Bert Wheeler in drag. A Lady Loved A Soldier written by Harry Tierney and Anne Caldwell.

This totally insane number is taken from Hips Hips Hooray (1934). Keep On Doing What You're Doing, written by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar performed by Bert Wheeler, Dorothy Lee, Robert Woolsey and Thelma Todd. This song was actually intended for inclusion in the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup (1933) but ended up here instead. Swell!

2009 marks the 80th anniversary of the screen debut of Wheeler and Woolsey. Let's hope this means we will get loads of their movies on DVD this year.

Robert Woolsey's great grandson Robert Woolsey is continuing the family tradition and has a comedy site: Bob And Andrew.com

The March Of Time - The unfinished MGM 1930 Musical

2008-12-28T05:40:00.027+01:00

Let's end this year with a meaty post about one of the most fascinating projects of the early talkie era. The March Of Time, the no expenses saved MGM musical spectacular of 1930 that was to be the most grandiose of the early musical revues but for various reasons was abandoned. Not much is written about it anywhere and the sparse information given in various sources is often quite confusing or mixed up. Not surprisingly perhaps, since The March Of Time never saw the light of day. Over the last few years I have spent a great deal of time putting bits and pieces together and in this post I will try to show what The March Of Time looked like. Luckily some of the footage from it was recycled in other productions during several years after the project finally was scrapped in the summer of 1930. I have managed to track down this footage, so sit back and enjoy the ride.

When MGM released The Hollywood Revue in August 1929 they started a revue craze all the major studios came to participate in. Fox had actually been first out as The Movietone Follies of 1929 was released in April, but it was more of a musical misch-masch than a real revue as it had some sort of a dim plot. It's lost since the 1930's so there are not many people left who can give us first hand information about it so I take the liberty of ignoring it as a real revue.

The Show Of Shows was Warner’s contribution. A mammoth galaxy of stars extravaganza, mostly shot in color that opened to mixed reviews in December 1929. Universal had contracted Paul Whiteman and his orchestra for a movie project as early as October 1928. A year later Universal had finally come up with an idea for a movie. The whole band had to go west for Hollywood and The King Of Jazz, a revue built around the Whiteman orchestra. The all color revue The King Of Jazz opened in February 1930 but was a giant flop. Paramount deliberately waited to see what the other studios accomplished before taking the step making their own revue, Paramount On Parade, the last of the big revues opened in April of 1930. As Paramount had seen the mistakes made by the others their revue is probably the one that holds up best. Other studios planned or announced coming revue extravaganzas in the 1929-30 season but those mentioned above were the principal players.

As The Hollywood Revue was the first of the revues it also was the most successful. The general idea with the movie revue format was that it should be the equivalent to a Broadway Revue with new editions every year. Naturally MGM wanted to repeat the success of 1929 in 1930 and planned for a follow up. The Hollywood Revue of 1930

In this Technicolor ad published in The Film Daily Year Book 1930, released late 1929 it is mentioned as one of few coming attractions. Another interesting oddity in this ad is The Radio Revels of 1930, the RKO revue that was never made.

MGM gathered much of the same team as for the Hollywood Revue and shooting started in August 1929. Harry Rapf producing and Charles Reisner directing. Rapf had an idea to take the musical revue to the next level by making the most grandiose revue ever made. His idea was basically to make it a three-part exposé through the history of American entertainment over the past 50 years starting with classic vaudeville numbers and acts in the first part. The second part should show the stars of today and the third part the entertainment of tomorrow or up and coming stars. At this point it became clear that it wasn't going to be an ordinary revue so the name was changed to The March Of Time.

For the first part MGM contracted many classic performers including Joe Weber, Lou Fields, Louis Mann, Fay Templeton, Josephine Sabel, Marie Dressler, the 80 year old father of tap-dancing Barney Fagan and many others. The Albertina Rasch dancers did appear in massive recreations of classic ballet routines. All of this material was shot in the fall of 1929 and for many of the veteran performers it was the first and only time they stood in front of a camera. Some of this rare footage can be found in two very different productions of later date.

The first of them is a 1931 German film shot at the MGM studios as a promotional film for the German market. Actor Paul Morgan visit Hollywood and has a peek at what's going on on the different sound stages. Wir Schalten Um Auf Hollywood (We broadcast from Hollywood) was made when The March Of Time was in mid production. Originally it contained four numbers from The March Of Time but for some reason Long Ago In Alcala, sung by Ramon Novarro is missing from the print I have access to. I apologize for the bad sound and picture quality of this clip.

Luckily Ramon Novarro made a recording of Long Ago In Alcala, so let's just imagine what he looked like while hearing him sing this jolly number.

Many of the same scenes, shorter and cut a little different can be seen in Broadway To Hollywood from 1933, a movie that basically was conceived to take advantage of as much as possible of the material shot for The March of Time. However, in the final product much of it was cut.

We move on to the second part, modern day entertainment, which was mostly shot in color. Having survived from this segment are two magnificent ballets by the Albertina Rasch dancers. The first, "The Hades Ballet" was also the first footage from The March Of Time to be recycled when it was used in the Colortone short "The Devil's Cabaret", released in December 1930

The second ballet is "A Girl And A Fan And A Fellow" or "the giant fan number". A wonderfully elegant art deco number featuring Beth and Betty Dodge, or the Dodge Twins as they were called. This number can be found in a Three Stooges Colortone short called Nertesry Rhymes released in 1933.

The third surviving fragment from the middle section is probably the most mythical, and also one of the last numbers shot for The March of Time. Here we have the Dodge Twins again, this time in the perky number "The Lock Step", shot early 1930 at the brand new MGM extra high sound stage six. Sadly, only half of the number survives, found by researchers in the Technicolor lab in the mid 70's. The first part of The Lock Step number also featured Austin "Skin" Young who can be seen to the far right on this production still.

In 1934 "The Lock Step" was recycled in a Colortone short called Jailbirds Of Paradise. It was the last number to be recycled from The March Of Time. Unfortunately this short is lost today and all that is left is the following footage of the second part of the number.

The third section of The March Of Time is a bit more difficult to explain as there are several versions of what it really consisted of. At one point it was to showcase Gus Edwards Kiddie Revue as Edwards was appointed director for the whole project early on. A possible new title for the movie was also discussed, "Just Kids", but Edwards was replaced and the Kiddie Revue became a Colortone short never included in The March Of Time. The second attempt was done by the Myers-White dog troupe, as seen in Dogway Melody and several other shorts. The dogs were also lifted and finally replaced by some futuristic production numbers. A "Dance Of The Robots”and a "Steel Number" were planned but I have no liable information whether they were shot or not.

The last number that has survived to our days is the big finale that summed up the picture by connecting all three parts of the movie in a jolly sing-along, originally shot in glorious Technicolor, "The March Of Time Goes On" or "Father Time Number". It was included as a color sequence in some prints of Broadway To Hollywood mentioned earlier but is missing from all prints I have seen. However, it can naturally be found on YouTube. The quality of the clip is really bad but considering its rarity and importance it has to be included.

So what happened with The March Of Time? Why wasn't it the big hit of 1930? Apparently, it was indeed complete when shooting finished in February of 1930. But somewhere in post-production, producer Charles Reisner was getting cold feet as the musical was rapidly falling out of fashion. He ordered Rapf to "pump some story values into the picture". Rapf on the other hand was not very good at improvising and shot more songs and sketches instead. In hindsight it looks as Rapf decided to make what seemed to be random alterations and it becomes quite clear that he simply didn't know how to finish the project. The March Of Time couldn't simply be transformed into something else than a revue.

The last advertisement for The March Of Time appeared

as late as August 1930 in Photoplay Magazine,

weeks before the project was ultimately shelved.

In the fall of 1930 MGM simply didn't know what to do with a big budget musical that no one was interested in. I am quite convinced that the finished product that Rapf presented to MGM early in 1930 also was much of an artistic disappointment, apart from some good production numbers. MGM tried to make something else out of the $750,000 spent, but failed miserably. As Rapf frantically continued to look for a possible outcome for all the footage, MGM decided to go for salvage operations and use whatever footage that could be used in other productions culminating in Broadway To Hollywood in 1933. By that time MGM was strangely enough also planning a Hollywood Revue of 1933 as the musicals were coming back in style with a new twist. The project was quickly renamed Hollywood Party, released the following year and is a completely different story.

Let's end this post with a fine tune intended for The March Of Time. Here Comes The Sun, written by Arthur Freed and Harry Woods sung by Charles King, who possibly also would have sung it in the movie. I don't think this number ever was filmed though.

More about The March Of Time can be found at:
Jeff Cohen's Vitaphone Varieties.

Also be sure to visit Raquelle's review of:
The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

The 12" extended dance mix

2008-12-22T20:43:00.023+01:00

Among the talkies came a little oddity...

A friend of mine had me go back on a quest to the 80's the other day. The 1980's that is, with all its artifacts. It made me think of a phenomenon very connected to this era, the 12" "maxi" single. What was that all about? I usually bought them because they sounded better than the normal 7" single, but was I happy with them? You got the hit song all right, but often you got much more than you asked for really. The classic 12" single was in most cases an over-edited version of an already perfect song. The alterations were made only to make it bigger and longer, more suitable for dancing, which basically meant you got a lot more drum machine and random samples of the normal song scattered all over the place. For a long time I was fully convinced that the dance mix was something created by New York disc jockeys at the close of the disco era, around 1980. Naturally I was wrong.

Let me prove my case. Now, let's go further back in time to a more familiar era, closer to the intentions with this blog. Let's see if we can find any special dance mixes. The erliest example I have found dates back to 1914 when the duo Harlan & Collins made the first recording of the classic Feilds/Donovan hit song Aba Daba Honeymoon.

Original 1914 sheet music cover.

At this time there were mainly two consumer formats available on the market. The shellac disc and the cylinder. The normal cylinder had a playing time of just over two minutes, which was a bit short for a song. This limitation was one of the reasons the discs were gaining in popularity over the cylinders as they often contained more music. The last form of cylinders that was developed had however a playing time of up to four minutes and was superior to the disc in sound quality. And for a brief period of time, just before the First World War, the cylinder had its last minutes of fame.

The manufacturers often had to release both a disc and a cylinder version of the same song to reach all consumers. With the extended playing time of the new cylinders the dance mix was born!
Listen to these two fine recordings of the same song with the same artists, probably recorded the same day but in different formats. We start with the normal version from a Victor disc.

The four minute version contains a lot more sound effects, bells and whistles and is of course longer, even though it's played considerably faster. It simply have all the ingredients of an extended dance mix.

It was Debbie Reynolds and Carleton Carpenter who had the biggest success with Aba Daba Honeymoon as it was featured in one of Debbie's first movies Two Weeks With Love in 1950.

For more splendid cylinders and possible dance mixes from the past, please visit The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.

Favorite 20 actresses meme

2008-12-20T23:39:00.014+01:00

I got a smack by fellow blogger Raquelle at Out Of The Past, a splendid blog you should visit at any cost. The smack consisted in participating in the ongoing 20 favorite actresses meme.

This time I will keep in line with the general purpose of my blog and stick to silent or pre-code actresses. A very tough choice indeed. There are many really fine actresses that has been left out... maybe next time ladies.

The smack from Raquelle apparently hit hard as I began to see all my favorite dames in living color. Here goes in no particular order:

Dorothy Lee

Dolores Costello

Colleen Moore

Anna May Wong

Anita Page

Gloria Swanson

Ginger Rogers

Gerda Maurus

Greta Garbo

Fay Wray

Louise Brooks

Lillian Roth

Kay Francis

Jean Harlow

Janet Gaynor

Winnie Lightner

Tutta Rolf

Queen Norma Shearer

Marion Davies

Marie Dressler

I scribbled them all down on a peice of paper last week and comparing my scribblings with who actually made it to the list, I must mention those who didn't make it due to lack of space or pictures. Those are Joan Blondell, Charlotte Greenwood, Ethel Merman, Alice White and Joan Crawford.

I think just everyone that I know has been tagged and already made their lists.

So, tag yourselves if you fell like it.