Rio Rita - Lost footage found on You Tube

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

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!

An early talkie Christmas - Part 2

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!

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.

More on Golden Dawn soon, stay tuned...

Cut musical numbers in 1930

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.

To colorize or not?

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?

Sammy Lee at MGM 1929-30

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.

Alice White - Showgirl In Hollywood

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."

Forgotten Star - Lawrence Gray

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.

It was 80 years ago today...

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

Broadway (1929)

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)

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.