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

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.

June Clyde - Sweetheart of the early talkies

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

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