The static talkie

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)

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.

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.