Colleen Moore's last silent films

My very good friend Raquel of Out Of The Past recently sent me Colleen Moore's last silent film Why Be Good (1929), just released from the WB Archive. I decided to write something about it as an early birthday gift to Raquel, and also as a possible first step back to blogging after two years of relative silence. Happy Birthday Raquel!

On February 28, 1928 Colleen Moore signed what was going to be her last contract with First National. Moore had been the company’s prime money maker since her big break in Flaming Youth back in 1923. Her previous contract had included four films made 1927-28, Her Wild Oat, Happiness Ahead, Oh Kay, and the blockbuster Lilac Time.

The Swedish poster for Lilac Time

Early 1928 Colleen Moore was in a very good position to renegotiate her contract. One could say that the contract she was to sign was quite favorable. It stipulated that Colleen was to have final say over scripts, continuity, directors, photographers, male leads and cutting. She was obliged to make four photoplays and receive $150,000 per film. This made her just about the best paid actress in Hollywood at the time. Her husband and producer John McCormick who also was included in her contract didn’t believe in the coming of talking pictures so there was no mention of any singing or talking in the contract. One must also keep in mind that in February of 1928 talking pictures were just The Jazz Singer and some vaudeville shorts, nothing else.

The first film to be produced within her new contract was Synthetic Sin, a script which she approved of in March 1928. The script itself had been under development for over six months and Colleen was eager to shoot it. She still had to finish work on the last two films in the old contract first, Happiness Ahead and the silent version of the Gershwin musical Oh Kay. Both were made during spring 1928 and opened in May and August respectively. Lilac Time was already finished and waited for the fall season with an August premiere and a general release in October. With its enormous sets and multitude of extras, Lilac Time had cost more than the other three films together, so it was crucial it became a hit. By the end of its lengthy run it turned out to become the second most grossing film during the 1920’s. The biggest money maker until 1939 was The Singing Fool which coincidentally went up side by side with Lilac Time in the fall season of 1928.

Work on Synthetic Sin started in September ’28 but the other three films in the new contract were not yet decided. Normally the studio had a fair amount of forward planning, and when a four picture deal was settled it was often known which films were to be produced. Scripts were usually approved and directors appointed well in advance. Sometimes things didn't run as smoothly. McCormick had a script called The Richest Girl in The World which he thought suitable as Colleen’s next offering. William A. Seiter was to direct it. Even a starting date for it was set to November 5th.

Colleen Moore in Synthetic Sin

Hollywood movie making was quickly changing and with the thundering success of Warner’s second talkie, The Singing Fool in late September 1928, the other studios quickly had to reconsider their shooting schedules. First National decided that it would be favorable if Colleen agreed to do a talking picture since that was the new thing everyone was talking about. Colleen was the biggest star of the studio but her contract also granted her complete control and the possibility to refuse to talk on film if she felt like it, she had at least no contractual obligation to comply with this request. The studio cancelled The Richest Girl In The World because the script wasn't sufficiently developed (it was later revised into a 1934 Miriam Hopkins talkie, still with William A. Seiter directing it). First National suggested several titles to replace it, including When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, Funny Face and Dangerous Nan McGrew, and it had to be a talkie. That was if Colleen would agree to renegotiate her contract.

In October 1928 Warner Brothers bought two thirds of First National and since Warner’s was the leading studio of the talkie craze the demand to release talking pictures grew day by day. Before renegotiating Colleen’s contract the studio wanted to make sure she had a voice. She recited the nursery rhyme Little Bo Peep as her voice test. Colleen’s voice recorded just fine and was indeed considered suitable for talkies. However, she still had to go to a voice coach and even take singing lessons like everyone else who wanted to be a star of talking pictures. The coming of talkies was clearly a way of the studios to clean out all sorts of disadvantages and put pressure on their stars.

By this time Synthetic Sin was almost finished and a script for a second silent comedy was quickly decided, probably to buy some time to prepare for Colleen’s first talkie. The script was initially called That’s A Bad Girl but the studio finally settled on Why Be Good as the title. Mid November, just as shooting of Synthetic Sin wrapped, Colleen and McCormick took a week off and went through the heaps of suggested scripts to find the next film, Colleen’s first talkie. The choice fell on When Irish Eyes Are Smiling later renamed Smiling Irish Eyes, but it needed a lot of work to be turned into a working talking picture. Well home again, work on Why Be Good started immediately. With the success of MGM’s Our Dancing Daughters that had been running since September, First National wanted a similar vehicle to cash in on the youthful shopgirl movie fad.

In January 1929 Colleen agreed to renegotiate her contract with First National. The revision consisted in that the final two films left on her February 1928 contract were to be all-talking. She would get an additional $25.000 for each talking picture which meant she would get $175.000 per movie. McCormick who still was included in his wife’s contract was to get $35.000 per movie, a raise with $2.500. The contract more or less settled that the last silent picture Colleen was to appear in was Why Be Good.

Magazine ads for Synthetic Sin and Why Be Good (1929)

Synthetic Sin opened January 6th 1929 but wasn't a big success according to period reviews. However it wasn't exactly a bomb either as the public quite liked it, even more so with Why Be Good that opened two months later. It was clearly considered the better of the two. Why Be Good was basically an updated remake of Flaming Youth and was marketed as such. The press called it “peppy and entertaining”. None of the two films were seen as remarkable or outstanding by any sense, just typical Colleen Moore comedies.

Synthetic Sin and Why Be Good were shot almost back to back late autumn 1928, both had a synchronized score and sound effects but no dialogue. They were no high budget melodramas but quickly produced rapid paced comedies. Like so many other of Colleen’s comedies they were directed by William A.Seiter. As silent pictures quickly were falling out of fashion, the fan magazines and the press in general mostly neglected this type of movies in favor of bigger productions and all talking extravaganzas. We should be grateful that these two films have survived at all. Both actually did very well at the box office, each earning more than $750,000 against an initial cost of about $325,000, which was outstanding for silents in 1929, especially considering not very favorable reviews.

At the time when Why Be Good was released there were rumors running that Colleen would make one talkie and then end her career. This may very well have been her initial thought but to fulfill her contract she had to make two talkies before she could bow out. Smiling Irish Eyes and Footlights and Fools, shot during the spring and very hot summer of 1929. Both were lavish all-talking productions that included big production numbers and several Technicolor sequences. Sadly neither of the two survives to our time. Colleen was not at all pleased with how she turned out in them. She later said that especially Smiling Irish Eyes was a frightfully dull film and she wasn't surprised it flopped. Looking back this may explain why both her 1929 talkies were unsuccessful. She was clearly uncomfortable with the new way of making movies even though she had a voice. After fulfilling the contract Colleen took a break from movie making concentrating on dollhouses, successful investments and personal matters. Her days as a movie star were over.

Colleen divorced John McCormick in 1930. She returned to the screen briefly in 1933 and made four films for four different studios of which the first film, The Power And The Glory (Fox) is the one she liked best according to her memoirs Silent Star (1968).

The Restoration
Until the late 1990s both Synthetic Sin and Why Be Good were thought to be lost. There is an extremely high mortality rate for films released during the 1927-29 transition period. A large fire at Warner Brothers in the 1950's destroyed the then-known prints.
Fast forward to 2002 and New York's Film Forum. Prior to a screening, Ron Hutchinson of The Vitaphone Project updated the audience on the project’s latest activities. He casually mentioned that he recently acquired all the soundtrack disks for Colleen Moore's Why Be Good , and said something to the effect that "unfortunately, this is a lost film."

Film historian Joe Yranski, who ran the film library at the Donnell Media Center, had been a longtime friend of Colleen Moore's and knew more about this film than probably anybody on the planet, yelled out "No it's not! I know where it is!" The full house at Film Forum cheered.

Ron Hutchinson of The Vitaphone Project

Ron immediately connected with Joe, and learned the sole known 35mm nitrate prints for both Why Be Good and Synthetic Sin were in an Italian archive, donated to them decades before by actor Antonio Moreno. Thus began a decade long effort to negotiate the loan of both films for full restoration and synchronization with the existing Vitaphone disks. While the entire soundtrack to Why Be Good survived in Ron’s collection, only the disk for the last reel and exit music was known for Synthetic Sin. Fortunately, a full list of Vitaphone music cues existed and was used to recreate the soundtrack.

Ned Price, Warner Brothers Chief Preservation Officer and the driving force behind the studio’s support of nearly 150 Vitaphone short restorations, personally interceded with the Cineteca di Bologna and negotiated a mutually agreeable arrangement to have both films restored and copies of both finished efforts given to the archive.

Work began late in 2012, with the professional transfer of Ron’s Why Be Good disks and the lone disk for Synthetic Sin by sound engineer Seth Winner. The restoration effort represents a true partnership between Warner Brothers, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Joe Yranski, and The Vitaphone Project, and was completed in June 2014.

Synthetic Sin and Why Be Good were recently screened, for the first time in over 80 years, in 35mm and sound. The 2014 screenings in Bologna, Pordenone, London, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York were all literally packed to the last seat. One could assume that Colleen Moore's fanbase is growing with these discoveries.

Seen today both films are definitely well budgeted, have strong First National art direction with a heavy art deco slant. In the case of Why Be Good, there is the added attraction of Jean Harlow as a prominent dress extra (seen making out with a guy on a couch), and a super musical score with top jazz musicians of the period.

Jean Harlow as a dress extra on a couch

Why Be Good is available on DVD from Warner Archive. Be sure to get a copy of it.

The preservation state of the movies discussed above:
Her Wild Oat (1927) - Survives complete
Happiness Ahead (1928) - Lost
Oh Kay! (1928)- Lost
Lilac Time (1928) – Survives complete

Synthetic Sin (1929) – Survives with sound fragment
Why Be Good (1929) – Survives complete
Smiling Irish Eyes (1929) – Lost, sound survives
Footlights And Fools (1929) - Lost, sound survives

The recycling of music in The Artist

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

Colleen bobs her hair

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.

Queen Kelly - A talkie that never was.

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.

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

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: Jack Hylton & His 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 Paul Whiteman & 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.

Favorite 20 actresses meme

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.