The story of a girl from the country who makes it big in Hollywood was a staple of the silent era — see, e.g., A Girl's Folly, Souls for Sale, The Extra Girl, Ella Cinders — so much so that when Marion Davies (with King Vidor directing) spoofed the genre in the 1928 silent comedy Show People, everybody in town was in on the joke.
Look for cameos from just about everybody who was anybody including Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, John Gilbert and even Marion Davies and King Vidor as themselves.
While she is mostly remembered now as the inspiration for the no-talent opera singer in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane — a grossly unfair characterization if that's what Welles really thought of her — Marion Davies was actually a very good comedic actress and this movie was the best showcase of her talent.
In Tod Browning's West Of Zanzibar, Lon Chaney is crippled in a quarrel with his wife's lover (Lionel Barrymore) and takes his revenge on the daughter he believes to be theirs. First he forces her to work in a brothel. Then he arranges for cannibals to burn her alive. Then he really gets mad.
As with most Lon Chaney movies, it starts out weird then rides the twists and turns to a bloody and bizarre conclusion. Like an O. Henry story written by a psychopath.
One of the most enduring tropes of the early sound era is that of the silent film star who finds his career in ruins when his voice proves unsuitable for the new medium. Isn't that what Singin' in the Rain is all about?
More often than not, the tale of an actor's vocal woes was simply a cover story for a studio's own greed, spite or incompetence (see, e.g., Louise Brooks, John Gilbert and Clara Bow, respectively).
But in the case if Russian-born Olga Baclanova, the myth is right on the money.
A native of Moscow, Baclanova was a star of stage and screen in the early days of the Soviet Union, and received the title of Merited Artist of the Russian Federation, the USSR's highest honor for artistic achievement.
In 1925, Baclanova toured the United States with the Moscow Art Theatre then stayed behind to try her luck in Hollywood.
She made a handful of films in the two years before talkies — including a pair of classics (below) — then found herself, thanks to a thick Russian accent, limited to "exotic" parts and B-pictures.
Baclanova abandoned Hollywood for the Broadway stage in 1933 and had at least one big hit, Claudia, which ran for two years. Baclanova returned to Hollywood briefly in 1943 to make a screen version of her Broadway hit and then permanently retired from the movies.
She died in Switzerland in 1974 at the age of 81.
Although her movie career was relatively brief, Baclanova made three classics which have stood the test of time:
The Man Who Laughs is a macabre little love story that begins with a decadent king's order to carve a permanent grin into the face of a boy whose father has been convicted of treason. The boy grows to manhood earning an unhappy but lucrative living as a circus attraction, shunning all human contact but that of the young blind woman who travels with him.
Through a series of twists plotted by the great Victor Hugo, whose novel L'Homme Qui Rit was the basis for this movie, the man (Conrad Veidt in a first-rate performance) finds himself elevated to Britain's House of Lords and ordered against his will to marry a brazen duchess (Baclanova) with a fetish for his ruined face.
Depending on who you believe, either Bill Finger and Batman creator Bob Kane concocted the Joker from a photograph of Veidt in full Man Who Laughs makeup; or illustrator Jerry Robinson conceived the Joker from a playing card and then fleshed out the character based on a photograph of Veidt that Finger provided.
In The Docks Of New York Baclanova plays Lou, an abandoned wife making ends meet as a prostitute in a waterfront bar.
Two of Hollywood's most successful writers, Jules Furthman and John Monk Saunders, wrote this story in the style of Eugene O'Neill, with all the action taking place in one evening and the following morning. A sailor on shore leave (George Bancroft) pulls a suicidal young woman (Betty Compson) out of New York's harbor and over the course of an evening, takes a liking to her and proposes marriage.
It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, an early stab at Pretty Woman, say, but everyone involved handles the story soberly and realistically and the movie reminds me more than anything of O'Neill's Anna Christie which would be adapted the following year as a vehicle for Greta Garbo's first talkie.
Baclanova in particular breathes life into what could have been a stock character, playing Lou as a hardened cynic when plying her trade in the dive bar that sees most of the movie's action but as a beaten down survivor in private, defeated and without illusions.
"Do you think he can make you decent by marryin' you?" she asks Compson after hearing of Bancroft's proposal. "Until I got married, I was decent!"
While The Docks Of New York is not as visually interesting as von Sternberg's later work featuring his greatest star, Marlene Dietrich, it's more relatable and moving. Here — before he descended into wretched excess and maybe even madness — von Sternberg was still in touch with the needs and interests of his audience, still trying to tell a story, still trying to connect with real universal human emotions. I think it's possibly the best work of his career.
Finally, you don't want to miss Freaks, which is wildest and most modern of all the horror movies that were released during the early sound era.
Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks."
In this one, Baclanova plays the cruel circus performer Cleopatra. She seduces and marries the star of a traveling carnival (little person Harry Ealres), hoping to loot his fortune. Things don't work out quite like she planned.
Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.
Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin — or anyway, it got under mine.
Let's call this the Great Reconciliation. No, not between the Republicans and the Democrats — as if! Even the Monkey's not that good!
No, this is the reconciliation between what I used to call the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (read about them here) and my alternate Oscar polls. I stopped working on the former seven or eight years ago as I took up the latter and now the two lists have greatly diverged. So I'm reconciling the two.
Blah blah blah ...
Follow the highlighted links to read about the movie or nominee in question.
1927-28 PICTURE (Drama) winner:Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox) nominees:The Crowd (prod. Irving Thalberg); The Last Command (prod. Jesse L. Lasky and Adolph Zukor); Laugh, Clown, Laugh (prod. Herbert Brenon); The Man Who Laughs (prod. Paul Kohner); Wings (prod. Lucien Hubbard)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:The Jazz Singer (prod. Warner Brothers) nominees:The Cat and the Canary (prod. Paul Kohner); The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin); My Best Girl (prod. Mary Pickford); Speedy (prod. Harold Lloyd); The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (prod. Ernst Lubitsch)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat) (prod. Alexandre Kamenka) nominees:Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony Of A Great City) (prod. Karl Freund); Oktyabr (October (Ten Days That Shook The World)) (prod. Sovkino); Spione (Spies) (prod. Erich Pommer)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (The Circus) nominees: Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer); Harold Lloyd (Speedy); Albert Préjean (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat))
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Janet Gaynor (7th Heaven; Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans and Street Angel) nominees: Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd); Gloria Swanson (Sadie Thompson)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner:Mary Pickford (My Best Girl) nominees: Marion Davies (The Patsy); Norma Shearer (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner:F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) nominees: Paul Leni (The Man Who Laughs); King Vidor (The Crowd); Josef von Sternberg (The Last Command); William A. Wellman (Wings)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (The Circus) nominees: René Clair (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie a.k.a. An Italian Straw Hat); Paul Leni (The Cat And The Canary); Ernst Lubitsch (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg); Lewis Milestone (Two Arabian Knights); Ted Wilde (Speedy)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama) winner: Lionel Barrymore (Sadie Thompson) nominees: Gary Cooper (Wings); Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Spione); William Powell (The Last Command); Bert Roach (The Crowd)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Drama) winner:Clara Bow (Wings) nominees: Olga Baclanova (The Man Who Laughs); Evelyn Brent (Underworld and The Last Command); Gladys Brockwell (7th Heaven); Mary Philbin (The Man Who Laughs)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Eugenie Besserer (The Jazz Singer) nominees: Louise Brooks (A Girl In Every Port); Martha Mattox (The Cat and the Canary); Olga Tschechowa (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat))
SCREENPLAY winner: Herman J. Mankiewicz (titles) and John F. Goodrich (writer), from a story by Lajos Biró and Josef von Sternberg (The Last Command) nominees:King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd); Elizabeth Meehan; titles by Joseph Farnham; from a play by David Belasco and Tom Cushing (Laugh, Clown, Laugh); Raoul Walsh; titles by C. Gardner Sullivan; from a story by W. Somerset Maugham (Sadie Thompson)
SPECIAL AWARDS
George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography); Roy Pomeroy (Wings) (Special Effects)
The most popular movie of 1927 was The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronized sound to the movies at last. Audiences were thrilled not just to see Al Jolson singing but to hear him singing — and I can't say I blame them.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute, I tell you — you ain't heard nothing yet!" He wasn't kidding.
Even though "Toot Toot Tootsie" had been a hit for Al Jolson a couple of years before, its appearance in The Jazz Singer was a pivotal moment in the history of motion pictures. As co-star May McAvoy put it "In that moment just before 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie,' a miracle occurred. Moving pictures really came alive. To see the expressions on their faces, when Joley spoke to them ... you'd have thought they were listening to the voice of God."
Great moment.
Do you know the movie's story? Jolson plays Jakie Rabinowitz, who defies his father to become a vaudeville performer. While Jolson, now performing as Jack Robin, becomes a huge Broadway success, his father disowns him for defying his insistence that that his son succeed him as cantor at the local synagogue. There's lots of good singing and a tearful reconciliation at the end.
Audiences ate it up.
No doubt modern audiences will squirm as Jolson performs many of his numbers in blackface. This is one instance where I'd recommend you power through it. As film historian Corin Willis wrote:
"Of the more than seventy examples of blackface in early sound film 1927–53 that I have viewed (including the nine blackface appearances Jolson subsequently made), The Jazz Singer is unique in that it is the only film where blackface is central to the narrative development and thematic expression."
Blackface here plays as a metaphor for the mask Jack Robin wears to hide his Jewish heritage. Ironically, by putting on the makeup, Jolson can assimilate into a white Anglo-Saxon society that would otherwise reject him.
Only at the end, however, when he strips off the mask to sing "Kol Nidre" in the synagogue for his father does Jolson again become a complete man — the Jewish son and the jazz singer.
Well, at least that's the theory. Blackface may have been a staple of vaudeville and early Hollywood but it tends to take me out of a movie even as I understand the historical context.
Your mileage may vary.
Some notes of historical interest:
● Vitaphone, Warner Brothers' system for pressing sound onto 16-inch discs, was not the first technique for synchronizing sound and film but it was the first practical technology to do so, generating a sound loud enough for an audience to hear and with a higher fidelity than sound-on-film technologies could produce.
● Contrary to popular belief, the first feature-length film using the Vitaphone process was not The Jazz Singer but a John Barrymore movie, Don Juan, released on August 6, 1926. Don Juan, however, included only a recorded score and sound effects and the film was not enough of a hit to make back the costs of using the Vitaphone process. Only the persistence of producer Adolph Zukor convinced the Warner brothers — Harry and Sam — to make another feature-length sound film.
● The technology used to record The Jazz Singer was so primitive, no sound editing was possible. Al Jolson's songs were recorded and mixed as he performed them and what you saw was what you got. Except for a couple of spontaneous ad-libs — including the immortal line "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" spoken by Al Jolson as a bridge between "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" and "Toot Toot Tootsie" — there's no spoken dialogue in the movie. Technician George Groves is credited with recording the sound.
In his career, Groves received eight Oscar nominations, winning twice, an incredible track record considering he only worked on twenty movies.
● Ironically, despite the enormous success of The Jazz Singer, the Vitaphone disc technology itself proved to be too uneconomical for large-scale use. The studio had to distribute a separate disc with each copy of the movie and each theater needed an operator skilled enough to synch the recording with the film, driving up costs. In addition, because assembling and editing a Vitaphone picture was not just a simple matter of cutting and splicing film, but also of mixing and pressing new recordings, directors and film editors found the technology difficult to use. In 1932, Warner Brothers gave up on the Vitaphone process and instead opted to add sound recordings to optical tracks that were laid over the edge of the film negative.
● Left to the voters, The Jazz Singer probably would have cleaned up at the first Oscars ceremony. But in a smoke-filled backroom, the powers that be figured that handing a bunch of awards to the most popular movie of the year wasn't going to help sell extra tickets — to The Jazz Singer or anything else — so they arbitrarily declared it ineligible and handed its producers an honorary Oscar instead. (Read the story here.)
And last but certainly not least, a bit of personal history involving Al Jolson and my wife Katherine's great-grandmother.
In 1912, on a whim, Katherine's great-grandmother decided she, her daughter and her chauffeur should take the Packard on a cross-country drive from New Jersey to California — a nutty idea, actually.
As recently as 1908, the United States only had some 600 miles of paved road. Conditions weren't much better in 1912.
Perhaps they could find a traveling companion to go with them, someone suggested. The New York Automobile Club hooked them up with a guy named Al Jolson.
Yeah, that Al Jolson.
Katherine's great-grandmother sent her chauffeur to meet this Jolson character who had recently headlined the Winter Garden in Manhattan, New York.
The daughter (Katherine's great-aunt) tells the story:
"Fred went to Jolson's suite where Jolson and a couple of pals were entertaining or being entertained by some girls.
"The next morning, Jolson left before we did. Fred's brief encounters were the only near contact we had with Jolson. He reached Chicago a couple of days ahead of us and reached San Francisco in two weeks while it took us a month!"
The story has a happy ending though — the daughter married the chauffeur!
Billed as the first "all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing" musical, The Broadway Melody is the story of two sisters (Bessie Love, Anita Page, pictured below) who go to New York and fall in love with the same guy (Charles King).
Self-sacrifice follows, set to peppy songs and dance numbers which in addition to the title tune, featured future chestnuts "You Were Meant For Me" and "Give My Regards To Broadway."
Out of necessity, sound man Douglas Shearer invented the concept of the "playback" — pre-recording a song that performers would then dance and lip-synch to — when the choreography on a huge dance number that had already been performed and recorded was deemed unsuitable. Rather than bring the orchestra back to the sound stage, Shearer figured out how to reuse the sound from the previous take, and the cast performed the dance number with its new choreography to a playback of the song.
This technique became the industry standard for decades.
The Broadway Melody was the top grossing movie of 1929 and the first sound film to win the Academy Award for best picture. Its success further cemented sound's commercial future.
So after all that, it's got to be a great movie, right? Uh, no, not even a good one.
The Broadway Melody is quite probably the weakest best picture winner ever, and that's saying something. As musicals go, it did feature the aforementioned classic songs, but the story is trite, the pacing is leaden, and the acting, especially among the supporting cast, is too awful to be believed.
And despite Douglas Shearer's technical innovations, the early sound equipment just wasn't up to the task. Lyrics get muddled, shoes hammer like cannon fire and the rustling of the actresses' dresses drown out the dialogue.
Which is a shame because Anita Page is as cute as a bug's ear! (Read more about her here.)
