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Okay, I admit defeat. As I've mentioned more than once, I've been working on an essay about achievements in the use of sound in movies to date (1927-1931), catching up on technical and artistic breakthroughs after the work of early pioneers such as Thomas Edison and Lee De Forest led to the premiere of The Jazz Singer on October 6, 1927.
I planned to write about people like two-time Oscar winner George Groves, the sound technician who recorded The Jazz Singer; and Douglas Shearer, the brother of actress Norma Shearer, hired by Irving Thalberg out of pure nepotism, who turned out to be a sound editing genius and went on to win fourteen Oscars, many of them for technical innovations Hollywood still uses to this day. And I wanted to write about directors such as Rouben Mamoulian and René Clair who were bright enough to work around the limitations of early sound recording technology to give us movies as fluid as anything the silent era had ever produced.
And I'm 1500 words into this essay and you know what? It's boring. And I'm bored with it. And I have to figure that if I'm bored, there's no way you won't be bored. And besides, there are Katies to be awarded, with the nominees for supporting actress waiting eagerly in the wings. And Katie-Bar-The-Door is coming home early today and I still have to run to the grocery store, walk the dog again and bake a chess pie.
So let's just concede defeat and move on.
But rather than flush all that hard work down the intertube, I'm serving up the leftovers in the form of bullets (or big dots if bullets sound threatening) and here are some pictures to go with them.
● 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 number 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 transferring the recordings, as had other studios before it, to optical tracks that were laid over the edge of the film negative.
● MGM's The Broadway Melody, billed as the first "all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing" musical, was the top grossing movie of 1929 as well as the first sound picture to win the Academy Award for best picture, and further cemented sound's commercial future. 
Douglas Shearer out of necessity 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. Shearer wound up working on more than nine hundred movies in his career, was nominated for twenty-one Oscars, won seven and was awarded an additional seven Oscars for technical, scientific and engineering achievements.
● King Vidor's Hallelujah!, the 1929 musical with an all-black cast, for the first time effectively mixed sound recorded on location and sound dubbed in the studio.
● Although Hollywood produced a lot of forgettable movies in the early sound era, a handful of artists saw the possibilities in sound and used it in a way that changed the course of movie history. Rouben Mamoulian, a director of Broadway theater productions, and René Clair, a young French director then known for a handful of experimental films, managed to make movies characterized by fluid camera work despite the bulky, restrictive nature of sound recording equipment.
● Mamoulian's Applause took the camera into the streets of New York (and under them, into the subway), and unlike other sound films released that year, took care to capture the sounds of the city rather than shut them out, giving the movie, which is otherwise dated and melodramatic, a documentary feel.
● Lewis Milestone used sound masterfully in All Quiet On The Western Front. The off-camera sounds of the war—incessant shelling, machine gun fire and particularly the gasping sounds of a French soldier as he dies—deepened the audience's emotional investment in the story.
● René Clair with Le Million was the first to use sound and sound effects in a non- realistic way to comment on the action—for example, as the characters fight over a jacket containing a winning lottery ticket, instead of recording the sound of the actors fighting, Clair used the sounds of a rugby match, the crowd roaring, the players grunting, the referee's whistle blowing, to comment on the absurd nature of the action. It's a commonplace joke now, so often used ever since, our ears don't hear it. But it was a startling innovative at the time.
● Just as important is when Clair doesn't use sound at all. Some conversations—the unimportant or entirely predictable—are not overheard, merely observed. The effect underscores to what degree how much of what we say in any given day is merely rote and the silence in Le Million is as effective a joke as the funny sound effects.
That's it. That's all I've got. Oh, I did track down John Lennon's quote from the 1971 Rolling Stone interviews that somehow seemed pertinent to a discussion of how an artist sees potential where a non-artist sees only problems: "I'm an artist, and if you give me a tuba, I'll bring you something out of it." 
Rouben Mamoulian, Lewis Milestone, René Clair, and in different ways, George Groves and Douglas Shearer, were artists bringing something new and innovative out of a technology others saw as only a nuisance or a novelty.
My hat's off to them.
If you want to see silent film star Lillian Gish in the performance that won her a Katie, tune in Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 12:45 p.m. EDT for Turner Classic Movies' presentation of The Wind. And if you show up early (say, 7 a.m. early), you can watch Lillian Gish all day long. I also recommend The Scarlet Letter, one of Gish's best silent movies. The White Sister also has a stellar reputation and it co-stars Ronald Colman in his breakthrough performance.
Finally, you might want to see Duel in the Sun at 5:30 p.m. You can watch legendary producer David O. Selznick's career come unglued before your very eyes with this trash-tastic potboiler designed to show off the talents of his future wife, Jennifer Jones, who despite an Oscar, didn't have any. Critics dubbed this crapfest "Lust in the Dust," but audiences ate it up and Gish received her only Oscar nomination for her supporting performance. It's a pity, really.
Check it out.
From the TCM website:
7:00am [Silent] White Sister, The (1923)
Thinking her lover was killed in the war, a young woman becomes a nun.
Cast: Lillian Gish, Ronald Colman, Gail Kane, J. Barney Sherry Dir: Henry King BW-135 mins
9:15am [Epic] La Boheme (1926)
In this silent film, a starving artist falls in love with a sickly seamstress in 19th-century Paris.
Cast: Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Renee Adoree. Dir: King Vidor. BW-94 mins
11:00am [Silent] Scarlet Letter, The (1926)
In this silent film version of the classic tale, a single mother in Puritan New England bears her shame alone rather than expose the child's father.
Cast: Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Henry B. Walthall, Karl Dane Dir: Victor Seastrom BW-98 mins
12:45pm [Silent] Wind, The (1928)
In this silent film, a sheltered southern girl fights to adapt to the rough-and-tumble life of the wild West.
Cast: Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Montagu Love, Dorothy Cumming Dir: Victor Seastrom BW-82 mins
2:15pm [Comedy] One Romantic Night (1930)
A princess engaged to a prince falls for her brother's tutor.
Cast: Lillian Gish, Rod La Rocque, Conrad Nagel, Marie Dressler Dir: Paul L. Stein BW-108 mins
3:45pm [War] Commandos Strike At Dawn, The (1942)
A Norwegian refugee leads the British in an attack against his country's Nazi invaders.
Cast: Paul Muni, Anna Lee, Lillian Gish. Dir: John Farrow. BW-100 mins
5:30pm [Western] Duel In The Sun (1946)
A fiery half-breed comes between a rancher's good and evil sons.
Cast: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore Dir: King Vidor C-144 mins
She's now remembered as "what's her name, the one James Cagney hit with a grapefruit," but for a couple of years in 1930 and 1931, Mae Clarke was on a real roll, with substantial parts in The Public Enemy, The Front Page and Frankenstein, as well as the lead in the 1931 version of Waterloo Bridge.
You might also remember her from another James Cagney vehicle, Lady Killer in 1933, where Cagney drags her by her hair before throwing her out of his hotel room.
Like Katie-Bar-The-Door, she was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Unlike Katie, she started her career as a dancer, signed a contract with Universal Studios and worked steadily throughout the 1930s. By 1940 her career slowed considerably although she continued to play supporting roles in movies and on television until her retirement in 1970.
You can see her talking about The Public Enemy on Turner Classic Movies Wednesday morning (October 14) at 5:30 a.m. EDT in the documentary James Cagney: Top of the World. By the way, her ex-husband Lewis Brice (Fanny's brother) enjoyed that scene so much, he would frequently buy a ticket for the Times Square theater where The Public Enemy played twenty-four hours a day, ducking in just long enough to see his ex-wife get smacked with a grapefruit. You have to wonder what that marriage was like.
For an in-depth article about the famous grapefruit scene, drop in at the blog Big Hollywood. Interesting stuff.
My good friend Mister Muleboy on his blog The Mouth O' The Mule has been somewhat critical of my lack of productivity recently:
I'll be moving on to the films of 1928 within the next day or two.
Hang tight.
Ooooops; wrong blog.
Hell -- wrong blogger!
Things are a little. . . tough right now.
Actually, I've been working on an essay about "Special Achievements in Sound: 1927-1931" which has topped 1500 words so far and shows no signs of ending any time soon, as well as taking a couple of days to work on my next (unpublished) novel and spend some vacation time with Katie-Bar-The-Door.
But promises are not content and so to supply the demand I'll channel my inner Mule for a moment, knock off a quick post and catch you up with what's going on in the world of 1931 (we're well past 1928, my friend):
Herbert Hoover is a fat, insensitive Nero who fiddles while the American Rome burns and yet as a doctrinaire Libertarian I find this strangely comforting. The only thing that would make me happier is if a foreign army were to land on our shores so I could exercise my Second Amendment rights to accidentally shoot my neighbor. Rumor has it that that New York commie, Governor Franklin Roosevelt, is going to run for president next year. If as a result of his leftist meddling, he not only saves democracy but also creates an agency that keeps me employed for years to come, I am going to be so steamed, you have no idea!
It was another dis- appoint- ing year for Wash- ington baseball—first in war, first in peace, last in the American League. Okay, actually we were third but Griffith Stadium is a dump, Walter Johnson is no better a manager than he was a pitcher and Ben Ali is still thirty years away from inventing the best chili dog on the planet, so I hate these guys.
On a positive note, local jazz composer Duke Ellington seems to be making headway with New York audiences. His nightly performances at the Cotton Club are not to be missed and as a Washingtonian (by choice rather than birth), I take great pleasure in his success. Of course, local pride doesn't keep me from digging the work of another Washingtonian (Tacoma, Washington, that is), Bing Crosby, who had ten of the top fifty hits on the pop charts this year and promises to be a force for decades to come, that is unless he does something crazy like hawking orange juice and making Christmas specials on this new-fangled invention, television (it'll never catch on—why sit at home when you can go out?).
Haven't been to any movies lately but here's a random picture of a good-looking broad, Anita Page, and because we always enjoy a drive-by comment from the distaff side, Clark Gable.
Hubba hubba.
Today would have been Buster Keaton's 114th birthday if he had taken better care of himself. I recommend you celebrate by going to your local library, checking out an armful of Keaton movies and watching them with someone you love. I particularly recommend Our Hospitality, The Navigator, Sherlock Jr., The General, Steamboat Bill Jr. and The Cameraman.
Note: This is as close to a blog post as you're going to get this weekend. I've been under the weather ever since Wednesday night when Katie-Bar-The-Door, Mister Muleboy and I went to the last Nationals home game of the season. Justin Maxwell did hit a walk-off grand slam to win it, but related or not, I've been sick ever since. Instead of my usual crystal-clear thought processes and cheerful bonhomie, I've been fuzzy headed and cranky.
So no blog entries for you today.
If choosing the best screenplay of the year were simply a question of counting up the quotable lines, Animal Crackers would be the hands-down winner for 1930-31. Not only did that movie give us Groucho Marx's most famous monologue—a description of the most inept African safari of all time—but it also included the "Take a letter to my lawyer" routine, the "Strange interlude" bit, Groucho's signature song "I Must Be Going," Chico's first piano performance of "I'm Daffy Over You" and some of the best work of Harpo's career.
In adapting the stage play that he and George S. Kaufman (with songs from Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby) had written two years before, Morrie Ryskind retained the best jokes and the bare structure of the story, and jettisoned as much of the connective tissue as he could, but Animal Crackers never quite escapes the staginess of its origins and even if one of the supporting characters and I share the same name, I get a bit restless waiting through the dull stretches of creaky plot contrivances for another of the Marx Brothers' wonderful comedy routines. It's not much of a knock considering how often these great routines pop up, but in a year loaded with great screenplays—not just my nominees, but also The Dawn Patrol (John Monk Saunders), M (Fritz Lang and Thea Harbou), The Front Page (Charles Lederer and Bartlett Cormack) and The Public Enemy (Harvey Thew)—it's just enough of a flaw to make me look elsewhere for the best screenplay of 1930-31.
Instead, the award goes to René Clair for his delightful and inventive musical comedy, Le Million. The story is tight and precisely put together, the songs and dialogue are witty and memorable, and the resulting comedy is as light and frothy as a glass of cold champagne.
Le Million is the story of a struggling artist (René Lefèvre), in debt to his landlord and every shop owner in town, who discovers he has won the lottery—if only he can find the ticket. He remembers it's in the pocket of a jacket he left with his fiancee (Annabella), but she's given the jacket to a beggar (Paul Ollivier) on the run from the police who then sells the jacket in a thrift store to an opera singer who thinks it's just perfect for his role in La Boheme. Soon everybody is scrambling to get their hands on that jacket, a chase that climaxes in an on-stage scrum in the middle of the tenor's performance. Le Million influenced the title sequence of A Night at the Opera, and as a comedy, it can stand comfortably alongside the Marx Brothers' classic. It really is that good.
And if that was all there were to it, Le Million would still be one of the best movies of the year. That Clair also takes time, as the characters race around at a non-stop clip, to explore two of his favorite themes, the outsize role of money in society and the fragile nature of love, makes Le Million one of the best movies of any year, a deserving award winner.
Clair gets great mileage out of the deference we pay to money and the people who have it regardless of their worth as human beings, and we laugh at the contortions of the shopowners to ingratiate themselves to a man they had just minutes before been chasing through the streets. Clair also shows us the lengths supposedly respectable people will go to get their hands on money they aren't entitled to, such as the ironically-named Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert) who lets his friend the artist sit in jail just to increase his chances of getting to the lottery ticket first.
As for the beggar who took loan of the jacket then sold it, he turns out to be Grandpa Tulipe, a master criminal who leads a well-organized band of highly-efficient thieves. But even they aren't content merely to steal, they feel compelled to dress up their base impulses with the same sort of respectable lies Bernie Madoff no doubt told himself:
"We are the foot soldiers of inequality!
We take back the spoils of social injustice!
And under the watchful eye of the police,
We redistribute wealth and private property."
Clair concludes that "money isn't everything" but then adds this telling postscript:
"So say folks who are intelligent
To folks who haven't got a cent.
We'll believe what they say,
When they give all their money away."
The second of Clair's favorite themes, that along with the notion that pos- sessions are a trap, real love is fragile and fleeting and not a game human beings are really adept at, could have become the stuff of a pretty conventional romantic comedy but for Clair's skill at spinning out the courtship. "We're just sort of engaged," the artist tells the beautiful model in his arms after his fiancee has caught them in an embrace. The fiancee herself is an outrageous flirt and isn't sure she wants to help him even of it does mean riches for them both. As expected, the two reunite and break apart and reunite and break apart throughout the movie, but it's only while they're trapped on stage behind a piece of scenery while the tenor and the coloratura sing of love that they reveal to each what's really in their hearts.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that Le Million made the most innovative use of sound to date in the Early Sound Era, introducing ideas that still crop up in movies and television. But that's the subject of my next essay, "Achievements In The Use Of Sound: René Clair's Le Million."
Despite how unappealing the idea of watching a seventy-eight year old French musical comedy might sound to a casual movie fan, Le Million really is a Saturday night movie, full of slapstick and sightgags, and the only thing that keeps me from naming it the best Fun-Stupid movie of 1930-31 is my reluctance to task your patience with subtitles. But if you're willing to take a chance then I'm telling that this is the one French movie you can brag to friends about watching, understanding and enjoying.
Or to put it another way, Katie-Bar-The-Door started out watching Le Million I think mostly to humor me, became completely enchanted with it and wound up talking about it for days afterwards. In fact, she's the one who urged me to choose it for best screenplay over it's better-known competition. And she was right.
Born in Paris in 1898 as René-Lucien Chomette, René Clair worked as a journalist and an actor before directing his first film in 1924, Entr'acte, an exercise in Dadaism that included jumbled footage of Paris and a coffin that runs away from a funeral. He achieved his first lasting success in 1930 with Under The Roofs Of Paris, an amiable comedy about the intersecting lives of four Parisians. Convinced there was no point in merely replicating theater or radio performances on film, it was in this film that Clair first began to experiment with the new sound technology. As I will discuss at more length in my next essay, Clair's use of sound in Le Million was both inventive and influential and was a landmark achievement of the Early Sound Era.
Clair made three more movies in France, including the classic À Nous La Liberté, then relocated to Hollywood in 1935 where he worked until after World War II. His Hollywood films aren't on par with his best French work, but he did direct I Married A Witch and Then There Were None, both critically-acclaimed box office hits. During his career, he directed thirty movies, his last in 1965, and died in France in 1981 at the age of eighty-two.
Acknowledgment: Usually when I write these essays, I sit in front of my DVD player (or VCR or YouTube) and take notes in longhand, transcribing quotes and making my usual witty observations. But Katie and I got Le Million from Netflix and I sent it back before it occurred to me that I would need to watch it again to write this lengthy post about it. I don't know what I was thinking.
So I scoured the internet for usable quotes (the witty observations, fortunately, were firmly embedded in my head), came up empty at the usually reliable Internet Movie Database, then found a very useful and interesting blog called "The Criterion Contraption," written by Matthew Dessem who is attempting to watch and review every movie in the Criterion Collection catalogue. Obviously, he's even crazier than I am, which is saying something, and my hat's off to him. It's a good blog and if you're interested in the sort of movies Criterion sells on DVD and are looking for an in-depth review, I recommend you head on over there.
Anyway, his review of Le Million is chock full of good quotes, not to mention several screen captures of the movie itself, and I relied on his good work as a research tool. Hopefully, he and you are okay with that.
Gladys Brockwell is another of those names I confess I didn't know until I started working on this blog but now that I know it, I think you should know it, too.
Born to chorus girl Lillian Lindeman on this day in 1894, Brockwell started working on the stage in New York at the age of three and made her first movie at the age of nineteen. Brockwell made 115 movies during the Silent and Early Sound eras, but she's primarily known now for two performances, as the mad Sister Gudule in the 1923 silent version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (starring Lon Chaney), and as Janet Gaynor's brutally abusive sister in 1927's 7th Heaven, one of the three movies the Academy cited the year Gaynor won her only Oscar.
You can also look for Brockwell in Chaney's 1922 version of Oliver Twist, in the early talkie Lights of New York and in a bit part with Louise Brooks in Howard Hawks's A Girl in Every Port.
Brockwell died in 1929 of peritonitis after being seriously injured in an automobile accident.
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I went to TCM's screening of the new hi-def print of The Wizard of Oz at one of our local theaters last night. Who knows how many times we've seen the movie but it was the first time either of us had seen it in a theater. As always, it makes a difference even if the woman sitting next to us carried on a nonstop conversation in a normal tone of voice from the moment the lights went down until they came back up again, and some guy in the third row with a phosphorus flare of an iPhone screen kept checking, well, something, maybe for updates on this blog.
Anyway, I offer up this photo of the evening—that's me on the left, Katie in the middle and our Chatty Cathy neighbor on the right.
Blogwise, we'll get to The Wizard of Oz in 1939. I foresee nominations for best picture, actress (Judy Garland), director (Victor Fleming, who also directed Gone With The Wind) and supporting actor (Bert Lahr).
Next up: the best screenplay of 1930-31.
Okay, I admit defeat. As I've mentioned more than once, I've been working on an essay about achievements in the use of sound in movies to date (1927-1931), catching up on technical and artistic breakthroughs after the work of early pioneers such as Thomas Edison and Lee De Forest led to the premiere of The Jazz Singer on October 6, 1927.
● 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.
● 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 transferring the recordings, as had other studios before it, to optical tracks that were laid over the edge of the film negative.
Douglas Shearer out of necessity 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. Shearer wound up working on more than nine hundred movies in his career, was nominated for twenty-one Oscars, won seven and was awarded an additional seven Oscars for technical, scientific and engineering achievements.
● King Vidor's Hallelujah!, the 1929 musical with an all-black cast, for the first time effectively mixed sound recorded on location and sound dubbed in the studio.
● Mamoulian's Applause took the camera into the streets of New York (and under them, into the subway), and unlike other sound films released that year, took care to capture the sounds of the city rather than shut them out, giving the movie, which is otherwise dated and melodramatic, a documentary feel.
● René Clair with Le Million was the first to use sound and sound effects in a non- realistic way to comment on the action—for example, as the characters fight over a jacket containing a winning lottery ticket, instead of recording the sound of the actors fighting, Clair used the sounds of a rugby match, the crowd roaring, the players grunting, the referee's whistle blowing, to comment on the absurd nature of the action. It's a commonplace joke now, so often used ever since, our ears don't hear it. But it was a startling innovative at the time.
Rouben Mamoulian, Lewis Milestone, René Clair, and in different ways, George Groves and Douglas Shearer, were artists bringing something new and innovative out of a technology others saw as only a nuisance or a novelty.
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