Word: cinemae
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Movietone Follies of 1929 embeds a musical show in the conventional cinema story about an understudy who got her chance. Dancing intervals, punctuating the Negro comedy of Stepin Fetchit, get across by such not entirely original, but fairly effective devices as photographing all the girls' feet at once or all their eyes. One good color sequence partly makes up for mediocre tunes. Best shot: backstage hands on opening night...
...falls in love with a rich man posing as a chauffeur. In the early episodes of their flirtation, and later, when love is frustrated temporarily by one of those misunderstandings based upon questioned chastity, you experience an atmosphere which has been for years the national atmosphere of the Cinema, but which is now being replaced by other, heartier, less elementary qualities of plot and treatment. Vilma Banky, who acts nicely, talks at times in a Hungarian accent, but fortunately neither the sound-mechanism nor the modern sort of wit in direction can make anything new or unfamiliar out of this...
...Manuel died; Manuel, infatuated with La Perichole (Lily Damita); Uncle Pio (Ernest Torrence), dismissed at last by the girl he has made famous?come to life in an imaginary country filled with splendid metaphors. Director Charles Brabin has translated these metaphors into concrete objects and scenery which give the cinema a reality not possible in written words. The emotional pitch of the story?a pitch originally far and not always convincingly above the pitch of prose life?becomes merely the concentration necessary for getting so many lives and deaths into the hour-and-a-quarter of a feature picture...
Leading them through the trying days had been Joseph N. Weber, their president, captain, champion, advisor. But even "Joe" Weber had been unable to offer any sure-fire suggestion for a way to combat the "menace" of machine-made music in the cinema houses of the land. Even "Joe" Weber seemed to see nothing but musical doom, and the one resolution which was issued for publication after the secret meetings contained nothing more cheerful than pride, nothing more tangible than a prediction...
...this resolution, the 400 of music pointed with scorn at the talking cinema. Small is the loss of their livelihood, said the 400, compared to the incalculable loss which the public must suffer from "canned music." Gone will be all chance for U. S. youth-culture; gone will be all appreciation for artistic renditions. Mechanical, soulless music will pervert and deaden the public musical sense. The resolution continued...