Word: technicoloration
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Bright Lights (First National). Made a year ago, Bright Lights was put on the shelf, presumably because too many other pictures just like it were being released. Unfortunately, seasoning has only helped to shelve it permanently. Its backstage plot, its industriously plugged songs, its imperfect sound-recording, its imperfect technicolor, already are relics of a dead past in picture making. Dorothy Mackaill is good looking and Frank Fay fairly funny. The plot-a show girl who is about to marry a millionaire when her past, in the person of Noah Beery, turns up and threatens her happiness-is good enough...
Song of the Flame (First National). Technicolor, elaborate staging, good Gershwin tunes and 5,000 voices have been assembled in this reproduction of a Broadway operetta. Bernice Claire is supposed to be a sort of Russian Joan of Arc; you are led to believe that the theme song she sings brings about the Revolution. It is extravagantly unreal, entirely out of the tradition of naturalistic cinema. Audiences who like operetta and audiences in the country who have never had much chance to decide whether they like it or not may find Song of the Flame to their taste. Others...
...anyone who hasn't as yet seen the "Vagabond King", if is an excellent counterpart to "Lovin the Ladies." Operettas are usually improved by the addition of Dennis King and this technicolor talkie is no exception. At times he ejaculates too heartily, but all in all he does a good performance. The histrionic efforts, however, are drawn down completely by O. P. Heggie, playing the part of Louis XI. He plays the role with such restraint and control that the actor is entirely submerged in the personage depicted. Jeannette McDonald and the stage-sets lend sufficient background and color...
...actually exploits and expresses is that of its director, John Murray Anderson. Whatever unusual, difficult, beautiful physical effects can be managed with the sound and color cinema in its present phase of development, Mr. Anderson has brought off successfully, brilliantly. Miniatures have been juxtaposed with full-sized sets in technicolor, as when Whiteman carries his whole band onto the stage in a satchel. Later the normal-size orchestra plays on top of a monster piano. There are sets that spring, completed, out of the floor, in time to notes of music. There are deep romantic backgrounds of Maxfield Parrish blue...
...efforts belongs properly to the music-critic; it is enough to say that his performance is distinctly appealing to the layman. The choruses are so far removed from the Tiller-Girl type that comparison is futile; they were probably the kind the "gay nineties" reveled in. In the Technicolor sets and the varied camera-shots the hand of the director and the essence of true cinema art may be discerned. The settings are artistically artificial, something entirely different from the lavish Ziegfeld decorations. They are the basis of the whole picture. Incidentally, the film does deserve a mood which...