Follow Thru

Back when "Follow Thru" debuted, it must have been an incredibly prestigious film. After all, very, very few films were all-color productions and only a few others had color sequences buried within the picture. Yet, somehow, the studio scraped up the money to make this one color...albeit the old Two-Color Technicolor system...which looks pretty grotesque today. Part of it is that you never got true colors with the system...and everything tended to look orangy or greenish. But it's made worse because of nitrate stock degradation...and the print I saw on YouTube could use restoration.

Another shortcoming of the film is the sound. While the speaking sequences are just fine, the singing, at times, sound rather tinny...and it was obviously recorded using primitive sound technology. This is no one's fault...it's just that sound movies were a relatively new thing and compared to films from just a year or two later, "Follow Thru" has sound that could be better. This, by the way, is probably why the movie was made on a sound stage instead of outdoors (which you'd expect in a film set on a golf course)....getting good sound was not easier...and would have been MUCH harder to do outdoors.

The story finds Lora (Nancy Carroll) working hard to be a top golfer. She gets help from nice-guy, Jerry (Buddy Rogers) and the two fall in love. However, somehow Jerry is like catnip to the ladies and other women seem to want him as well...including Lora's nemesis! While all this is going on, Jerry's friend, Jack (Jack Haley) is there for comic relief and spends most of his time AVOIDING Angie...as he apparently doesn't like women.

Throughout the film are a variety of songs and a few song and dance numbers. Most of them are very pleasant and enjoyable. The ones I noticed most were the devil and angel dance numbers....you just have to see them to believe 'em!

Overall, this is a stagy old film...but an enjoyable one as well. Worth seeing...particularly if you love early talkies and don't mind that they lack the polish films Hollywood brought us just a year or two later.