An Intimate Dinner in Celebration of Warner Bros. Silver Jubilee

I'm giving this short subject a few points more than it deserves, because there are some faces in it that one rarely if ever saw or heard in early talkies. Among them are Broadway stars Otis Skinner (see OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY and KISMET), and Marilyn Miller, as well as young Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Sigmund Romberg, Oscar Hammerstein II, Al Dubin, and such faces as Walter Huston, Frank McHugh, Joan Blondell, Edward G. Robinson, Walter Pidgeon, Loretta Young, Sidney Blackmer, and Ona Munson. I can even add the Fred Kohler Sr. and Beryl Mercer. It's pleasant seeing faces of some importance or still vibrant memory there.

But having said that I look at the bulk of the celebrities. The chief spokesperson is a young girl, Betty Jane Graham, as "Little Miss Vitaphone". Vitaphone, of course, was the process that the Warners used to bring talkies to Hollywood. Ms Graham is polite and well spoken. She is a pretty child. That said, there has absolutely no spark of talent or panache in her. If you check the thread on her, she had a career into the 1940s, but increasingly it fell into not even supporting parts but extras. Finally she must have gotten the message and left films entirely.

I have heard of Evelyn Knapp (barely) and Louis Fazenda, but who on earth are Leon Janney (any relation to television star Alison Janney?), Claudia Dell, or James Rennie? The stars of tomorrow. Their credits barely suggest anything.

In the other comments on this thread, there are complaints that the brothers Warner failed to use such figures as George Arliss, Richard Barthelmess, or (my God, how could they?!) John Barrymore. Yes, indeed, they did. They also did not bring in their champion man of song Mr. Al Jolson. A song is sung at the end by some well intentioned crooner with a forgettable name, who looks like he's got a great future in half-empty concert halls. He is warbling a slightly passable ditty with words by Mr. Dubin. As I listened to him sing this, and saw Ms Miller was in that room, I wanted to cry. The tune is not a standard, but with a bit of friendly or sexy push it might have been. Or if Mr. Jolson had been around it might have been.

I take it this was done as publicity (to show off some of the big and so-called promising names) for the studio. As such they may have grabbed whoever was available (due to shooting schedules) on that day or two it was shot. So, as a museum piece it is curious enough to merit a "7" out of generosity to Otis and Marilyn in particular. But otherwise I felt like a lot of good film stock was wasted in this work.

Between the 1930 release of this short and 1934, most of the talent appearing or mentioned in this short were gone from the Warners lot. Grant Withers divorced Loretta Young and soon after worked elsewhere. Loretta stuck around to 1934 before leaving. Richard Barthelmess, who sent a telegram that he was on location(Warners was great at creating telegrams) left in 1934 when Warners did not renew his contract. Marilyn Miller did not last that long before departing. George Arliss also sent a telegram in lieu of making an appearance. Arliss's last movie for Warners was 1933's Voltaire, directed by John Adolfi, who also directed this short. Adolfi's career and everything else ended in 1933, death from a cerebral hemorrhage. In Arliss's next movie after Voltaire, House of Rothschild, his co-star was Loretta Young and the production boss was Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century Pictures. Before he quit Warners in 1933, Zanuck was that studio's production chief.

Samuel Marx said that when Louis B. Mayer ran MGM, he would tell the MGM staff that as long as they did their job well, they had a job for life. And, to a large extent until he was ousted in 1951, Mayer kept his word. The situation at Warners was different, run like a sweatshop, actors constantly put on suspension for refusing to work in pictures they thought would wreck their careers and Jack Warner pinching pennies everywhere except at the racetrack. This short is evidence of the great turnover of talent at Warners. Warners made great pre-code movies in the early thirties, but it was not a nice place to work at, not having much job security. And what happened to Alice White, she starred in 1930's The Widow From Chicago with Edward G. Robinson, who was at the dinner.

A Silver Jubilee would imply 25th anniversary and this was made in 1930 but Warner Bros. Pictures wasn't incorporated until 1923. How can that be? Well, according to many of the comments here, the actual brothers Warner started in the movie business when they rented a movie theatre in 1905. Okay! Anyway, it's a formal party with many of the studio's stars in attendance, well, except for George Arliss, John Barrymore, or Richard Bartheness. What, no Al Jolson, the one who put Warners on the map with The Jazz Singer? And it puzzles me why this was on TJS DVD when he's not even mentioned. Oh, and the little girl introing the stars is playing Miss Vitaphone, the sound process that also helped put the studio on the map. One more thing, among the songwriters at the tables are Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II but they're both with their then-partners of Lorenz Hart and Sigmund Romberg, respectively. In summary, An Intimate Dinner in Celebration of Warner Bros. Jubilee was an interesting curio and nothing more.

... and for the film history buff this kind of stuff is priceless. I just love the very early Warner Bros. talkies and their goofy themes - "Dancing Sweeties", "The Mad Genius", "The Green Goddess", etc. Only at this time - 1930 - and at this studio could such films be possible, and this short helps explain how they were possible.

Only in 1930 at Warner Brothers - a studio with poverty row roots and a wad of cash from its part in the birth of the sound revolution, much like a bus driver winning the lottery, could you see such an awkward struggle to join the big leagues forever enshrined in celluloid. Let's start with the cast. How often can you find Sidney Blackmer, Evalyn Knapp and Claudia Dell billed above Edward G. Robinson and Joan Blondell? And there are Rodgers and Hammerstein, sitting at the same table, renowned for their music, but not together. At the time Sigmund Romberg and Hammerstein are collaborators and Rodgers and Hart are in partnership. Much ado is made about Marilyn Miller's presence and her next picture "Sunny", when the truth is Ms. Miller was to never have a hit picture again after her initial success in talking films - "Sally". Even mistress of ceremonies Little Miss Vitaphone - named after a sound system whose time had passed by the time this short was made - has to explain the absence of Warner's biggest stars - Richard Barthelmess, George Arliss, and John Barrymore. Telegrams are presented that are supposedly from the missing stars mentioning their next films where they are on location. As for obvious big gun Al Jolson, by this time he had already made his last film for Warner's until 1934 and - let's face it - Warner Brothers probably worked for Jolson as much as he worked for them during their three year collaboration 1927 -1930. Not even the studio system could ever put a harness on big Al.

As for the premise of this short, it is completely false. The only milestone 25 years before 1930 would have been in 1905 when the Warner Brothers opened their first nickelodeon in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and then only as distributors. They didn't dabble in film creation for another ten years after that and got their first hit with what was basically a WWI propaganda piece - "My Four Years in Germany" in 1918. 1923 is really the birth of Warner Brothers as we know it, when they incorporated as a film production company. Today, 1923 is the date that WB counts as its birth year. Up through the 1970's though, you could still see references to 1905 as the date of the company's beginning.

The proceedings in their entirety are basically ironic. Two years later 23 of the stars here - and yes I actually counted them - had been fired by WB and drifted into cinematic obscurity. Still others such as Walter Huston and Walter Pidgeon went to other studios and had long careers elsewhere. All of these were replaced with players that could better project the urban look and feel that would take WB all the way through the 1930's and into the 40's - James Cagney, Dick Powell, Bette Davis, Warren William and others.

My recommendation - if you are into film history this short is priceless and probably even worth repeat viewings to pick up all the movie titles and names being thrown about. If this is not the case, you'll probably not really enjoy it.

Intimate Dinner in Celebration of Warner Bros. Silver Jubilee, An (1930)

*** (out of 4)

The 25th Anniversary of Warner Bros. is documented here with a party thrown that included many of the studios biggest stars at the time. Loretta Young, Edward G. Robinson, Walter Pidgeon, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Walter Huston, David Manners and Joe E. Brown are just some of the famous faces at the party. Each are introduced and often times their next movie is mentioned for some free press.

You can view this historic short on disc 3 of Warner's The Jazz Singer set.