The Hollywood Revue of 1929

I have seen this film a few times and always think boy they were the good old days. In 1929, for their first talking film, MGM put together this lavish, all-star revue with absolutely no plot. It contains guest appearances from many of MGM's top silent film stars. If you do ever see this you will notice many of them did not make it through the transition of the talking pictures. Joan Crawford stands out doing her horrible dance and singing routine, but the best is the technicolor SINGIN' IN THE RAIN finale. This is a must for any film buff.

MGM used to boast that they had more stars than were in the heavens. This transitional picture shows some "stars", people who still have name recognition. Some of the performers were near the end of their career, some at the beginning, and others, probably did not have much of a career before or after this.

There's no real plot - it's pretty much a variety show hosted by Conrad Nagle and Jack Benny. There are some historical moments here - the first performance of "Singing in the Rain", the alleged cause of John Gilbert's career nosediving, Joan Crawford singing and dancing, some slapstick from Laurel & Hardy. There are appearances by the stunningly beautiful Anita Page who looks kind of sad while Conrad Nagle appears to be singing to her. William Haines, just before Louis B. Mayer ended his acting career, eating part of Jack Benny's clothing. Bessie Love appeared to come from one of Jack Benny's pockets - she said there was a $100 bill in the pocket, Benny quips that it's not his suit.

Parts of this was the inspiration of the movie "Singing in the Rain", which was done 20+ years later.

The pluses to this: some color sequences, including the closing performance of "Singing in the Rain", a weird dance sequence by Buster Keaton, who remains mute, and it's a great glimpse into Hollywood as it transitioned from the Silent Era to the age of "talkies". One interesting thing was the cameras weren't as static as they were for many of the early "talkies". There's also a kind of experimental dance sequence where it appears that they used some of the negatives in place of the processed film.

Some of the minuses are it wasn't a smooth transition from the Silent Era to the age of "talkies" - the sound quality is very inconsistent. Some people sounded kind of muffled, some people's voices weren't picked up very well. The version that was played by TCM on 8/4/08 wasn't closed captioned, so if you can't understand what someone is saying or singing, you don't have any captioning to help you out.

This is a good movie if you are interested in relatively early movies - it's almost 80 years old. It's also a chance to see some performers that didn't appear very often.

....suddenly it was decreed that everyone had to do one? That's what was happening in 1929, except it was naked voices, not naked bodies that were being revealed. No one could hear the stars talk, so they got to imagine what their voices were like. They also got to imagine what they were saying, or read it on the occasional title card. With sound, they heard the voices themselves and also the lines written for them. Conrad Nagel comes out sounding like the elegant gentleman he was. John Gilbert's voice is a little high pitched, (rumor has it that Louie Mayer, who hated him, had the sound track sped up), and effected. In his first film after this, he was asked to say "I love you, love you! about a dozen times during a love scene- a sequence parodied in "Singing in the Rain", and the audience laughed. Clara Bow revealed her thick Brooklynese, which seemed to belie her image as a gay party girl. Greta Garbo had a deep voice with a thick Swedish accent- just like the audience had imagined. Ben Turpin, the cross-eyed comedian, played against his image by playing swash-buckling heroes in the silents. Talkies revealed he sounded like he looked and made his films a little too ridiculous.

When you watch Hollywood Revue of 1929 and other films of that year, you are looking at some very nervous people who's recently minted stardom was threatened with extinction. And few of them made it. Those who did, like Joan Crawford, made it for reason not apparent in this musical review. In the early 30's, a deluge of stage stars like Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Paul Muni, Katherine Hepburn, etc. would sweep them away and provide us with the stars of Hollywood's Golden Age.

MGM was one of the last studios to convert from silent to sound movies. To break the ice for the stars' talkie transformation, studio executives felt if they dipped their collective toes on a sound stage these silent movie actors and actresses wouldn't be so scared to hear their recorded voices for the first time. The June 1929 "The Hollywood Revue of 1929" proved to be a grab bag of MGM performers mixing song-and-dance routines with comedic acts. The movie served as a predecessor to television variety shows such as 'Ed Sullivan Show,' while at the same time harkened back to those earlier vaudeville days.

The 'moving camera' of the later silent movie era was all but discarded for a stationary one anchored just behind the orchestra pit in the audience seats. Additional cameras captured close-up and two shots. But the majority of scenes took in all the stage action in one wide frame. The two-hour length of "The Hollywood Revue of 1929" served as an entire evening's entertainment to those not used to seeing huge Broadway musicals. Despite being contained on one stage, the movie still cost over $400,000 to produce, and was filmed over a 25-day period.

The revue, billed as an "All-Star Musical Extravaganza," was well received by the curious public. Stars not known for their singing and dancing, such as Marion Davies and Bessie Love, were given quick lessons in both to showcase their limited musical talents. Joan Crawford, a previous dancer, said "the revue "was one of those let's-throw-everyone-on-the-lot-into-a musical thing, but I did a good song-and-dance number." The feature film had so many fans flocking to those theaters wired for sound to hear their silent film stars vocalize on film for the first time that MGM earned an enormous $1 million profit. "The Hollywood Revue of 1929" was nominated Outstanding Picture, the only revue movie ever to be considered for the Academy Awards Best Picture.

The many acts were tied together by emcees Conrad Nagel and Jack Benny, appearing in his first film. As a vaudeville and stand-up comedian beginning in 1911, Benjamin Kubelsky (stage name Jack Benny), along with his trusty violin, bounced around the country for years. His agent, Sammy Lyons, approached MGM's Irving Thalberg, and asked the producer to give Benny a look-see at the local Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. Thalberg liked Benny so much he sign him to a contract, beginning with "The Hollywood Revue of 1929." Not only was Benny a co-anchor to the show, he came up with the special effects introducing actress Bessie Love by taking a miniature version of her out of his pocket and placing her on the stage. She quickly grows larger like the Wonder Bread commercial boy. To achieve such an effect, the actress was in front of a black velvet curtain while the camera moves in.

The movie is also noteworthy for the performance of actor John Gilbert, who plays Romeo in a tongue-in-cheek sketch with Thalberg's wife, Norma Shearer. Claims of Gilbert possessing a high, shrill voice aren't found in the color clip where his deliberate pacing isn't as bad as film historians claim it was in his later films. Additionally, one of the highlighted comedic acts was delivered by the Laurel and Hardy team, who had just released the pair's first talkie a few weeks earlier in "Unaccustomed As We Are."

In another skit where the song "Lon Chaney Will Get You if You Don't Watch Out," viewers are introduced to the Chaney character played up by actor Gus Edwards. Chaney inked a three-picture a year deal with MGM. The actor wanted "The Hollywood Revue of 1929" to count as one of those films, even though his appearance would be only five minutes of reel time. The studio balked at the expense of paying Chaney for the short performance, which would eat up a good portion of the film's planned budget. It flatly refused. The actor wasn't happy to find out the song about him was going forward. But the untimely death of Chaney a few months later forced MGM to cut the song while in theaters that summer. The studio did put the sequence back into the motion picture when re-released years later.

Director Charles Reisner got MGM to film the last-minute inclusion of the grand finale with the song 'Singin' in the Rain.' The sequence was shot 10 days before the movie's premier at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The Technicolor ending included those stars who appeared in the previous acts to report to the studio stage to film late into night. Movie critics in the day appreciated the final coda with the New York Times praising "the most extravagant and extensive musical comedy so far presented by the talking pictures, and is in itself a complete evening's entertainment."

This is the very first of the all-star, no-plot revues that proliferated during 1929 and 1930. Just about every star at Metro is featured, and there are many fun sequences to be savored in this film. The most famous one is probably the Joan Crawford segment, where she sings and dances to "Gotta Feeling For You". Her singing is passable, and her dancing is, well, "energetic". Marion Davies seems quite nervous in her "Tommy Atkins On Parade" number, but Bessie Love is pretty good in her wild acrobatics. Marie Dressler is fun, as always, and you can glimpse Carla Laemmle as the pearl in the oyster during "Tableau Of Jewels", which opens the second half. John Gilbert's speaking voice dosen't sound nearly as bad as had been rumored, even when considering the antiquity of the recording. The "Singin' In The Rain" number is fun, and offers a good contrast to the more famous one in the film of the same name. There are some special effects and two-color Technicolor that must have wowed the audiences back then, and it's been said that during the premiere, the theater put a gallon or so of orange-scented perfume into the ventilators during the "Orange Blossom Time" finale. In all, this film is well worth a look if you are into early sound films of historical value.