"Earth" Review, Plus Bonus John Candy

The New Yorker film reviewer of 1930 ("J.C.M."), after pooh-pooing the trend toward larger-format films (so-called "three-dimensional films" that "fill the whole proscenium"), provides a great review of a movie that has always confused me: "Earth" by Alexander Dovzhenko (translated in this case as "Soil").

To conclude my memoirs on a lofty and dignified note, I should mention "Soil," a new Russian film. The picture is concerned with the favorite dramatic theme of the Soviet artists: the introduction of new methods of farming to the local wheatlands. Of more interest to these unusual people than the awakening of pure love or the dawn of passion is the coming of the tractor. I must say, too, that there are more persons in this town absorbed in this subject than one might suspect. Down there at that little Eighth Street house, where the picture has been shown, the crowd gets very excited, and there is applause, and even now and then a hiss... In "Soil," a silent picture, a caption was thrown on the screen, a comment of the older peasant as the tractor comes over the hilltop. "There is no God," he says at the sight, and this statement was suddenly met with applause by some of the guests. You will be happy to learn that at once the faithful downed the applause with pious hisses. The whole moment was very intense, and it was a great relief to everyone when the picture passed on to some closeups of apples seen from various angles.

I can certainly understand and appreciate most propaganda, but "Earth" left me totally confused. I couldn't figure out if it was a love song to the soil, a warning to farmers, or an outright parody. Maybe it was all three?

You can hardly say the same about "Hey Giorgy!" This was one of several hilarious SCTV spoofs of Russian television.

Giorgy! If he's not helping somebody, he's helping somebody else! Featuring a bevy of Eastern European immigrants waving at John Candy somewhere in North York.

Talkie Technology in 1930

By September 27, 1930 the talkies had hit their stride. The technology had advanced to a point where procedures for recording sound were standardized and efficient, but as the wonderful Morris Markey tells us in his New Yorker article entitled "Hit the Switch!", things were still uncertain in the studios.

Markey takes a trip to Stage B "in the Paramount studio at Astoria" to see the filming of a new movie (possibly "Follow the Leader") starring comedian Ed Wynn. He discovers that studios are no longer sound-proofed and cloistered the way they were in the early days of the talkies, but some new equipment has certainly arrived.

There were four cameras. Three of them were the familiar movie cameras, a little bulky with their sound-insulation but recognizable. The fourth was the sound camera. Instead of a lens, it was fitted with a microphone at the end of a very long, very thin telescopic arm. The arm thrust out from the camera like the tentacle of an insect, and the microphone at its end was poised immediately over the spot where the action was to take place--high enough to be invisible to the lenses of the other cameras. As the actors moved about, the arm could be extended or shortened, raised or lowered in an instant so that the sound-collecting microphone always hovered over them.

The sound camera does not carry its own film. It merely carries certain electrical equipment which transmits the sound from the microphone to a telephone wire. The telephone wire carries the speech of the players to the central sound-recording room in the basement.

It's interesting that Markey doesn't know the names for any of this equipment, and so relates to it as though it were simply refurbished from the silent film days. The "boom microphone" is a "sound camera," even though it has nothing whatsoever in common with the other cameras. The cable which carries the sound is a "telephone wire."

He goes on to describe the somewhat magical goings-on inside the basement room where another camera stares at "infinitesimal reeds" which vibrate to the transmitted sound impulses. The light which shines between these vibrating reeds creates the visible sound wave which is recorded onto film for later playback. Was this REALLY how it was done?

He also mentions the "control booth," a little "soundproof room on wheels." Inside sits a man who monitors the recorded sound and controls the volume. This man -- credited as a "sound recordist" and possibly Ernest Zatorsky -- actually stops the entire shoot by walking out and protesting:

"There's a hum," he said, glancing vaguely toward the ceiling and the arc-lamps.

"What kind of hum?" asked the director.

"Something technical," said the young man. "It's an induced hum. I told 'em they'd have to fix it. This stuff sounds lousy."

The director, unable to solve or even understand the problem, walks helplessly off the set. "Like lost sheep, the actors and the helpers drifted out after him and the young man of the booth, nodding with satisfaction, picked up his hat and went home."

Boston vs. The Talkies

You thought Boston was only known for banning books? No ma'am, they had problems with talkies as well, according to the July 12, 1930 issue of The New Yorker.

SOME unhappy Bostonians tell us that things are being made harder and harder for the people of their city. Lately the censors got after the talkies, deleting passages of dialogue which were dangerous to morals. The way matters stand now there are passages in many films which can't be said in the town at any time, and still further passages which pass on weekdays but won't do on Sundays...

The movie people have to assign a man at a switch which controls the speaking apparatus, and he turns off the sound when a dangerous passage is reached...

This practice bewildered the audiences at first, but they are getting pretty good at lip-reading now and can follow the plot fairly well.

And it wasn't just Boston. Only a few months before this article was published the Hayes Code had come into effect -- though it wouldn't be enforced for another four years -- with the practical result of convincing many people today that America before the 1960s was a place of tranquility, harmony, and only the simplest of problems. Which tends to be the result of most broad prohibition attempts: misinforming people and creating a disconnect between actual events and cultural artifacts.

Check out the pre-code films, though, and whoa Nelly! That's the stuff.

Talkies and Continuous Showings

In 1930 -- several years after the arrival of the talkies -- The New Yorker continued to make references to the phenomenon, indicating that talking pictures were still a bit of a novelty. Here's a cute story from the January 11, 1930 issue:

No doubt about it, the talkies do complicate life. A talkie-goer has made this complaint: The other day she arrived in a theatre just before the conclusion of the feature picture. In the old days, to remain in pleasant ignorance of the outcome, she would have had merely to lean back and shut her eyes. Now, in addition to doing this, she has to put her fingers in her ears.

To understand this you need to recognize that movie theatres at the time showed "continuous showings." Unlike today -- when your ticket only buys you admission to a single showing of a film -- the early theatres repeated the same program all day: for example a newsreel, then a cartoon, then a short subject, then the feature film...and then right back to the newsreel again. You could watch the film multiple times if you wanted, though I imagine the ushers -- another bygone aspect of movie theatre culture -- would kick out loiterers, snoozers, and groping flappers eventually.

I mention this because I don't know if many people are aware that the continuous showing method ever existed. What's more, I can't even find out when it ended...it was certainly happening in the '50s (I'm sure that Wally and Theodore alluded to it in "Leave It To Beaver," which is probably where I first heard about it), and it certainly ended before I was a child (in the early '70s).

So I wonder: when did theatres switch to the current method? And why?

Incidentally I AM old enough to remember when theatre seats had ashtrays build into their arms. I can also remember the playing of the national anthem before the feature began: after the coming attractions, the curtain would lower, and then as it rose the anthem would begin to play. We'd all stand up and sing. The curtain would come down at the end, then finally rise at the beginning of the feature.

Hard to imagine that today, somehow.

"The Roaring Talkies"

In the August 24, 1929 issue of The New Yorker, James Thurber complains about the strange "resonance" and "clangor" of the voices in the talkies. Assuming that such things are here to stay, he proposes a plot which uses this audio problem to good effect.

[The Banker] is on his knees by the bathtub, scouring it out. Mrs. Brundage is in the kitchen cleaning out the breadbox. "Hello, dear," he calls--his head far down into the tub. "Hello, dear," she answers--her head deep in the breadbox. In the next scene, they go to the attic to straighten up there. The wife finds a couple of old megaphones that her husband used when he was a college cheerleader. Playfully, they talk through these. "Let's give a megaphone party," says the wife, through hers. "All the guests to talk through megaphones!" "Splendid, dear," he croons, through his.

The plot moves to the back of an armored truck, then into a laboratory.

At the laboratory, he picks up a hollow brass cylinder. "This hollow brass cylinder," he explains, talking into it, "is contrived to intensify musical tones and designed for the study and analysis of complex sounds." Mrs. Brundage takes it from him and sings the picture's theme song into it.

The next scene takes place in a bank vault, and then inside an empty diving-tank, followed by the lower level of Grand Central station. After the husband and wife have a fight, "She sobs brokenly into the goldfish bowl, 'Little fish, bring him back.' (Which also could easily have been the theme song.)"

What Makes the Picture Talk?

If you were a moviegoer in 1929 -- and who wasn't? -- then you might have wondered how the "talking pictures" worked. Fortunately Western Electric put this somewhat pushy advertisement in the August 3, 1929 issue of The New Yorker. Click on the picture for the full gorgeous schematic, including the stylized "horns" which look more artsy than functional.



This advertisement graphically shows the reluctant transition from the Western Electric-developed Vitaphone (sound on disk) technology to the superior Movietone (sound on film). Though not actually developed by Western Electric, the company was anxious to cash in SOMEHOW on the new techonology that was making the Vitaphone obsolete...so they sold these Sound Picture systems to make use of both methods, and then promoted the heck out of their own contributions ("Sound pictures came out of the telephone.")

Smart folks.

Sound Pictures!

This "great new art" used by Paramount, Warner Brothers, Hal Roach, Columbia Pictures, Christie, Universal, United Artists, Harold Lloyd, Fox Movietone, and Metro Goldwyn Mayer, as pioneered by the world's leading makers of telephones, switchboards, cable, trans-Atlantic telephone equipment, telephoto machines, and public address systems?

Yes, it's "Sound Pictures" ("The Voice of Action") provided by Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric. They were responsible for the Vitaphone and the Movietone, and they practically shove the reader into a cinema seat with their final paragraph.

The success of Sound Pictures is history now. Continuing progress is certain. Make sure of enjoying it. Go to the theatres showing these great producers' pictures with the sound equipment recognized as the world's standard.

(The New Yorker, June 8, 1929...a particularly good issue, by the way).

Unspeakable! The Talkies Are Here To Stay

Throughout the run of The New Yorker magazine, starting in February 1925, I've been following the transition from silent films to talkies. At first the articles about "talking pictures" highlighted the unsuccessful technological advances, while movie reviewers continued to mention the title cards and orchestras of the still-popular silent films.

Then along came "The Jazz Singer," and The New Yorker started really adjusting to the idea that talking pictures were here to stay. Now, in June 1, 1929, the tone is one of complete resignation. This week's "A Reporter at Large" column, written by "Jean-Jacques," starts this way:

There persists a quaint notion amongst no small number of the populace that the talkies will soon pass. "I've never seen anybody yet who liked them," the expression goes, and with it the vague hope this will confute producers and bring back silent pictures. The hope is futile. That noble animal, the horse, is no more dead than silent pictures. Unspeakable as most of the talkies are, they are able to speak and they are here to stay. There's nothing left to do but make the best of it, no matter how unpalatable the superlative may seem in such connection.

The rest of the column describes the problems inherent with making a talking picture -- the placement of recording equipment, the construction of soundproof stages, the actors who need to actually learn their lines. It ends by suggesting that the people most disturbed by talking pictures were the producers, who suddenly found it VERY difficult to use editing and re-takes to totally change the film in post production; when film married sound it suddenly became much harder to edit it.

Poor producers.

After the Sound, the Colour

I've enjoyed watching the invent of sound wash over the New Yorker film reviewer, leading him through the typical stages of denial and anger and now into acceptance (at least, he no longer talks about it).

But the poor guy...he's barely recovered before December 1928 brings him...COLOUR!

The great scientific advance in the art of the cinema, starting this week's new era, is the Technicolor film (all in color) at the Embassy--"The Viking."

Having learned his lesson about sound, does the reviewer embrace colour as the next major development in film? Or does he belittle it?

As a matter of fact this picture is rather pretty, though certainly not art. The sea is too green and the sky too blue for sensitive people, but if you like your colors bright and gay you won't mind that.

So don't worry...it's just a gimmick and not "art," and you should probably wear sunglasses in the theatre.

The 1920s Technology Update

It's certainly true that we live in a time of fast-moving technology, but those folks in 1928 were no slouches either. They were so busy coming up with new inventions that they barely had time to apply Odorono twice a week!

By September 29, 1928, the "talking pictures" had finally arrived. A lot of technological work still needed to happen -- sound syncing, improvements in sound recording and amplification, mixing techniques, soundproofing of studios -- but by that time people were pretty much ready to accept what the studio scientists were cooking up.

In a short article called "Black Magic," though, The New Yorker describes several other inventions that were establishing themselves.

I can't find any information about the main topic of the article -- "Photograms" --but it seems as though this technology had existed for some time (I recall articles much earlier in the magazine about the low quality of telegraphed photos).

Photograms are pictures, or documents, sent by wire the same as telegrams.

Newspapers use photograms for news pictures, in cases like the Florida hurricane. Lawyers send photograms of legal documents, making error impossible.

Musical scores are often sent--song hits of Tin Pan Alley are released in San Francisco within twelve hours. Fashions are sent from Paris.

The editors then make a keen distinction (keep in mind this is 1928).

Don't confuse all this with television. Television (are we boring you?) is very, very different. At the Radio World's Fair last week, which was terribly dull, we took a look at television. A man with a scrubby mustache let himself be televised. He showed his teeth and winked and leered, which is about as far as television has gone at present. The pictures didn't do justice even to that. His mustache was vague, and his chin finally faded out altogether. What we could see of him looked pretty grim. Nobody is using television yet and we can well understand why.

I can't find any substantial online references to this early television experiment, but it may have been one of John Logie Baird's 1928 transmissions between London and New York. If so, Baird's prototype had only thirty scanlines, a far cry from the 486 we're used to in NTSC-world. You can see one of those early facial images at the link; Picasso would have appreciated it.

Anyway, radio was still to be king for another fifteen years or so, and The New Yorker concludes with the latest advances (which would not have been news to anybody -- like me -- who'd been reading the advertising copy for the previous few months).

The only thing to report about the newest in radio sets is that they now mostly plug into the electric-light circuit--no batteries. They are also disguised artfully in period furniture. Some of them have liquor cabinets.

All true...during Prohibition no less! What has been confusing me is that these sets were advertised as plugging into LIGHT SOCKETS. Like, you twisted them into the socket of a lamp where you'd normally place the bulb. I'm wondering if this was a novelty idea or if electrical outlets were really scarce at the time.

Uptight Reviewer Faces the Future

I recently mentioned the joy of watching the "talking pictures" creep up on The New Yorker's stodgy film reviewer ("Bergman"). Just three weeks before the below article, the reviewer had been poo-poo'ing talkies.

Now (July 14, 1928), "The Lights of New York" has arrived and Bergman is eating crow (while simultaneously being a bit poo-poo-ey in the process):

At the Strand is "The Lights of New York," the first one-hundred-per-cent talker. Conversation, action, and plot are all very poor, but you will find it interesting as a museum piece. It would have been better silent, and much better unseen. The talking films have not even progressed to their infancy yet. Bad as it is, though, the film shows what I have been very reluctant to believe, that audibility will be a great help to the movies.

Reading these magazines sixty years after the fact is occasionally like watching a blind man stepping into traffic*, though other small articles are noting the shockwave that was about to hit Hollywood (studios rushing to implement sound, actors rushing to elocution lessons).

I'd like to point you in the direction of a good scholarly resource about this topic, but instead I'll direct you to "Singin' In the Rain." Seriously.

* What's the next runaway bus, speeding towards the 1920s blind pedestrian? I guess that would be "Black Tuesday" fifteen months from where I currently am in the magazine's history.

The Creeping Talkie

One of the interesting things about reading old New Yorker magazines is observing the slow approach of the talking film.

Film reviews from 1926 didn't mention sound-films at all, complaining mainly about the people who loudly repeat captions while in the theater (proving that some things never change). In 1927 the critic was thrilled with "The Jazz Singer," which relied on the Vitaphone for sound (which would soon be obsolete) but he was not happy with other films that used the same method: too loud and -- due to the problems with syncing sound to video -- usually used in unimportant scenes.

Now, in the June 23, 1928 issue, he admits that talkies just might not be a fad:

Movies are going more and more talkie and people who make statements about the infant industry say that in five years there will be no silent films at all. I recommend that gentlemen concerned with pictures take it easy. For about half its length "The Lion and The Mouse" indulges itself in dialogue and while it does, action is at a stand-still, as two characters stand woodenly by the camera and say things, or talk in close-up. Maybe the two mediums of the stage and screen can be combined, but there has been very little to point the way... We are now getting all the faults of the speaking film. Perhaps one of these days we will begin to see some advantages.

With the benefit of hindsight we know that the film critic doesn't have long to wait. A smash hit talkie will be along in July ("Lights of New York"). By 1929 the talking films will have become the norm, leaving critics to argue instead about colour, or Panavision, or HD.

It's nice to see a snarky critic get it wrong, now and then.

The Spoken Film

I'm going through the back issues of The New Yorker chronologically, and they've finally gotten to "The Jazz Singer." The magazine's movie critic makes some interesting statements in the October 15, 1927 issue:

With a first-night audience clapping and bellowing with joy at the end of his first picture, at the Warner Theatre, Mr. Al Jolson stepped to the front of the stage with a tear in his eye and said he was glad they liked it. The film was "The Jazz Singer" and probably nobody liked it much... The shouting was about Mr. Jolson and the Vitaphone. I have said a lot of unpleasant things about the Vitaphone, but all my words are eaten.

The Vitaphone was a record carefully synced up with a reel of film; the record and the film played simultaneously, and the sound was amplified and played into the theatre. It was (at the time) the most effective way of syncing film and audio together, but it took two years before Warner Brothers found the right way to apply the process.

One limitation appeared to be that the sound needed to be "dubbed" by the performer, instead of recorded live at the same time as the filming. So it wasn't deemed practical to recall actors to re-speak their lines and try to sync them with the original film recording. Perhaps this was more complicated because the idea of "dialog" in a movie was an extremely loose one; the actors often ad-libbed (or babbled) during the filming, relying on the subtitles to tell the story.

For this reason it was probably considered more practical to only use the Vitaphone when exact synchronization wasn't necessary.

Previously, the film critic for The New Yorker had mentioned those applications for the vitaphone: playing marching music when the soldiers march home on-screen, for instance, or playing the sound of a motorcycle during a slapstick chase scene. But audiences accustomed to silent films found these intrustions noisy and weird.

It took "The Jazz Singer," with its musical interludes, to strike a comfortable balance and open the door to a new concept. And it took Al Jolson to perfectly dub his singing and his dialog into the Vitaphone.

That evening will probably turn out to be an epochal one in the history of the movies, for questions were answered and questions were raised. True, the speaking movie is not so new; but hitherto it has been a novelty without much grip. Now it has shown what it can do... An article in a recent Variety mentions spoken sub-titles, but that will not prove to be enough. In "The Jazz Singer" after the singing, or after a short bit of dialogue, the silent mouthings of the characters seemed flat and silly. A new and fertile field of writing, acting, and directing is in view, with possibilities that can hardly be guessed. Will the spoken film have to aim at two audiences, the metropolitan and the rural, instead of one as now?--and consequently make two separate types of pictures, one for the city people and one for those in the country?

He's correct that audiences would no longer be satisfied with the "flat and silly" silent films, but he's actually wondering if "metropolitan" audiences would remain loyal to silent films and "rural" audiences would demand the spoken film. This says something about either the snobbishness of "metropolitan" audiences...or, more likely, the snobbishness of film critics.