User Reviews

Jay Carr, as J. Pierpont Ginsburg, the movie mogul, is about to undertake his first talking picture. His butler asks him about the screenwriter. "Oh, da SCREENwriter! He's a BRILLIANT writer! Every week he writes for more money!" When he inquires after an actress who missed her call, he's told that she's still sleeping even though it's afternoon. But don't forget, she's a star. "A STAR -- maybe dat's why she only comes out at night."

If you don't find this funny, this may not be your kind of movie. I enjoyed some of it. Gentle parodies of ethnic folkways, like speech, shouldn't be confined within the borders of the ethnic group being parodied; they should be shared with the world, if they're any good. Why is it so difficult to come by a showing of "Abie's Irish Rose"? And whatever happened to "Amos and Andy"? Hey? Well, I'm glad I've got that off my chest. I feel better now. The Xanax helps.

But all seriousness aside, if you don't find those gags amusing, you might not want to watch this film because there are more of them, a lot more, and some are better than others. A gay character is the male lead, and Ginsburg asks, "Are you da leading man or da leading lady? Remember, dis ain't no fairy tale." Withal, this is a clumsily made story along the lines of "Singin' in the Rain" but not nearly so funny or entertaining. Carr is the central figure and it's tempting to think that he came to Hollywood directly from vaudeville because his Yiddish accent sounds like it, rather like Chico Marx's Italian accent. But Carr is too slow to have been in vaudeville where so much depended on pace. He pauses too long between utterances. And he projects an air of fatuous self satisfaction that doesn't quite fit the part. The technology of the time was primitive but that can't account for the poor acting on the part of Carr and just about everyone else in the cast.

On the plus side, everyone tries hard, and from what we can see of the legs of the girls in a chorus line that anticipates Busby Berkely's terpsichorean kaleidoscopes, they have pretty legs.

What a weird movie! 'The Talk of Hollywood' (filmed in New York City) has a clever title, since it deals with the then-recent talkies revolution in the movie industry. This film is basically a comedy (although not very funny), and the protagonist is a burlesque Jewish stereotype ... so it's bizarre that, at a couple of points, the plot line strives for genuine pathos as the protagonist mourns his deceased wife.

This movie truly seems to have no sense of itself. The leading actress, one Fay Marbé (who?), is introduced with a screen credit indicating that she's a stage star now becoming a film star. She was neither.

J. Pierpont Ginsburg (played by Nat Carr, who also co-scripted) is a successful producer of silent films who has now sunk all his funds into a talking picture that will either make him or break him. The soundtrack is recorded on Vitaphone discs. When the first reel's disc is broken by the drunken projectionist -- played by an uncredited actor, doing one of the phoniest drunk acts I've ever seen -- he merely runs the second reel's disc with the first reel's film, and so forth ... so that the sound never matches the image. Alleged hilarity ensues.

A previous IMDb reviewer has suggested that this film might have been an inspiration for "Singin' in the Rain", which featured a scene in which an actress's dialogue is in synch with a male actor's body and vice versa. I doubt it; during the talkie revolution, as movies stumbled to find their voice, there were plenty of genuine horror stories along those lines: nobody had to reach for this movie to find inspiration.

There are a couple of funny gags here, with Ginsburg mangling the English language in the style of Sam Goldwyn: "Talking pictures are only in their infantry." Unfortunately, there are a lot of wince-worthy gags relying on stereotypes of Jews, blacks, and a "nance". I cringed at one scene in which Ginsburg teaches an African-American actor how to talk like a "darky". Fay Marbé is faintly amusing as a French prima donna named Adore Renée (geddit?), but her cod French accent is made more annoying because several other members of this film's cast also speak in bizarre affected accents. I was especially annoyed by Hope Sutherland's weird mid-Atlantic accent.

SPOILERS COMING. This movie's payoff is that very hoary cliché in which a serious endeavour fails so badly that it succeeds as a comedy. Also, a major plot point is revealed in a title card, as if this talking picture were a SILENT movie. I'll just barely rate this bizarre (but interesting) failure 4 points out of 10.

It's nobody's fault when a film from 1929 turns out to be as dull as this one is, and while there are a few moments where it comes to life, you have to deal with a lot of truly lifeless ones. Ironically, the film is about the early days of talkies, with a bombastic film producer out to get to the screen to talk, sing and dance. Nat Carr isn't exactly a Louis B. Mayer, brother Warner (or Cohn) or Carl Laemmle, and certainly not the screen version of "42nd Street's" Julian Marsh. His cliched Jewish accent is closer to "Abie's Irish Rose" than the foreign born Jewish studio heads who went through a lot of training to hide their roots.

Stage actress Fay Marbe is truly forgettable in her leading role of the French star whom Carr wants to make a big film star in this. This is overloaded with some really unbelievable bad musical numbers, painful at times. As a historical artifact, it's fascinating, but it takes a lot of patience and energy to get through, even in multiple attempts. Long periods of silence don't help at all, but the film attempts some style. Definitely not one of the highlights of the brief history of early sound studio Sono Art-World Wide Pictures, even though they filmed it on the RKO lot.

Actually, this one doesn't start off too badly – it just gets worse and worse as it progresses. Comedian Nat Carr plays a studio head who makes all the wrong business guesses and murders the English language in the process. There's a limit to the amount of humor that can be wrung from a take-off on Sam Goldwyn, and Carr reaches that limit about 20 minutes in, forcing the screenwriter to bring the film to a climax by rehashing that old gag of something going wrong in the projection booth causing women's voices to issue from men and vice versa. This is played through at excruciating length. It's hard to believe that this feast of incompetence was directed by Mark Sandrich who did such a good job on the Astaire-Rogers pictures at RKO. The leading actress, Australian-born Fay Marbe, was the star of an Austrian feature, Dorine and Her Downfall (1938), but aside from a brief appearance in the 6th edition of The Voice of Hollywood, she made no more movies after this miss. Or should I say "mess"? Admittedly, for a few moments there it looked like the movie might turn into a fully-fledged musical. Indeed it could be condensed into a reasonably entertaining two-reel musical short. But no such luck. Mr Carr swamps all comers except Tom O'Brien, who likewise over-plays his role as an inebriated projectionist. Available on an excellent Alpha DVD.

One of the first independent musicals, produced by Prudence Pictures, successor to the silent Excellent Pictures (as in "if it's a good picture, it's Excellent"), it had a great behind the scenes pedigree. Produced and directed by Mark Sandrich who later went on to direct some of the great Astaire/ Rogers musicals, he also co-wrote the story with Nat Carr who also starred and was absolutely hilarious in it and went on to become a character actor at Warners. The movie grabs you from the start with "Presenting the International Star - Miss Fay Marbe in Her Talking Picture Debut" which happened to be Miss Marbe's last film. She reminded me of Ethelind Terry who also proved a fizzer in "Lord Byron of Broadway"(1930).

Fay plays Adore Renee (how did that ever make it past - people had a more "who cares" attitude back in the roaring twenties!!) By having a "they'll never catch on" attitude to talking pictures J. Pierpont Ginsberg is watching his film empire slip through his fingers but he has now decided to make a film that will be "the talk of Hollywood"!! He needs to cast and the auditions are a scream - there is the stuttering chorus girl ("she doesn't always stutter - no, only when she talks"!!), the effeminate leading man (played by Gilbert Marbe, Fay's brother), he already has his temperamental leading lady. Sure it oversteps the boundaries of good taste and has a few off colour remarks but it has to be viewed as belonging to the time it was made. Equally funny but probably unintentional, was the love scene away from the studio between Ginsberg's lawyer, John Applegate, and his daughter Ruth (Hope Sutherland). John starts off saying "I can't tell my feelings the way they do in the pictures" and then almost breaks into song!! He doesn't but if only this scene was part of Ginsberg's new "sock it to 'em" talking picture it would be a smash!!

It wouldn't be a 1929 movie without a musical interlude and with Al Goodman's Follow Thru Orchestra leading the charge the songs are toe tapping. Forget Fay Marbe's fruity French accent - she is good when her feet do the talking, although her thunder is stolen in one dance by her partner's spirited Al "Rubberlegs" Norman eccentric dance. My favourite was a crazy Egyptian dance from a flurry of chorus girls with a jazzy beat, then Marbe is back with more chorus girls (The Leonidoff Ballet Troupe) for the finale!! "That's big time stuff" and everyone agrees only to find out that the microphones have been out all day!!

The ending is straight out of "Singin' in the Rain" - although this movie was made when the talkie change over was today's news and it is fascinating to see how "sound on discs" actually operated. A drunken projectionist causes mayhem with the wrong records being synchronized with the wrong reels - very, very funny. A big percentage of the cast never made another movie, although one exception was Sam Levine who appeared in the projection room scene and went on to become one of Hollywood's and Broadway's best character actors.

A day after this film was released the R.C.A's Photophone Studios of Manhattan was burned to the ground because of Kleig lights setting fire to the cloth that was used to sound proof the walls from the noise of the busy streets. Careless safety measures but also attributed to the slap dash way many musicals were churned out to feed the public's huge demand.

Highly Recommend.