Let's Go to the Movies

Let's Go to the Movies (1949)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produced this 10-minute short, which tells us the history of movies starting with the early days of Edison, up to THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, THE BIRTH OF A NATION, THE JAZZ SINGER and more current films. We get to learn how movies were born, when sound came along and even deeper stuff like how the actual film is made. If you're a fan of film then I'm sure you'll get a real kick out of this short, which is full of wonderful information as well as clips from some famous movies. I'm a die-hard fan of Griffith and have seen over one-hundred of his films and that includes watching different versions of his THE BIRTH OF A NATION. The clip show in this film is without question the cleanest and sharpest print I've ever seen and it was rather sad only being able to see such a short amount of footage in such condition. The stuff dealing with the cotton and silver used to make the film was an interesting segment as was seeing theaters from various parts of the world.

This little short celebrating the American movie industry and all of the workers behind it was rather interesting. It didn't use all of its time talking about individual movies, instead it took a different point of view - that of technical developments. Thus the short starts with Edison's kinetoscope and mentioned that Edison didn't bother to spend the hundred dollars it would have taken to secure his rights to the machine overseas. This was puzzling since nobody in history with maybe the exception of Bill Gates has so diligently pursued a monopoly on their achievements. The short talks about "The Great Train Robbery", shows how the illusion of motion is achieved on screen using an old Charlie Chaplin short, and mentions a film of Mary Pickford's that I thought was now lost - "Feud in the Kentucky Hills". A very good print of "Birth of a Nation" is shown as being one of the first feature films. The battlefield scene is shown as an example of an innovation in films.

At this point, the short jumps to the late 1920's with "The Jazz Singer" as the first feature with dialogue in it, and then jumps to two years later to John Barrymore in "The Show of Shows" doing a Shakespearean scene. I think this was to show how fast and far sound film came. There was never a revolution in technology in film that shook things up like the coming of sound.

Then the short jumps to the present - 1949 - and talks about how film itself is made from cotton that is processed and from silver. I believe the process they are showing here is for silver nitrate, the deterioration factor of which is ironically why so many pre 1950 films are gone forever. Safety stock did not become the standard until 1953.

Finally all of the technicians and scientists used to make a movie are saluted, and this is rather sad today since the migration to digital media means a much less labor intensive procedure is involved, thus fewer employees are needed, and that is pretty much the story of all American industries present day.

One technical innovation the short did not mention was color. In particular how the industry was finally able to go from two strip color which only involved red and green and colors that you could derive from those two colors, to being able to realistically bring all colors to the screen starting in about 1935.

So I'd watch this for what a film historian would say about film's present and past from a technical viewpoint. If you are looking to see all of the films that were milestones for artistic rather than technical reasons you will likely be disappointed. For that I'd watch the Turner Classic short "One hundred years at the Movies". I don't think that one is currently on DVD, but somebody always has it on youtube.