Lights of New York

EARLY talkie... even the poster said "first all talking picture". stars Helene Costello as Kitty, well-meaning chorus girl. Co stars Cullen Landis as Eddie. Eugene pallette is in here as Gene, the barber. He wasn't so big yet, but still had the lower, deep voice. Bootleggers move in. and unfortunately, that's where the money is. the timing is odd, but it IS one of the early talkies, so technical difficulties are to be expected. Speak-easies. the mob. Wheeler Oakman is "the Hawk", mob boss. Wheeler died young at 59... sadly, Costello also died quite young at 50, of tuberculosis. Directed by prolific Bryan Foy, who actually was one (the oldest) of the Seven Little Foys! warner brothers shortie, at only 57 minutes. This one is interesting for history's sake, since it claims to be the first all talking picture, with no music. after the silents, they even have title cards here and there to explain things. It's okay. more important as a piece of history.

LIGHTS OF NEW YORK was the first "all-taking" feature film, coming in at a brisk 57 minutes and directed by Bryan Foy (of the famous vaudeville family).

The story has two dopey barbers (Cullen Landis, Eugene Palette) yearning for a chance at "big city life" and getting involved with gangsters and bootleg booze. One of the guys gets framed for the murder of a cop but is saved at the last minute by a gun moll (Gladys Brockwell).

Much of the story takes place in a night club called The Night Hawk, which is run by a crook named Hawk (Wheeler Oakman) who has his eye on a pretty chorine (Helene Costello) who is the girl friend of Landis. Costello gets to do a brief dance, and we hear Harry Downing (made up to resemble Ted Lewis) sing "At Dawning) in his best Al Jolson style.

The acting ranges from good (Palette and Brockwell) to awful (Oakman). A couple of the actors muff their lines but then keep right on with the scene. As noted elsewhere this was intended to be a short 2-reeler and was made on a shoestring budget. Yet the sound quality is surprisingly good, the voices all register clearly, and there is a neat cinematic touch in the silhouette death.

The film was a box-office smash even though it was shown as a silent film where theaters were not wired for the new sound technology. No one expected this little film to gross an amazing $1.3 million. It briefly made stars of Costello and Landis and certainly launched Palette on his long career as a star character actor.

Co-stars include Mary Carr as the mother, Robert Elliott as the detective, Eddie Kane as the street cop, and Tom Dugan as a thug.

This is it. The first all-talking feature film. Although at 57 minutes it barely qualifies as a feature. The Lights of New York has a reputation for being a pretty bad film. Even contemporary reports from back in the day rather kindly label it as experimental. Watching it today it does not seem nearly as bad as it's reputation. Sure, there are pregnant pauses between lines, and Mary Carr as the hero's mother appears to deliver her lines as though she had been drugged, but the film is more fun to see than I care to admit. The nightclub scenes are rather lively and there is a music score under a lot of the dialogue. Overall, it is considerably better than Paramount's Interference, released a few moths later. All these pioneer talkies are interesting for buffs to see today as their respective producers and directors felt their way through the first few years of a brand-new medium. The print of Lights of New York had really excellent Vitaphone sound. Much clearer than the sometimes muddy sound in Interference. I believe Interference used Movietone sound-on-film process, but I could be mistaken. You could find worse ways to spend an hour than to watch this.

Okay so I gave this a 6 but to be fair you can't grade Lights of New York in any ordinary sense. The camera's immobile, the acting's on par with lumber and the script's below second-rate. I love the dialog--- Wheeler Oakman's "But... they... must not... find... Eddie" and the infamous, "Take.. him... for... A... ride" is stupifyingly awful (further proof of his thespian skills can be seen in his death scene... then he keeps on breathing!). But hey, this was the very first all-talking movie! There's every reason in the world to make allowances for every one of it's shortcomings. I've seen The Jazz Singer released around 8 months earlier and this represented a huge leap over part-talkies. It's hard to be overly critical on the technical aspects when it's apparent that everyone was dealing with new fangled sound and heavily soundproofed cameras--- not to mention sound requiring completely new types of direction. This is a gem that deserves to be seen and judged for what it is, a historical artifact. Eugene Palette is the best actor here (no surprise).

Though mainly notable for being the first "100% Talkie", this one is still reasonably well-regarded; it is also a fine example of an early gangster film – incidentally, I have a handful of other such efforts unwatched from that first initial burst within this most invigorating of genres.

That said, the mobster of this one is more akin to the hissable villain from some old barnstormer, complete with pencil-thin moustache, rather than the larger-than-life types (fast-talking, no-nonsense, eventually hysterical) subsequently made their own – at the same studio, Warners, no less – by the likes of Robinson, Cagney and Bogart! Even so, the action here is extremely modest – being relegated to the silhouetted shooting of a cop during a bootlegging 'job' and the behind-the-curtain execution of the villain. The aftermath of the latter sequence, however, elevates the suspense quotient considerably as the killing occurs in a barber shop immediately prior to a police 'raid'…so that the victim is put up in a chair by the owner (Eugene Palette), lathered and generally treated as any other customer, before he slips down to the floor!

The rest of the cast is made up of now-forgotten actors (apart from a young Tom Dugan – the Hitler impersonator from Lubitsch's TO BE OR NOT TO BE [1942] – as one of the hoodlum's stooges, here looking an awful lot like Lon Chaney!). Still, the performances (ditto the plot of small-town love rekindled in the big city, the fleecing/selling of naïve fellows by slick-looking-but-obviously-slimy-heels, and the jilted ageing mistress furnishing the villain's inevitable come-uppance) are all delightfully of their time, and the film itself very enjoyable if approached in the right frame-of-mind. Indeed, the only major let-downs here are the static camera-work and the wholly resistible (yet obligatory) musical numbers. By the way, the director had been one of the "Seven Little Foys", sons of popular vaudevillian Eddie Foy; he later changed gears to producing, with perhaps his most successful effort being the 3-D horror classic HOUSE OF WAX (1953).