... is a famous line uttered by Delores Costello as reproduced by Vitaphone, the recording system having a tendency to make actresses more than actors seem as though they are lisping. Audiences howled with laughter, perhaps offsetting the sting of paying two dollars a ticket in 1928, a high cost at the time, needed to offset the cost of wiring for sound. This film, including the sound discs, is completely lost. It followed on the heels of The Jazz Singer and contained four talking sequences totaling about fifteen minutes that featured Delores Costello.
It's a crime drama about a dancer, Rose Shannon (Delores Costello) who is accused of stealing fifty thousand dollars from a bag and replacing the money with poker chips and newspaper. The first of the talking sequences is Rose being given the third degree over this theft while she proclaims her innocence. A complicating factor is that the stolen money is gangland money, and gangster Chuck White (Conrad Nagel) while suspicious of Rose over the theft, has also started to care about her. The New York Times Review that I read described another talking sequence involving some criminal figure named "The Professor" (Mitchell Lewis) in some remote cabin menacing Rose over the money, and also described the dialogue as very pedestrian.
In spite of Michael Curtiz' direction and some great visuals and dance hall scenes, the critics were largely merciless in their judgment, saying that the sound conversations were more like the reciting of lines. As a result of public and critical reaction, two of the four talking sequences were withdrawn after the first week of release. In spite of the bad reviews, Tenderloin did great business in the spring of 1928, largely owing to the novelty of sound. Jack Warner could care less about bad reviews. What mattered to him is that this film, which took 188K to make, raked in 985K at the box office.
