The Hole in the Wall

"The Hole in the Wall" is an early part-talkie, well-directed by Robert Florey but saddled with a plot that Tod Browning might have cooked up for Lon Chaney on a bad day. Several themes beloved of Browning (and often used in Chaney's movies) are prominently used here, including a gang of crooks and phoney mediums, and (shades of "West of Zanzibar") a plot to corrupt an innocent girl in order to get revenge on her parent. The "hole in the wall" in this movie's title is in the crooks' hideout: it's a peephole with a periscope, which the phoney medium uses to spy on her victims, so that she can gain information about them before she meets them, and impress her victims with her "psychic" abilities.

Claudette Colbert (still learning the techniques of film acting) stars as Jean Oliver, who was sent to prison on false testimony by snooty society dame Mrs Ramsay. After spending several years in prison, now Jean is out and hell-bent on revenge. She plans to kidnap Mrs Ramsay's little daughter Marcia, and raise the girl as a thief in a Fagin-like environment. Jean hopes that Marcia will grow up to be an habitual thief, get arrested and acquire a criminal record ... and then Jean will get her revenge by revealing herself to Mrs Ramsay as the person responsible for her daughter's corruption.

The climax of the film is meant to be very exciting, when little golden-haired Marcia is a prisoner in the dockyards, trapped on a quayside ladder while the tide rises. Unfortunately, the untalented child actress who plays the kidnap victim keeps screeching "Mama! Mama!" over and over, on a very bad soundtrack. We're supposed to be concerned about the plight of a kidnapped child who's in danger of drowning, but I kept wishing the brat would shut her gob and quit yapping.

The soundtrack is VERY bad, and I don't think it's just because I saw a very scratchy old print of this film. In the late 1920s and early 30s, the Fox Movietone method of sound recording (which this film uses) was vastly inferior to the Vitaphone process used by Warner Brothers. I give credit to director Florey and his screenwriter (Pierre Collinge) for intelligently shaping the story to incorporate sound effects legitimately, at a time when many part-talkie films used sound effects merely for stunt purposes. But the dialogue is badly written, apart from its poor sound fidelity. Groucho Marx, who worked with the French-born Florey in "The Cocoanuts" later this same year, claimed that Florey had difficulty speaking English ... which might explain why Florey allowed such wretchedly bad dialogue to get past him in "The Hole in the Wall".

There's an exciting scene of a train crash on an elevated railway, and throughout the film the photography is excellent, as are the lighting and the shot-framing. This film's many good points outweigh its numerous bad points.

I was so excited to see Edward G. Robinson's first movie! He plays the ringleader in a gang of thieves, fronted by a psychic "madam". Together with Donald Meek, Alan Brooks, and Nellie Savage, they extort information out of wealthy clients and then rob them. Everything changes when Nellie is killed in a train accident and they go in search of a new madam. Enter Claudette Colbert, in only her second picture. It was before her Harlequin eyebrows, but she's still very beautiful. Her acting is very modern for its time. There are parts of the film that feel like a silent picture, but Claudette propels the audiences into the future with her different style. There are no grand gestures, no facial expressions intended to reach the back row, and no over-exaggeration of her words. I was very impressed; no wonder she became a star!

Eddie G, as much as I love him, wasn't much different in this picture than he was in Little Caesar. Watching this movie will be fun because it was his first, but it won't showcase his greatest performance. In fact, he sometimes takes the back seat (which he rarely did in his later movies) to the storyline, Claudette, or the creepiness of Donald and Alan.

There are some very eerie parts to this movie, and it might not be for everyone. I'd have a comedy on hand for later in the evening, to get you in a better mood. And try to remember the movie is 95 years old. Yes, there are silent passages where no sound was recorded, and yes, women didn't shave under their arms, but that was just the time period.

Hollywood studio scouts were scouring Broadway theaters in an attempt to persuade and hire articulate actors and actresses to make the leap into cinema. Studios spent lots of money for talent scouts after discovering many of their reliable silent movie performers were incapable of making the transition over to sound. These actors either possessed an unpleasant voice, their verbal rhythm was slow or uneasy, or they simply had difficulty remembering their lines. Those whom especially hadn't acted on the stage before were most likely fodder for early retirement.

A good example exists in one of Paramount Pictures earliest talkies, filmed in its New York City studio. The company hired two Broadway stage performers to play the leads in its April 1929 "The Hole in the Wall." Claudette Colbert, 25, signed with Paramount in 1928 for her silky voice with a touch of a French accent and for her looks. A four-year veteran of the stage who had emigrated to New York City from France at the age of three, she appeared in Frank Capra's 1927 lost silent film, 'For the Love of Mike,' before getting the call for the talkie, "The Hole in the Wall."

Meanwhile, 35-year-old Edward G. Robinson, a Romanian-born immigrant to America since nine, had made his Broadway theater debut in 1915. He received Paramount's attention for his role in the stage hit 'The Racket,' which was made into a film the next year. The studio scouts felt he was a natural as a conman in "The Hole in the Wall," his movie debut.

The two became highly successful in their transition from stage to screen. But Robinson's memory of how bad his first movie was caused him to vow to never to watch it. Years later, after Colbert saw "The Hole in the Wall" playing on television, she called up the actor and told him the Robert Florey-directed film wasn't all that bad and he should see it. "The Hole in the Wall", based on a Frederick Jackson play, concerns 'The Fox' (Robinson), working alongside a fake fortune teller to con rich people out of their money. The reliable teller dies in a car accident. Up steps her replacement, Jean Oliver (Colbert), who was previously unfairly incarcerated by a rich society woman and is looking for revenge. The director Florey, went on to have an active career as both a film and television director in A-listed and low budgeted B films well into the late 1940s, before transitioning into television in the 1950s. As for Robinson and Colbert, both would see their names on movie theater marquees for years to come.

There are several reviews posted here on the page which cover well "The Hole in the Wall," but I just want to with this comment encourage younger viewers who may be considering embarking on a look at this one to definitely do so. This film was released in April of 1929, so it was probably shot over the winter of 1928-29 or in Jan or Feb at the latest. I would conjecture that most films produced before the summer of 1929 do not hold up well for viewing today, in 2020. But this one does... it looks and feels good in its acting work, its direction, the sets, and the compelling story. Oh sure, the dialog may not be sparkling, but that's just the writing... we're not looking for something great when we are peering into history. We are looking for the joy of seeing what came before, to learn how things developed... to see what things were like back in the day. And "The Hole..." gives us that. Many films in 1928 were still being shot as silents, particularly before summer began, so here in these early days of talkies we have the actors placed around microphones that often dictated where the actors were placed on set. Much of the dialog was delivered deliberately and enunciation was important. The voices may be a bit louder than what would really be appropriate for the situation. For some actors the dialog offered could sound "stagey," and getting physicality to jibe with speech was tricky. Some actors coming in from silent pictures had exaggerated eye and hand movements, but that wasn't the case in this film. Just think how really exciting it must have been to be a part of this change from silents to talkies in the film industry.

It was fun to here see the apparent difficulty of trying to present the characters in conversation while in the nightclub with the band's music playing. For the most part they didn't even try. There was one short sequence where they did try and it worked out just so-so. And furthermore, no attempt was seemingly made to soundtrack the words of the cops who were gathering for the stakeout at the gangsters' den... we only see the mouths moving in apparent conversation while the soundtrack is dull static. This shouldn't be negatively criticized by us today; rather it should be enjoyed. The little girl in peril under the dock is shown in silence in her peril... we the viewers must supply our own sound for the situation she is in, including the splashing of the water by Donald Meek (I for one think silences such as this can add to the gathering concern felt by the viewer if one accepts some of the terms of watching a sound film from early 1929).

This film is a real treat for all the reasons listed above and also because, on good authority, it was Edward G. Robinson's first sound picture and was also his first gangster role, and additionally for it being Claudette Colbert's very first movie role. Youngsters and anyone interested in film history should indeed enjoy this very valuable motion picture. It is a worthy experience.

Poorly lit and poorly written but interesting from a historical perspective.You can watch on You Tube under The Charlatan. Colbert is young and not as confident as in her later films Robinson only shows glimpses of his gangsta persona but it is still interesting to watch The plot is very simple and unbelievable.