Lights of New York

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.

Lights of New York (1928)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Eddie (Cullen Landis) lives in a small town but dreams of the big city just forty-five minutes away. He talks his mom into letting him go to New York City to visit his girl Kitty (Helene Costello) as well as try to make something for himself. Before you know it Eddie is in New York but he's gotten conned into a bootleg racket by the criminal Hawk Miller (Wheeler Oakman).

Everyone knows the history of THE JAZZ SINGER and how it introduced the world to talking pictures. That movie only had portions of it that were sound but all of that changed with LIGHTS OF NEW YORK, which would be the first all sound picture. It's rather interesting that the film has so much history behind it and yet it was hard to see for many decades and just finally got released to DVD in April of 2018.

When you watch this film you can talk about its place in history, the technique of its use of sound and the movie itself. I'll start with the movie itself, which is mildly entertaining thanks in large part to it just running 57-minutes. The film is rather short but there's no question it's rather unoriginal and especially the story of a small town boy going to the "evil" big city and finding bad stuff. It's not original and there's nothing fresh done with it outside of the dialogue and sound effects.

The performances are all pretty stiff but this here goes to the technology. Mics had to be hidden all over the place to pick up the actor's dialogue and quite often the actors had to stand very close to them. You can tell there were various problems because more times than not the actors in the film are standing close to each other for no reason than so the mics can pick up what they're saying. In fact, there's one scene where you can hardly hear a woman speaking until she takes a step up and then her dialogue becomes audible. With that in mind, it makes sense why some of the performances are rather bad and at times the actors seem to be shouting to get them heard. It should be stated that the star of the picture, Landis, appeared in over a hundred movies but would just make two more after this one.

LIGHTS OF NEW YORK is certainly going to appeal to film buffs who want to see the first sound picture. That alone makes it worth watching but it's also fascinating to see where the technology was at this point and how it hampered the picture. There are some obvious issues with the picture and there's no question that it doesn't have anything original about it but at the same time the movie remains entertaining and worth watching.

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.

This is an important historical film since it was the the first all-talking feature film.

The film was made for a mere 23,000 dollars.

It grossed over a million dollars upon its release.

This film all so helped define the gangster melodramas that were to become the bread and butter of the Warner's studio in the 1930's.

The popularity of this film ended the silent era more so than its more famous part-talkie predecessor, the Jazz Singer. The film deserves its place in history and not as a mere footnote.

The only actor who might be remember today that is in it was Eugene Palette.

One-hour-long, corny, somewhat boring---but still kind of watchable. I liked one song that an entertainer in a nightclub sang (and he did a bit of dance accompaniment). Some decent plot twists. The actors stumble over their lines but one cannot blame the movie that much because I am reading here that it was billed as "the first 100% talkie." The slang expressions and quick-fire dialogue are big pluses.