The Miracle of Sound

This short film purports to be about the intricacies of sound technology, but it's really more of an excuse to showcase a batch of big-name MGM stars and some coming attractions. But either way it's fascinating. We go behind the scenes for the filming of a scene featuring Jeannette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, and get a glimpse of the massive technicolor camera being used. There is also a scene featuring Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr, in which we see their voices represented as sound waves. But this is all surface-level stuff and a prelude to an extended preview of coming attractions. And what a preview it is! Clark Gable, Greer Garson, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, one right after the next. There's a nostalgic thrill in seeing a preview for "The Philadelphia Story" before anyone knew that that movie would become one of the most beloved of all time. Fun stuff.

Miracle of Sound, The (1940)

*** (out of 4)

It's funny to think that so many people go to the movies or watch them on television each week yet I'd be willing to bet that the majority of them doesn't know how sound actually gets on the movies and I'm sure many didn't know this back in 1940, a brief decade after sound became the popular (and only) thing. This documentary runs just under 10-minutes but it has MGM sound engineer Douglas Shearer telling us exactly how our favorite movies can speak. This "New Romance of Celluloid" episode is a pretty good one as we get a brief bit of information in a film that is clearly meant to be promotion for future films by the studio. We do get some behind the scenes footage from BITTER SWEET, which was a Technicolor production but we get to see some of the footage in B&W since this was how the documentary was shot. We also get to see Clark Gable's voice from COMRADE X. The rest of the film pretty much spotlights upcoming movies like A WOMAN'S FACE, BLOSSOMS IN THE DUST and THE GREAT ZIEGFELD. In the end, even the promo stuff isn't too bad as we get some nice information that I'm sure many people aren't aware of. Showing this in a theater today would certainly be a lot more entertaining than those silly trivia questions.

Frank Whitbeck narrates this MGM promotional short subject. He introduces Douglas Shearer, for many years the head of the MGM sound department. He had got the job because he was the brother of Norma Shearer, the wife of the now-legendary Irving Thalberg. Doug needed a job, no one knew anything about this new-fangled sound system.... so he got the job and learned along the way. He picked up 14 Oscars during his career. Not a bad job.

It's a promotional short, as I said, and it's used to tell you about forthcoming MGM pictures, some of which never got made, or didn't get made for five years. Along the way, you get the usual two-second portrait shots of some of MGM's stars, of which the saying went, there were more than in heaven. There's also a color test of Greer Garson. As a family snapshot album, it's a lot of fun.