American Cinematographer - September 1990 - 39

On the opening
night of The Jazz
Singer in New
York City, Octo¬
ber 6,1927, the
death knell of the

silent film

was

sounded.

nical achievement apart it is a difficult picture to
become excited about, though it does spotlight

Myrna Loy in two-colors and incurred the Los
Angeles censor's wrath for it's nude swimming
scene. Local
censorship changes like this required re¬
mixing and pressing custom discs for specific en¬
gagements. Happily the surviving print - Jack
Warner's personal copy - has the offending Tech¬
nicolor bosoms, giving Texas Moon a piquancy that
it would otherwise be lacking.
Far more interesting is the operetta Vien¬
nese Nights (1930), also in two-color Technicolor. By
this time Warners was providing sound-on-film
prints for theaters not equipped with Vitaphone.
Where Texas Moon was a Vitaphone release print
(full frame with no integral soundtrack), the surviv¬
ing copy of Viennese Nights was a combination print
with a silver optical track. The original recording
was done to disc, then mixed
simultaneously to both
a disc master and an
optical negative, the latter com¬
pounding the worst flaws of both systems. The
optical track was particularly dismal, so UCLA re¬
recorded the sound from Vitaphone discs to a new
optical negative for printing with a restored color
picture negative. Though the discs contained a
broader dynamic range and were splice-free, the
sound is still not wonderful, lacking body and pres¬

September 1990

ence, reflecting the inherent pitfalls of disc-to-disc
mixing.
For The First Auto (1927), a gentle idyll of the
coming of the motorcar, a nitrate 35mm print was
found at Warner Bros. At some point the original
negative had been cannibalized for stock footage.
"There were just pieces in the print saying 'shots 302
309 cut for stock'", says Gitt. Intrigued by the
possibility that 60 year old stock shots might survive,
-

he asked Martin Fox of the Warner Bros, stock li¬

brary about the trims. Fox looked under 'First Auto',
'Old Automobiles', 'Antique Cars' and found noth¬
ing. At the same time a new computer program was
being installed and vaulted material that had never
been inventoried was being entered.
'Antique Automobiles' appeared in the new
listing. Fox retrieved the can and there, in order,
were all the shots from The First Auto.
Though it has
no
dialogue sequences, sound effects are used care¬
fully and creatively - a laughing sequence is par¬
ticularly successful in pointing up the use of rhyth¬
mic sound effects.

The Divine Lady presented challenges in both
picture and sound. The "lady" of the title is Lady

Hamilton, and she and Lord Nelson survived in two
worn

One

versions at the Czechoslovak Film Archive.

was an

American

American

Cinematographer

Vitaphone version with

37



American Cinematographer - September 1990

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American Cinematographer - September 1990 - 1
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