Jazz-Mad Youth At Slow Tempo
The 20's Roaring Its Last in Dance Hall (1929)
Woeful in ways too many associate with earliest
talkers, the fact much of Dance Hall plays out of sync on TCM further grist for
tarred brush the unknowing apply to oldies. What this needs is audio
tweak if not full restoration. Who'll step up with cash? There's the rub,
of course, Dance Hall being miles short of importance to justify outlay,
whatever our level of interest in late 20's artifacts. There is value per
lifestyle it depicts, club environ a likely mirror of what towns large and
small had to pass leisure time of jazz-mad youth. Again there are dance
contests to breathe life into workaday grind, acreage plowed by year-later
Dancing Sweeties and undoubted dozens more I've not seen. Arthur Lake
is a gelded boy lead, comforting to mothers watching perhaps, but a grind for
us now. How could he credibly get any girl, let alone looker Olive
Borden?, but scripts had ways of making improbables come true, thus
score one for Arthur, a hapless Dagwood here in all but name. Dance Hall was
made when a nickel was real money people argued over, which makes sense
considering you could buy a whole soda or half a movie ticket with
it.
Dan Mercer sees something amiss in the "Dance Hall" one-sheet ...
ReplyDelete"Dance Hall" played on TCM out of synch? Possibly they were trying to recreate an authentic talkie experience. The poster seems a little out of synch, too, with Arthur Lake a whole lot more dynamic and Olive Borden a whole lot less cute than they would have been in the film.
Daniel Mercer
I wonder if the film was out of synch or the broadcast was out of sync. I've seen a few digital presentations where the picture and sound don't match. Did Mr. Osborne or Mr. Mankiewicz introduce it, and was he in synch?
ReplyDeleteOn the Nitrateville boards someone mentions taping the movie in 1989 from a TV showing on the local ABC affiliate which ran the Movietime USA package late at night. "This was a better-than-average print, with the original Radio Pictures logo intact. Right away while viewing my tape I noticed the badly out-of-sync sound ....... "
ReplyDeleteMany theories discussed there as to the poor synching, the chief one being that some parts of the original that showed in theatres was dubbed over for some reason.
I love this movie. The presence of Joseph Cawthorn and the lovely Helen Kaiser is a big plus for me. She only appeared in 3 movies, the other 2 being Rio Rita and Tanned Legs, both 1929 but she made a real impression on me in Rita as Bert Wheeler's character's first wife.