[Dixielandjazz] "Vitaphone Varieties" reviewed

Robert Ringwald rsr at ringwald.com
Sun Dec 23 08:49:37 PST 2012


Vitaphone Varieties: Vol. 2 (Warner Archive)
by Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle, December 23, 2012
Starting in 1926, a year before "The Jazz Singer," Warner Bros. started producing
a series of sound shorts, usually musical or comedy acts, mostly taken from the vaudeville
stage. These shorts have been difficult to see and much coveted by aficionados. Last
year saw the release of a magnificent four-disc collection of these shorts, "Vitaphone
Varieties." Now comes "Vitaphone Varieties: Vol. 2," a two-disc collection of 35
short films, which originally played in theaters in the years 1927 through 1931 and
haven't been seen since. So you're really seeing some kind of miraculous resurrection,
and I can't help but wonder, watching these films, what the people in them would
think of their being seen again, now in people's homes, over 80 years later. Most
of these people were not stars. Take the hula girl who sits off to the front left
in the 1927 film "Hawaiian Nights." Because she's not an actress, she's not acting;
she's just being herself, and being herself, she seems like any 19-year-old girl
today. If she were alive in 2012, she'd be 104, which means she is almost certainly
dead, but whatever became of her? What was her life like? These are the things you
think when you watch the films in this set. However, the shorts are much better in
the first Vitaphone collection. Many of the films in the new collection are from
later in the Vitaphone era, and as such they're more polished, more professional
and less interesting. There are too many shorts of orchestras just sitting there
playing, and too much Edgar Bergen. If you are a Vitaphone completist, by all means
get this. But if you want to have the ideal Vitaphone immersion, stick with the earlier
collection.
-30-


-Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Amateur (ham) Radio Operator K6YBV
916/ 806-9551

"The vote is the instrument and symbol of a free person's power to make a
fool of himself, and a wreck of his country." -Ambrose Bierce



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