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.
