90 years ago: jazz and murder and William Haines

That subject line sounds like the title of a post about a scandal (even more so when you know that William Haines was a more-or-less closeted movie star of the silent era), but it's really just another post of movies playing in 1930.

Wild Company may not be a lost movie, but there is no current commentary about it out there--though it sounds like a Reefer Madness movie about the jazz lifestyle. Fox has not been the best caretaker of its early films, so it might exist somewhere. Years later, Frank Albertson and H.B.Warner were both in It's a Wonderful Life, Albertson as Sam "Hee-Haw" Wainwright and Warner as Old Man Gower, the druggist.

Midnight Mystery sounds good--a man living in an island castle in Maine tries to teach his mystery-writing girlfriend a lesson but winds up with a real murder on his hands that she has to solve--but it also appears to be lost. However, the author of the Mystery File blog reviewed it based on a tape he had made from a TV showing some years ago, so it may still be floating around out there in the cinema ether.

August of 1930 was apparently "RKO Month" in Cincinnati, as in the theater chain, because neither of these movies came from RKO Radio Pictures. Both movies are still in existence. All Quiet is a classic, and Way Out West was near end of Haines's career. He retired in 1934, reportedly pushed out of his MGM contract because of his sexuality, but he was getting a bit too long in the tooth for the cocky juvenile parts MGM kept putting him in. This came from an August 1930 Cincy paper, so I can't explain the "Midwinter" wording in the ad.

From 90 years ago, 2 lost films

I thought it might be fun to start the year by going back to 1930, in the early days of talkies, as movie ads were getting a little more artwork and becoming more interesting to look at. Looking at ads from 90 years ago this month, the first two I ran across were for movies that now considered lost. Often, rare copies of lost films do crop up, but these two don't seem important enough for anyone to be conducting specific searches for them.

Above are two ads for Gold Diggers of Broadway, one of the better-known lost films, as it was the first of the classic Gold Diggers series of the 30s which featured the stunning choreography of Busby Berkeley. He was not involved in this first film, but the plot, with "gold digging" chorus girls getting the better of  their rich sugar daddies, set the template for the later films. The top ad, from a Sandusky Ohio bill, stands in contrast the classier looking but very wordy ad from the New York Times in August of 1929.

Based on contemporary reviews, The Forward Pass was a run-of-the-mill sports romance (the Times review made note of its predictable plot) but enjoyable for the chemistry between the two co-stars, Loretta Young and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It's not a musical but, as the ad above from a Tucson paper in January of 1930 notes, Young does sing at least one song.

Finally, an ad from Edmonton, Alberta featuring both films in the last week of 1929, not to mention prize giveaways!