The Next Voice You Hear.

The supply of early sound film that has likely fallen out of Copyright has become a deluge. Where to start? How about a couple of ambitious mainstream product-ions that demonstrate the abrupt decline brought about by sound, which filmmakers, headed by Chaplin and Renè Clair deplored?

A welcome surprise is that U-Tube has come up with the Ramon  Novarro The Pagan, one of the hits of the sound transition period and a film that, despite my best efforts over what is now a lifetime, I’d never managed to see - a nice copy shot at near the right speed for the new projectors but retaining the control that pre-sound film making had developed -  and with the l929 sound track too. It’s still really a silent, though the leads do lip synch. the theme at one stage (“Come with me where moonbeams/light Tahitian skies…”) encouraging Navarro to appear at the Berlin Opera House, and the track has a few crucial sound effects like the snapping of lip curling villain Donald Crisp’s walking stick. We have pretty much the ideal version, providing William Axt’s original score but retaining intertitles which spare us the early struggles with recorded dialogue. 

 The first thing that strikes you is that, like Tony Curtis' Universal movies, what they are selling you is the leading man in his briefs, with a languorous pan over shirtless Ramon reclining on the studio foliage eating bananas - not the reviled male gaze we hear about.  Hollywood was big on The Natural Man. Think Mutia Omoloo in Trader Horn, Uncas or Tarzan, whose adventures with Johnny Weismuller in the lead, this film's director, W.S. Van Dyke would shortly also get to launch. It didn’t seem to worry anyone at that stage that, in the most conservative of Hollywood film factories, their two big earners, Novarro and Billy Haines were determinedly gay. 

The Pagan - Dororthy Janis & Ramon Novarro

There is no doubt that one of the attractions of The Pagan is having two great-looking performers in skimpy sarongs as stars. Female lead Dorothy Janis had a small part in an earlier film by director Van Dyke and it’s to be regretted that her career went nowhere. She’s highly decorative and manages to register plausible adoration and terror - the two emotions called for. 

   W. S. Van Dyke

Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke had been an assistant to David Wark Griffith. He appears to have had a little-considered early career as director. The only example I’ve seen is the 1918 The Lady Of the Dugout, a quasi-western featuring train robber turned movie star Al Jennings (of Oklahoma). It is pretty good. This all turned around when Robert Flaherty was hired for the MGM production White Shadows in the South Seas, presumably because it used the Pacific Islands setting of his Moana, and things went pear-shaped. Some of Flaherty's footage remains visible in the finished film. The studio sent in expendable director Wiidy, who rose to the challenge. He became MGM’s go-to man for location filming,  turning out Trader Horn and what is debatably the last silent film 1933’s Eskimo, which once again did have a track but was largely played in the local language with inset caption translation. Though they are rarely seen now, all are accomplished. He also was misguided enough to do a respectable job on Naughty Marietta, which set him up for Jeanette McDonald - Nelson Eddy vehicles to come. Rose Marie still has some vigor (Mounty Eddy commenting on the barroom dancing girl who has upstaged opera star McDonald “Nelly couldn’t sing a note if she got lumbago”)but these productions are now hardly shown. Van Dyke’s San Francisco & The Thin Man do better. 

As for plot,  we are in the sweaty topics. Yacht owner Crisp in a white suit anchors in the Paumatu Islands and makes his way to the local store, where he is dismissive of barefoot idler Navarro. Turns out Ramon owns all the palm trees Don wants for Copra production. Rather than make him a deal, Ramon gifts him harvesting rights. Trouble is that Ramon and Don’s ward Janis are feeling the call of the blood - or to keep the thirties censor happy, mutual half blood. As Don is raising her to be all white, Ramon has to become all white too, borrowing money to stock his store and dressing up in a linen suit. Local Sadie Thompson type Renée Adorée (definitely a Woody Van Dyke character) tells him he looks like a Kansas City Street Sweeper but she helps out in the store, which he has no idea how to run. 

Pagan - Adorée & Novarro

He keeps on looking out the window for the yacht to come back with Janis. When it does, Don has bought up all his debts and owns the place and, what is more, to protect ward Janis from the corrupting Island influences (“When you looked at him, I saw an unholy light in you eyes”), he is prepared to marry the girl himself. This is where you hiss him. Ramon snatches Janis from the church but Don’s crew take her back and row her out to the yacht so our hero swims through shark infested waters and faces the dastard - man to man. 

This is a simple-minded version of the kind of popular exotic-erotic adventure that then ranged from Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham to pulpy John Colton, The Single Standard, White Cargo, John Hall & Maria Montez. Van Dyke and the writers understood it well. The most familiar name there is Hollywood Ten member John Howard Lawson, who does an impeccable job on the intertitles. The technical work is expert and the piece moves along nicely in an assured staging of the movie tropics. This was Novarro’s last silent and a peak in his career. He and Van Dyke would try again with the similarly themed 1934 sound film Laughing Boy but by then the magic had faded. It’s unjust that Novarro is now only remembered as the twenties Ben Hur.

The Pagan remained part of studio culture and Metro built an agreeable 1950 Esther Williams vehicle called Pagan Love Song around the Arthur Freed - Nacio Herb Brown theme. 

 

To make the point that the arrival of sound destroyed the assurance that the early years of filmmaking had built up, look at  Atlantic,  from the same year as The Pagan. Watching the poor quality current copies tends to endorse that view. Another candidate for first British sound film, along with Blackmail and Flying Scotsman (begun as silents) and Journey’s End (shot using a U.S. studio), this one is not one film but five - simultaneous 1929 English and German versions, reworked as a now-lost French film, a silent edition and a recent 4K colourised restoration, which is probably the most presentable surviving copy.

Atlantic is the first sound entry in the sinking of “The Titanic” movie cycle. The incident was still vivid in living memory and, possibly for legal reasons or, it has been suggested, to spare the feelings of survivors and relatives, the story has been mixed with an earlier naval disaster, the 1873 loss of White Star's S.S. “Atlantis” shown in August Blom’s then admired 1918 Atlantis where, to complicate matters further, the ship was called The Roland. There’s no unsinkable Molly Brown or John Jacob Astor IV here, though a rich man does spray bank notes among the doomed passengers playing poker as the water rises. Heroic second officer Lightoller, a regular feature of these productions, appears in the British version as  John Longden (Lanchester) and, less prominently, as Georg August Koch (Lersner) in the German.

British International, the producing company here, had a history of ambitious silent productions directed by German Ewald André Dupont (Moulin Rouge with Olga Tschekova and Piccadilly with Anna Mae Wong, their most expensive silent effort). Dupont was considered a world-class talent after his imposing Emil Jannings drama Vaudeville/Variety, the success of which he would never repeat. Atlantic would represent the start of his decline through early sound French-English-German films and a shift to Hollywood, where routine assignments came to a halt - an incident in which he was reported to have punched out one of the Dead End Kids for ridiculing his accent. After a ten-year break in administration, he returned as director on inferior independent b movies. Facing a new language and anti-German feeling destroyed what began as one of the great international director careers.

Atlantic - Stuart & Caroll  

Unlike, say, the later multiple version Anna Christie or F.P.1 Does Not Answer, the editions are substantially different. The ballroom scene comes at another point in the opening but its music still plays distant under the first-class smoking lounge material. In the English version, more trouble has been taken with the soundtrack, presumably by editor Emile de Ruen, as where a still-brunette Madeleine Carroll and John Stuart enter and the music cuts into the background track to end abruptly when they again close the door.  Music and effects do play with dialogue in tracks that have been mixed rather than just cut together, as in some early sound films. As the crisis deepens, the sound of the deck orchestra playing jaunty “Pack Up Your Troubles” and “Charley Is My Darling” behind the grim dialogue is striking. Legend demands the ship’s band’s rendition of “Nearer My God to Thee” accompanies the sinking.

Atlantik - Kortner, Heinrich Schroth, Elfriede Borodin, Thea Serda.

Like other simultaneous “Home” editions, the British copy has material not included in the “Foreign” version - the track along the deck, which half reveals philandering husband D.A. Clarke-Smith, the model shot exterior of the iceberg striking the hull and the scene of shooting the black(face) sailor trying to force his way onto the panic filled life boats. The German however allows Willi Forst a song at the lounge piano, which Monte Banks, as his opposite number, is denied.

The scripts are derived we are told from "The Berg", a play by Ernest Raymond, author of “Tell England” and “For Those Who Tresspass”.  They still show evidence of the stage origin, with the bulk of the action taking place in the below decks First Class Smoking Room where a notorious author (“They would’t let us read your books at school. You make fun of everything that people take seriously”) reduced to a wheel chair, his wife, the family of the cheating husband, a play boy and a minister receive information on the damaged ship relayed from the Captain’s wheel house by the second officer.  A freshly married young couple join them. Franklin Dyall reassures fellow passengers “This ship is no more likely to sink than St. Paul’s Cathedral”, lacking the Teutonic irony of Fritz Kortner’s parallel “This ship is as solidly built as the Leaning Tower of Pisa”.

This comparative serenity is disrupted by footage of real ship- board activity, the grand stairway, the stoke hold and pumping pistons, panic on deck and lowering life boats. These have a totally different texture to the dialogue material and were filmed at a slightly slower speed. As there appears to be no earlier production that they could have been lifted from, this suggests filming by a unit preparing a silent version. Spot  Carrol and Stuart. This shooting is genuinely impressive and seems more in character with the work of Dupont and credited celebrity English-Hollywood cameraman Charles Rosher(Sunrise and the 1952 Scaramouche).

The problems are obvious. Raymond was concerned with the ruling class, providing the stiff upper lip dialogue ridiculed in the later British Naval adventures, lines like “May I shake hands, sir” or “I haven’t had the luck to be ordered to a lifeboat.” Unlike other Titanic films, there is virtually no depiction of the steerage passengers. Bit-playing Dany Green (in The Lady Killers twenty years later) does get one quite effective speech in the British version. (“Who’s for a hand of poker?”)  Compare Roy Ward Baker's nineteen fifties Morning Departure, when calamity also means that the lower classes are permitted to invade a space previously reserved for the privileged, there a sunken submarine’s Ward Room.

The inference is that Dupont lacked familiarity with spoken English. Several of his British cast appear in Hitchcock films of this period, where they are more at ease - as well as Longden, we get manservant Donald Calthrop, the blackmailer from Blackmail. Top-billed Dyall was known for his theatre work, productions of Edgar Wallace. His major claim to our attention now is as radio actor Valentine Dyall’s father.

On the other hand, the Germans are in their element, communicating with Dupont without the stress of an unfamiliar language.  Kortner was a major star of their theatre and film. Viennese Willy Forst was already a leading man and would become the most accomplished German speaker director of the thirties. A couple of the support are familiar from the work of Fritz Lang -  George John in the Calthrop role and Theodore Loos as the preacher, both wasted, and the young couple become Francis Lederer, scenery chewing alongside  Lucie Mannheim, here still the glamorous leading candidate for the part of Blue Angel's Lola Lola. The casting suggests that the producers had no idea of the players’ status on their home ground.  Some of the cast do odd lines in English, either as an oversight or because it was not considered that German was necessary. The only performer credited in both versions is English comic Syd Crossley, as the radio operator who has no dialogue - writing messages on Marconigram stationary.

Atlantik - John & Loos at right

So what we have here is a project of failed ambition. There are effective moments but mainly we have stilted dialogue, theatrical characters and a lack of imposing effects work. There is no boats in the water footage. At a later stage, a model shot of the liner being engulfed by the waves was added. Still, the fade-in on the clear skies of the following morning, coming after the grim scene of the (off-screen) sinking remains effective.  

The Herbert Selpin - Werner Kinger Nazi era Titanic or Roy Baker’s British A Night To Remember are superior and James Cameron’s blockbuster makes this film’s lost opportunities embarrassingly obvious. Even uninspired items like Frank Borzage’s 1937 History Is Made at Night, Jean Negulesco’s 1953 Fox Titanic or the TV mini-series are a better evening’s entertainment. However, Atlantic has a quality these all lack. It is a fascinating chance to watch the cinema embrace its future, stumble through a new challenge and test limits. There are people of proven talent here. They deploy extensive means and their daring is to be admired - especially on the odd occasions where they succeed. For anyone with a serious interest in film history this is viewing not to be missed.

The Pagan  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW8EwURmfuY

Atlantik https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019657/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_10_tt_7_nm_1_in_0_q_Atlantic

Atlantic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCqhf-KEH8Q

Barrie Pattison 2026

Atlantik - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62rAHqV2Whg&t=503s - 

Barrie Pattison 2026