(HIS LADY, Alan Crosland, US 1927, 111 min.)
John Barrymore and Dolores Costello star in the best version of Abbé Prévost’s oft-filmed Manon Lescaut, the love story of a divinity student (Barrymore) and a beautiful girl (Costello) whose brother (Warner Oland) has sold her to a lecherous aristocrat. One of the earliest sound films (released before The Jazz Singer, also directed by Crosland), When a Man Loves’ original Vitaphone soundtrack has been restored in a joint project by George Eastman House, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Warner Bros. Members admitted free.
Program Notes
To contemporary audiences, watching Warner Brothers’ 1927 production of When a Man Loves, may actually bring about some sense of déjà vu. Though it has been seldom-screened in the eighty plus years since its debut, it does seem to have sparked at least some inspiration for sequences in a much-better remembered film from 1952: Singin’ in the Rain. In the latter film’s story about the early days of synchronized-sound cinema, the film pokes fun at the trials and errors encountered at the dawn of sound in motion pictures, and uses a Louis XV-style romantic drama as the early experiment in sound film. Comedy ensues when the projected film is screened for a test audience and loses synchronization midway…causing the actors and actresses to seemingly swap lines. Fortunately for our motion picture history, the real story of When A Man Loves, as one of the first synchronized sound films, has a much more successful outcome.
Based on the 1731 novel, The Story of Chevalier des Greiux and Manon Lescaut by the author Abbé Antoine Francois Prévost, the story of Manon Lescault has been filmed many times throughout the course of film history, and at least six times during the silent film era, before Warner Brothers decided to select it as a vehicle for John Barrymore. Barrymore, at the time one of the top Hollywood leading men, was under contract to Warner Brothers for a three-picture deal. When a Man Loves was the third and final film in this contract, and for it, the casting of the leading lady went to Barrymore’s personal choice, Dolores Costello.
Costello had met Barrymore during production of the first film for his Warner’s contract, The Sea Beast. So enamored was Barrymore by her, that he immediately requested she play opposite him in the film, raising her from bit-part status to leading-lady (much to the chagrin of already-cast leading actress Priscilla Bonner, who would sue the studio for breach of contract). For his next film, Don Juan, Barrymore had again wanted Costello to play opposite him, but the studio declined (not wanting another lawsuit). Barrymore willfully downplayed his own acting in the film, in an effort for Costello’s to shine. Following his divorce with his then-wife, Barrymore married Costello the year after the film’s release.
Barrymore’s Don Juan, released in 1926, was an important film for Warner Brothers, in that it was the first film the studio released utilizing their Vitaphone process. Though not the first attempt to create sound for film, Vitaphone was the first successful synchronized sound-for-film format. Vitaphone was a synchronized sound-on-disc system, developed from a recording system by Western Electric, which used a 16 inch record of the soundtrack that was played from the inner groove out (unlike conventional phonograph records). The record had an arrow designating where to place the needle to start it. Because both the phonograph and film projector used the same motor, the picture and disc were able to maintain proper synchronization. Warner’s tested the process on dozens of short subjects in a Brooklyn, New York warehouse (formerly the Vitagraph studio), determining that the format would only be viable to a mass audience if they could market it with a grade-A feature production. When they finally worked out the quirks of the system, they showcased the new technology in Don Juan, featuring an orchestral music score. The movie (and the process) was an instant hit, paving a new direction for motion pictures.
Warner’s then used the successful teaming of lead actor, John Barrymore, director Alan Crosland, screenwriter Bess Meredyth, and the Vitaphone, to bring another 18th Century romantic melodrama to the screen, this time in When a Man Loves. Though no dialogue in the film is heard, the film introduces with its music score, select sound effects – door knocks, swords clashing, bell chimes, and properly timed cymbal crashes – to demonstrate the skill of the Vitaphone process. A technical improvement over its predecessor, Variety said of the film in its review, “the synchronization was in all cases a triumph for the producers”. The New York Times reviewer even noted that the audience was “moved to applause” at the appearance of the music score’s conductor Herman Heller and his orchestra, following the end credits. The film’s success would be trumped only later that same year, by another Warner’s film which introduced spoken dialogue to the mix of ‘effects’ capable with the Vitaphone process; The Jazz Singer, firmly establishing “talking pictures” as the new frontier in cinema.
The print which you are seeing tonight of When a Man Loves, is a collaborative restoration done by the George Eastman House and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, using original picture elements and the original Vitaphone discs.
~Stefano Boni, Student, The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
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