THE YOUNGER GENERATION (1929)

Bastard offspring of the transition period from Silents to Talkies (1928 - 1929*), ‘Partial Talkies’ were mostly accidents of timing.  Completed silent films sent back into production to add a few speaking sequences for advertising (HEAR Them Speak!!) and to look up-to-date.  This early Frank Capra film being a prime example.  From a Fannie Hurst B’way play of the previous year (IT IS TO LAUGH), it's one of the few that actually improve the pic.  It feels designed that way right from the start.  (It wasn’t, the Talkie segments filmed a month after the rest of the film.)  Classic Hurst, an assimilation tragedy where the successful son of Lower East Side Jews takes his family up with him to a Fifth Avenue mansion where they’ll never fit in.  Mama tries, but wouldn’t fool a soul; Papa grows depressed & isolated without his schmoozing & card games; little sis runs away to marry the boy who once lived across the air shaft.  (A Tin Pan Alley song plugger, he’s caught up with the Jewish mob.)  Opening with a superb ethnically rich/rudely comic Delancey Street prologue from twenty years back not in the play, Capra keeps the knockabout comedy & sentimental melodrama as a silent film where it plays naturally, and uses the Talkie segments to emphasize character & social differences thru speech.  Younger & Older Generations might be speaking different from languages, and not just different accents.  A brilliant use of technical limitations to highlight the social embarrassment that turns to heartbreak as Papa’s isolation destroys his health;  sis loses contact with family; and business success tethered to the coldest of hearts.  Capra may have been Sicilian, but undoubtedly saw some of himself (and his family) in here.*  So too leading man Ricardo Cortez (né Jacob Krantz) who plays the social-climbing scion.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  While film histories still push the idea that synch-sound showed up overnight with THE JAZZ SINGER in 1927, it’s really a bit more complicated than that.  Still , the story of the Hollywood Talkie takeover can be summarized thusly: 1927: Just THE JAZZ SINGER.  1928: Silent to Talkie releases split 80% to 20%.  1929: Silent to Talkie releases reverse!  20% to 80%.  1930; it's all over.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Capra has little to say about this important film in his deeply flawed, but fascinating autobio THE NAME ABOVE THE TITLE.  Mostly about early sound filming conditions and how obese lenser Ben Reynolds suffered in a soundproof box he barely fit into.  Only problem, Reynolds didn’t shoot the film.  It was Ted Tetzlaff.

DOUBLE-BILL:  With Irene Dunne as co-star, Cortez returned to Fannie Hurst’s Jewish tenement milieu for SYMPHONY OF SIX MILLION/’32.  Seen here many moon ago!  Will revisit & write up.