A Year: Day to Day Men: 28th of May
A Small White Space
The musical film “On with the Show!” by Warner Brothers Studio was released on May 28, 1929.
Filmed in Two-strip Technicolor, “On with the Show!” is noted as the first all-talking, all-color feature length movie. Warner Brothers promoted the film as being in “natural color”. This would be the first of a series of contracted films by Warner Brothers to be made in the Technicolor process. The film generated much interest in Hollywood; and other studios began shooting films in the process. The film, though a success, was eclipsed by the success of their next color film “Gold Diggers of Broadway”.
“On with the Show!” was a combination of a backstage musical using the ‘show within a show” format, a comedy and a mystery. The story and dialogue were written by Robert Lord with the music and lyrics by Harry Akst. William Bakewell was in the role of the head usher eager to get his sweetheart played by Sally O’Neil. Betty Compson played the temperamental star and the whiny young male star of the show was Arthur Lake. The vaudeville actor Joe E. Brown had a role as a comedian in the show; through this role his career shot to stardom status.
The film was a box office hit, with a worldwide gross of over two million dollars. Reviews from critics were mixed. Many thought the length was too long and the story was bad; however, most were impressed with the color process. Josh Mosher, the first regularly assigned film critic of the New Yorker magazine, wrote that the film was “completely undistinguished for wit, charm, or novelty, except that it is done in color. Possibly in the millennium all movies will be colored. In these early days of the art, however, not much can be said for it, except that it is not really distressing.”
The original color print of “On with the Show!” is lost, a fate of many of the early films printed on a nitrate film base. Only black and white prints of the film have survived. A 20 second fragment of an original color print surfaced in 2005; it was found in a toy projector. Other original color fragments have been discovered in 2014. The Library of Congress has long held a copy of the black and white version in its collection.