A New Romance of Celluloid: The Miracle of Sound (1940)

So much average

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Miracle of Sound, The (1940) *** (out of 4)It's funny to think that so many people go to the movies or watch them on television each week yet I'd be willing to bet that the majority of them doesn't know how sound actually gets on the movies and I'm sure many didn't know this back in 1940, a brief decade after sound became the popular (and only) thing. This documentary runs just under 10-minutes but it has MGM sound engineer Douglas Shearer telling us exactly how our favorite movies can speak. This "New Romance of Celluloid" episode is a pretty good one as we get a brief bit of information in a film that is clearly meant to be promotion for future films by the studio. We do get some behind the scenes footage from BITTER SWEET, which was a Technicolor production but we get to see some of the footage in B&W since this was how the documentary was shot. We also get to see Clark Gable's voice from COMRADE X. The rest of the film pretty much spotlights upcoming movies like A WOMAN'S FACE, BLOSSOMS IN THE DUST and THE GREAT ZIEGFELD. In the end, even the promo stuff isn't too bad as we get some nice information that I'm sure many people aren't aware of. Showing this in a theater today would certainly be a lot more entertaining than those silly trivia questions.

This short film purports to be about the intricacies of sound technology, but it's really more of an excuse to showcase a batch of big-name MGM stars and some coming attractions. But either way it's fascinating. We go behind the scenes for the filming of a scene featuring Jeannette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, and get a glimpse of the massive technicolor camera being used. There is also a scene featuring Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr, in which we see their voices represented as sound waves. But this is all surface-level stuff and a prelude to an extended preview of coming attractions. And what a preview it is! Clark Gable, Greer Garson, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, one right after the next. There's a nostalgic thrill in seeing a preview for "The Philadelphia Story" before anyone knew that that movie would become one of the most beloved of all time. Fun stuff.