Showgirl's Luck (1931) - full, Australia's first (out of synch) talkie? A Norman Dawn Festival ...

Описание: This site has previously provided the film in gobbets ...

For example, the opening number is here:

   • Showgirl's Luck (1931) (1) - terrible film...  

Because of interest in seeing early Oz silent and talkie films in full, here it is, though not much could be done to fix some of the obvious technical problems, both sound and image..

The film also makes a handy companion to director Norman Dawn's previous, unwieldy epic silent feature For the Term of His Natural Life, with Showgirl's Luck his second attempt to try his luck down under.

Some will find this outing more amiable, with an amusing opening song and dance number making iconic use of kangaroos. The film veers wildly out of synch towards the end because of the inept technology originally used to attempt the synching of sound and image.

The producers claimed the film was Australia's first talkie, but there were a number of contenders for that honour, some now lost.

This is how Pike and Cooper's Oxford History of Australian Film 1900-1977 (rev1998) described the result:

The director, Norman Dawn, wrote that Showgirl's Luck' followed the accepted formula of the typical American musical of the period ... "It had the usual simple straight line plot upon which was hung as many musical numbers as could be worked in"'(N. Dawn notebook, NFSA)...

Norman Dawn, the American director for For the Term of his Natural Life (1927) and The Adorable Outcast (1928) returned to Australia in October 1929 with plans for an Australian talkie using a sound-on-disc system of recording. His recording was first installed at the Lapstone Hill Hotel in the Blue Mountains, and later at the Sydney Showground.

With a working title of Talkie Mad, shooting began in May 1930, and the film was ready for trade screening in January 1931. By this time, developments in sound had outmoded the disc system, and Dawn attempted to transfer the sound to an optical track.

Beyond experimenting with sound, the film also made use of sophisticated optical effects, in which Dawn had long specialized. For example, the opening shot of the burlesque tent show in the bush involved to exposures, the first of a tent show in Balmain, Sydney, with the wires and chimneys matted out of the scene, and the second of mountains and tree in the Blue Mountains as a background. In another scene Dawn used a similar technique to suggest the heroine's queasiness after smoking a cigar: her eyes were made to 'pop out and come forward till they wander all over the screen'.

Early in December the trade press reported the premiére of the film at the Lawson Theatre in Redfern, Sydney, followed by a week-long season at the Arcadia Theatre, Sydney, the home of Dawn's company, Australian Talkies.
Trade comments were poor both at home and in England, where it was released in mid-1933 by Universal. Its commercial failure and the scarcity of capital in the Depression forced Dawn to abandon hopes of further production in Australia.

Late in 1931, after travelling extensively in the inland, he returned to Hollywood and directed several more features, including Tundra (1936), Orphans of the North (194) and Two Lost Worlds (1950). He died in Los Angeles in 1975 at the age of 88.

Susan Dennis, who played the leading role of Peggy Morton, was Dawn's wife.

Also see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Showgirl%27s_Luck

The wiki contained this note:

One of the film's investors was radio announcer "Uncle George" Saunders.
"Uncle George" Saunders later declared bankruptcy and complained about Dawn:

The directors [of Australian Talkies] borrowed £1,400. Norman Dawn and his wife were brought from the United States to produce a picture, and then Dawn disappeared. They learnt he had gone back to America. He had trouble with his wife and left us high and dry with the picture. The person who lent us the money took possession. The directors lost everything.

Another American in Oz triumph for Oz films.

See also

https://web.archive.org/web/
20140419115406/
http://www.ozmovies.com.au/
movie/showgirls-luck