MUSICAL FILMS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20976, 12 September 1931, Page 11 (Supplement)

MUSICAL FILMS.

PHOENIX-LIKE RETURN. SUCCESS OF NEW STYLE. The musical picture lias corao back, not with the blare of trumpet and saxophone, to an accompaniment of a thinly clad chorus, but, with a subtle glide on the violin, or an impudent toot on the cornet, against a background of fine melody. Two new films are excellent examples of the new type of " musical." Tho first is " The Smiling Lieutenant " and the second "The Road to Paradise" ("Lo Chemin du Paradis "), a French film, which is hardly likely to be seeu in New Zealand. The one represents Ernst Lubitseh and Maurice Chevalier at their combined best in a clever comedy with music by Oscar Strauss. Tho other is the French version of the great German success " Three Men at tho Petrol Station," a brilliant extravaganza with tuneful music.

Both these films, together with " Le Million," Bene Clair's delightful comedy, which has just completed a successful London season, are " musicals " which set the fashion for future films of this type. The day of massed choruses, bands and blues singers presented in the old stagey manner of the " screen revues " of a year or more ago is definitely passed.

The arrival of the. new musical pictures is not a thing which has happened in a flash of time. Lubitsch and Clair have been pioneers for a long while. The former, with his great success " The Love Parade," showed that ho knew how to blend music with action on the screen. His " Monte Carlo " carried his experiments in this direction a little farther; and now comes " The Smiling Lieutenant," with many delightful passages of subtle musical allusion and a consistently vital and entrancing accompaniment. Clair has been to the Continent what Lubitsch has been to Hollywood. In " Sous Les Toils de Paris " he had clever passages which 'combined continual movement on the screen with vocal melody; and '' Le Million " had in its magnificent burlesque opera sccno one of the finest examples of the apt uso of music yet seen on the screen. "Musicals" are definitely back again; but they have been brought back by really fine pioneers like " The Smiling Lieutenant." Filmgoers will expect the coming pictures to conform to the standard set by those films.