The end of an era: Hollywood’s final silent movie
Cinema has always embraced and adopted the newest technologies, so it was only a matter of time before the silent film was rendered irrelevant and obsolete when the era of the talkies began.
The Jazz Singer marked a pivotal moment in the art form’s evolution. It was the first feature to utilise synchronised sound, ushering in a revolution that rendered the silent age a thing of the past. It was a brave new dawn for celluloid, but Hollywood didn’t immediately abandon its quieter beginnings.
It was an uphill battle that was never going to be won, though, even if there were a few holdouts who continued indulging in the silent side of cinema until the early 1930s. There was no turning back, but there were still filmmakers and actors who tried their hardest to resist the oncoming tides of change.
That being said, it was hardly ideal for the last motion picture without a soundtrack to receive a theatrical release taking a drubbing from critics, but that was the fate that befell George Melford’s The Poor Millionaire. Ironically, Richard Talmadge played the lead role as identical twins Sidney Thomas and Putt Magee, with the talkies diminishing his star power significantly on account of his pronounced German accent.
The 54-minute film tracks the siblings as they embark on a collision course, with one of them an escaped convict and the other a millionaire. The one freshly liberated from a stint behind bars begins impersonating his well-to-do brother and does severe damage to his personal life and societal standing before they finally come face-to-face.
At the time, The Film Daily wasn’t impressed by The Poor Millionaire, remarking that it carried “crude production rates among the lowest seen this season,” replete with “amateurish directing and writing” in a comic caper that “looks as if it had been made over the weekend” and was “pretty terrible any way you figure it”.
Of course, little did anybody know that, at the time, they were watching the last wholly silent flick produced without a soundtrack made for widespread distribution, which extended to director Melford himself. The Poor Millionaire was initially filmed in 1927 with Universal as its backer, only to arrive in April of 1930 and distributed by the decidedly lesser-known Biltmore Pictures.
It was even released internationally with an accompanying soundtrack in certain markets, with Australian playbills not advertising it as a silent movie. Perhaps that was a decision made to try and avoid apathy on the part of an audience quickly won over by the explosion of the talkie, and in another hammer blow, The Poor Millionaire is widely considered a lost film.
Only a single still image survives to this day, and as of yet, no footage has publicly surfaced, never mind a complete copy, a sad footnote for a project that ended up securing a spot in history.
