by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on TCM last night and Charles and I watched their “Silent Sunday
Showcase” presentation of a film that technically wasn’t a silent: The First
Auto, made by Warner Brothers (back when
they were still spelling out “Brothers” instead of abbreviating it “Bros.” —
take that, Clive Hirschhorn!) in
1927 and outfitted with a Vitaphone soundtrack conducted by Herman Heller (he
gets a credit) that included not only a typical silent-film accompaniment
(complete with easily recognizable, at least to 1927 audiences, songs about
early motoring, like “In My Merry Oldsmobile” and “Get Out and Get Under,” as
well as other tunes familiar to moviegoers of the period, including “For He’s a
Jolly Good Fellow,” “In the Good Old Summertime,” the “Skaters’ Waltz” — one of
those melodies you’re likely to recognize even if you have no idea what it’s
called — and “How Dry I Am”) but also some sound effects and even bits of human
voices. The voices were almost all “wild,” recorded separately from the picture
and dubbed in more or less where they belonged, but there wasn’t an attempt
this early actually to have people talking to each other on screen (that would
happen later in 1927, with The Jazz Singer). The First Auto was the
headline attraction on the sixth Vitaphone bill, which played in a handful of
theatres in the big cities — including the Colony Theatre in New York, where
Vitaphone had premiered in 1926 with the John Barrymore Don Juan and a program of musical shorts that all used sound
more creatively than these features did — indeed, as Alexander Walker noted in
his book The Shattered Silents,
many big-city audiences regarded these “canned” musical scores as a decided
comedown from the live orchestral
accompaniments they were used to when a major film was shown in a first-run
house. (Allan Dwan, who directed the 1922 Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., recalled going from
city to city and rehearsing the orchestra the day before the film opened to
make sure they played the specially composed music in synch with the film and
supplied all the required sound effects on cue.)
The First Auto is an odd little movie whose poignant depiction of
technological change rings true today — adding to the irony that a film about the traumas people go through
adjusting to a new technology was itself released in a process that was going
to put a lot of people in the movie business (and in the movie audience as
well) through a similar set of traumas as they adjusted to the technological
change. It’s a film that remains moving even as the sheer rate of technological
changes to which people have to adjust has sped up frantically — when Steve Jobs
of Apple died one commentator noted that innovations in the computer products
business happen so rapidly that within two years of Jobs’ death there would no
longer be a market for any
product with which he had been personally involved — whereas The
First Auto takes place over a period of
about a decade, opening in 1895 (we get the cue from an opening title that says
the film is set “before anybody heard of Bryan”) in Maple City, Indiana. Unlike
most movies of the classic era, especially ones set in small towns, the script
for The First Auto (story by
Darryl Francis Zanuck — a credit which startled Charles, who hadn’t realized
what the “F.” stood for before — and script by Zanuck’s frequent collaborator
in the early days, Anthony Coldewey) is quite specific in its geography. The
principal character is Hank Armstrong (Russell Simpson), who owns the biggest
and most prestigious livery stable in Maple City in 1895 and is also its
leading breeder of thoroughbreds; his current star horse, “Sloe Eyes,” wins
every race it enters (and is the fourth generation of her family Hank has
owned). The races are trotting races, in which the jockeys ride sulkies
(essentially miniature crosses between carriages and chariots, made to be as
light as possible and made of metal frames to which two wheels and a seat are
attached) and the horses are forbidden to gallop (if the horse breaks out of a
fast trot it and its rider are disqualified) — one remembers Meredith Willson’s
The Music Man, in which as part
of his indictment of modern decadence in the song “Ya Got Trouble” con man
Prof. Howard Hill says that current horse racing is “not a wholesome trotting
race, no, but a race where they set down right on the horse!” Worse changes are in store for Hank Armstrong when
inventor Elmer Hays (E. H. Calvert) comes to Maple City and, at a dinner
presented by the town’s mayor, he gives a speech about the upcoming new
invention, the automobile, which his factory is manufacturing at the rate of
three autos a day. (As part of his presentation he shows some magic-lantern
slides — the 1895 equivalent of a PowerPoint — and the last one, showing the
front of his factory with his workers and their products, is shown upside down
and encounters some unwelcome diversion when a cat walks across the screen.)
Squire Stebbins (Douglas Gerrard), the richest man in Maple City, buys its
first auto, and there’s a marvelous scene which reveals that both Zanuck and
director Roy Del Ruth started out doing gags for Mack Sennett; Stebbins finally gets his car started, only it periodically emits
explosions and even when it’s working right Stebbins is unable to control it
and ultimately drives it off a cliff into a convenient lake — no one is hurt
but the car is, as we’d say today, “totaled.” Nonetheless, progress takes its
toll on Maple City in general and Armstrong’s livery business in particular —
Armstrong takes it as a personal insult when a long-time customer and friend
decides against buying a new horse and, at the urging of his family, decides to
do something “modern” and purchase an auto instead. It gets even worse for
Armstrong when his son Bob (Charles Emmett Mack) goes over to the other side;
he moves to the nearby city of Detroit and takes a job with Henry Ford, helping
to develop the famous 1903 racing car which, driven by Barney Oldfield
(America’s first star racing driver, who was hired as a technical advisor for
the film and ended up playing himself in it — and the car we see is an exact
replica of the original), promoted cars in general and Ford’s products in
particular nationwide. Meanwhile, Armstrong’s streak of horse-racing wins has
come to an abrupt end when “Sloe Eyes” dies in childbirth (which is our one
clue that she’s a she) giving birth to another mare, “Bright Eyes,” but since horse
racing is fading in popularity and the racetrack in Maple City is now hosting,
you guessed it, auto races, there’s little or nothing Armstrong can do with
Bright Eyes (aside from waiting three decades for Shirley Temple’s producers to
appropriate her name — joke). The First Auto is listed on imdb.com as a “comedy,” but it’s as
much a drama as a comedy and it gets considerably darker and more serious as it
progresses and Hank Armstrong loses his business, has the ignominy of having
all his possessions (including Bright Eyes) sold at auction (and just to twist
the knife in, the buyer of Bright Eyes turns her into a beast of burden and
beats her unmercifully, leading Armstrong to attack him and the horse to escape
and flee back to what’s left of Armstrong’s stable), and ultimately sets his
own livery stable and barn on fire.
Then one of his few remaining friends in
town tells him of an exhibition auto race scheduled for Maple City, and the two
of them decide that if they sabotage one of the cars by pouring sulfur in its
gas tank (incidentally in 1895 the cars were depicted as running on kerosene
but by the 1904 scenes the fuel is being referred to as “gas,” meaning the
gasoline almost all cars have run on ever since), it will explode in the middle
of the race and no one in Maple City will ever want to buy an auto again. Only
— wouldn’t ya know it? — the car he sabotages is the one his own son was
planning to drive in the race, having come down from Detroit to Maple City to
race, pick up where he left off with his girlfriend Rose Robbins (the mayor’s
daughter, who while Bob was out of town went on a date with another guy but
then walked out on him when he put the moves on her, and an ironic title says
that she was the first girl to walk home from a car ride when the man driving
her got “fresh”) and see if he can reconcile with his dad. Realizing that he’s
sabotaged his son’s car, Hank races to the track in a carriage drawn by Bright
Eyes but doesn’t get there in time to keep Bob’s engine from catching fire (Hank
sadly tells Bright Eyes, “Even you
let me down!”), though Bob is able to get out of the car before it blows up and
there’s a final scene that establishes he’ll recover, he and Rose will pair
off, and the film ends with a montage depicting the changing car models from
1904 to 1927 followed by a title, “End of the Trail … ,” and a horse
silhouetted against the sunset. The First Auto is a fascinating movie, managing to balance its
comic and dramatic aspects better than a lot of far more prestigious productions
that have tried the same mix, and certainly its theme of the emotional impact
of technological change on the people who have to live it is as current as the
latest announcement from Silicon Valley. There’s also a macabre irony in that
Charles Emmett Mack was killed in, you guessed it, a car accident just as he
was heading for the location where the big race was to be filmed (though
imdb.com doesn’t specify how Warner Brothers handled the death of a leading
actor and what scenes had to be doubled or faked to complete the film),
essentially making him the Paul Walker of the 1920’s.
