Have you seen Victor and Edward Halperin's White Zombie (1932)?
I have, yes, thanks to your rec. It's fascinating.
it's not ham acting, it's a different mode of acting entirely.
I actually wasn't thinking about acting (which is an aspect of it I should consider), and more about the kind of scenes and what level of compression/exaggeration of action one's willing to accept.
Which odd half-talkie were you watching?
Weary River. Which I think isn't a good film for a number of reasons (though there's interesting stuff in it -- and, acting-wise, Barthelmess shifts seamlessly between sound and silent sections). But I suspect that one of the reasons is that there's a kind of whiplash you get between the silent and talkie sections, that the melodramatic mode of storytelling that works fine in the silent sections immediately seems silly as soon as people start talking. Or that there are talkie bits which are deeply unconvincing (the kindly prison warden almost immediately converts the hardened gangster to the path of reform by lecturing him briefly) -- but which, I suspect, would probably be much more believable as silent scenes, where (for example) we'd accept that there was a kind of compression going on.
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I have, yes, thanks to your rec. It's fascinating.
it's not ham acting, it's a different mode of acting entirely.
I actually wasn't thinking about acting (which is an aspect of it I should consider), and more about the kind of scenes and what level of compression/exaggeration of action one's willing to accept.
Which odd half-talkie were you watching?
Weary River. Which I think isn't a good film for a number of reasons (though there's interesting stuff in it -- and, acting-wise, Barthelmess shifts seamlessly between sound and silent sections). But I suspect that one of the reasons is that there's a kind of whiplash you get between the silent and talkie sections, that the melodramatic mode of storytelling that works fine in the silent sections immediately seems silly as soon as people start talking. Or that there are talkie bits which are deeply unconvincing (the kindly prison warden almost immediately converts the hardened gangster to the path of reform by lecturing him briefly) -- but which, I suspect, would probably be much more believable as silent scenes, where (for example) we'd accept that there was a kind of compression going on.