Vitaphone Varieties is the generic title for an excellent four-disc DVD set issued by the Warner Archive that features no less than sixty theatrical shorts, originally released from 1926 through 1930. Many of them feature vaudeville headliners going through their paces as if they were playing to a live audience at the Palace rather than to a movie camera. Most of these stars – big names in their day on the vaudeville circuit – made no other movie appearances at all.
Other shorts in this collection are not filmed records of vaudeville sketches, but actually miniature movies starring people we recognize such as Hobart Cavanaugh, Franklin Pangborn, Henry B. Walthall, Tom Dugan, Jay C. Flippen and Robert Emmett Keane.
The total running time is 547 minutes, so obviously it's not possible to review every item on all four discs in detail, but I'm making a start here with "These Dry Days", starring Fred Ardath (the drunk), Klar Magnus (the woman), Harry Brooks (the man friend), Claude Allen (the cop).
SYNOPSIS: An inebriate accosts a woman on the sidewalk (or it could be the other way around). The woman's friend arrives in the middle of their argument and throws in his two cents' worth. Finally, the couple leave the drunk flat. But all is not lost as the drunk (a rotund little guy of no mean weight) is literally picked up by a burly cop who takes him home.
COMMENT: This filmed record of a famous vaudeville sketch is most unusual, as it is the only such straight-off-the-stage sketch in the Vitaphone Varieties set that is actually played as a movie. All the other sketches are played as if the participants were still standing on a stage and they were facing, acting and reacting to a real theater audience. Most of these vaudeville artists look straight ahead into the camera and not only deliver their patter loud and clear, but throw in cues to which they expect the camera to respond and answer them back. In other words, they make no attempt whatever to adjust either their script or the way they deliver their patter. Their music hall routines are presented intact in every detail. As a result they all – with this one exception – fall flat. Because this sketch is played in a filmic rather than a theatrical manner, the familiar story works quite well. Ardath manages the drunk perfectly. We love his badgering tone and the way he gets a hiccup into his voice. The woman and her boyfriend are played with just the right amount of aggression by Klar Magnus and Harry Brooks.
Judging by the size of the type in which he is credited, Ardath was obviously a super-popular headliner in his day – which doesn't surprise us. His delivery and his mannerisms are amusing and the script provides him with some delicious comebacks. "These Dry Days" was his only movie, although he did make a TV appearance as a doctor in a single episode of some 1951 series. Magnus and Allen also made no other films at all. Brooks, on the other hand, had two small movie roles ahead. IMDb tells us that Murray Roth directed this one and that it was released on August 20, 1929.
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