A SONG IN THE DARK – The Birth of the Musical
                  Film.  Hosted by Richard Barrios
As Cinefest audiences are very aware, the earliest musical films run the full artistic gamut, ranging from the glories of Ernst Lubitsch’s operettas all the way down to, well, Golden Dawn.  In celebration of the publication of a second, extensively revised, edition of my book A Song In The Dark, I submit for your delectation a salute to that wild and wonderful anything-goes time when the movie musical began to find its voice.  Rare and unforgettable, splendid and occasionally deranged, these clips span the time from the dawn of Vitaphone, early 1927, to the heyday of MGM magnificence in late 1934.  I won’t give away all the surprises in this musical cornucopia, but here are a few highlights: a precious souvenir of the legendary contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink; Bebe Daniels and John Boles in Rio Rita, lifting their voices in a song now missing from current prints; Charles “Buddy” Rogers as a one-man orchestra in Close Harmony; Lillian Roth and Dorothy Lee at their sexiest; Eddie Cantor and Winnie Lightner at their most boisterous; and a mammoth (if pointless) color number from MGM’s unreleased The March of Time.  While the print quality of these clips naturally varies, the Technicolor clips do accurately reproduce that odd and beautiful two-color process.  Feel free to gasp, laugh, and applaud along with this tribute to that long-ago time when microphones could be hazardous, song and dance mattered greatly, and audiences were thrilled to be part of one of the most exuberant and inventive eras in movie history.  (Richard Barrios)