The Great Gabbo *** (1929, Erich von Stroheim, Betty Compson, Don Douglas, Margie King, Helen Kane) – Classic Movie Review 12,131

Director James Cruze’s 1929 American Pre-Code early sound musical drama film The Great Gabbo has two notable credits, to add to his own illustrious name: Ben Hecht as writer of the original 1928 short story The Rival Dummy and Erich von Stroheim as star.

The Great Gabbo is a very early version of the Dead of Night yarn about a crazed ventriloquist called The Great Gabbo (Erich von Stroheim) taken over by his wooden dummy, Otto Gabbo.

Director James Cruze is obviously having technical problems with the sound cameras and unfortunately there are pauses for silly musical numbers to fill the running time, with songs by Lynn Cowan, Paul Titsworth, Donald McNamee and King Zany. It is so weird that The Great Gabbo interweaves its stark drama with gratuitous full-length, large-scale, on-stage musical production numbers such as ‘Every Now and Then’, ‘I’m in Love with You’, ‘The New Step’, ‘The Web of Love’ and the now-missing colour sequence ‘The Ga Ga Bird’.

But, despite its drawbacks, it is still very well worth catching for a most striking, archetypal performance from von Stroheim (in his first talkie) though.

It also stars Betty Compson as Mary, Donald Douglas as Frank, Marjorie Kane as Babe and John F Hamilton as Neighbour.

Hugh Herbert writes the dialogue, adapted from the story by Ben Hecht.

It is shot in black and white by Ira Morgan with some colour sequences in Multicolor, but current prints, restored by the Library of Congress and released by Kino International on DVD, are only in black and white.

The idea turned up again in the 1978 Magic.

It was released on 12 September 1929 by Sono Art-World Wide Pictures, who advertised it as an ‘all-dialog singing, dancing and dramatic spectacle’.

The public domain version available on the Internet Archive runs 68 minutes, but the original film ran 92 minutes or 96 including exit music.

https://archive.org/details/great_gabbo

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,131

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