Silent prints

I hadn't seen The Big Parade before last night on TCM. Frankly, I think it's overrated, but that's not what I want to write about today. What intrigued me were Robert Osborne's opening comments, which implied that he expected a different print to be shown than what actually wound up on air.

Osborne made a comment about the roadshow version, and how it had tinted scenes, and that this is what we would e seeing last night. Unless all the tinting was done in sepia -- and the closest I saw to that was in the night scenes -- I saw little if any tinting. At least, there was nothing approaching what you can see in TCM's print of Ben-Hur which, in addition to the limited scenes in two-strip Technicolor, has several scenes tinted in purple (and red and green, if memory serves).

I immediately recognized something odd about the opening credits, which that that the title card wasn't the standard for the MGM silent era, which traditionally had the movie's title and some other information in a big ellipse on a gray background. Instead, this print of The Big Parade was more typical of MGM opening cards from the early talkie period, with the credits against some sort of scenery backgound. Even more interesting was that, in the opening credits, there was a credit given to a score by William Axt, who did the scores, limited as they are, for a lot of movies at MGM in the early 1930s. That, and the "Western Electric Noiseless Recording" logo. This was an obvious clue to a reissue print: Warner Bros. first put a synchronized score to a movie with Don Juan in 1926, but Vitaphone at the time was a sound-on-disc system, as opposed to the sound-on-film system that the other studios would use, and Warner Bros. would later adopt. That card was kept in even though this wasn't the Axt score, but one done by Carl Davis for British TV in the late 1980s.

IMDb didn't list a suitable reissue in the "release dates" for The Big Parade, but then, that's one of the parts of IMDb that generally seems to be badly organized, with lots of release dates for foreign markets and even release dates for video, but not the original US release date, which is what one would usually want for a Hollywood picture. Wikipedia, however, claims that The Big Parade was re-released in 1931, which would fit with the opening credits and the Axt score.

The other interesting thing with silent movies is that not all of the intertitles are original, as some of them are clearly in a different and more modern-looking typeface than what you see in most MGM silents. This was definitely the case with The Show which aired earlier on Tuesday; I wasn't paying quite as close attention to the intertitles on The Big Parade.