Thursday, December 5, 2024

The First Auto

I've got several silent films still to get through on my DVR, although not as many as I've got foreign films. One that I saw many years back during a TCM airing but never did a post on, at least not according to a search of the blog, is The First Auto.

The movie opens in 1895, which was already a generation in the past when the movie was released in 1927. Hank Armstrong (Russell Simpson) owns a livery stable in small-town Michigan (although the mountains of southern California are prominently in the background of several scenes). He also has the best harness racing horse in the entire county, and these two facts put together make him one of the town's more prominent citizens. Indeed, one of the tragedies of the early part of the story is when Armstrong's horse dies giving birth to a foal.

The mayor is probably the most prominent citizen, although not particularly a major character. He's just necessary to be able to have someone who can meet and bring to his small town the tinkerers who were working on the great new invention of the day, the horseless carriage. Those early horseless carriages weren't always technologically reliable, so Hank scoffs on them, but on some level he has to realize that the arrival of this new technology is going to change his business for the worse. However, he organizes a race between car and horse to show the superiority of the horse.

Hank's adult son, Bob (Charles Emmett Mack), on the other hand, being young, has no great romantic attachment to horses the way his father, and indeed takes to the new technology, much to the consternation of his father. Bob becomes interested in building cars and making them go faster. Already by this time there's a nascent car industry in Detroit, so Bob heads off there and even is able to get one of the great early racecar drivers, Barney Oldfield (playing himself although I don't know enough about car racing to recognize the name), to join his outfit and set a new speed record.

Eventually, Bob does well enough for himself that he's going to come back to town with one of the auto races that's being held at the county race track. He informs his girlfriend, Rose (Patsy Ruth Miller), who is also the mayor's daughter, although he asks her not to tell his father as he wants to surprise Dad. Ruth has another man pursuing her, and that man wants Hank to sabotage one of the cars so that it can put Ruth off the idea of the automobile. Hank is happy to do this, since the car has already put his livery stable out of business. Whe he doesn't realize until too late, however, is that the car he sabotages is being driven by Bob.

The First Auto is, more than many other silent pictures, an interesting historical curiosity for the way it looks at vintage cars and the idea of early car racing. But there are other historical reasons for wanting to see The First Auto. It was made at Warner Bros., who by this time were already using the Vitaphone process, although in a film like this that was mostly for a synchronized score and sound effects. It would be a few more months before The Jazz Singer would be released. Then there's the casting of a very young William Demarest in a comic relief role. Finally is the tragic fate of Charles Emmett Mack. One day near the end of filming, Mack was struck and killed by another car as he was driving in to filming. That probably affected the film's final scene, in which Mack obviously does not appear.

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