The Show of Shows

The Show of Shows (1929) is a lavish all talking Vitaphone musical revue film that cost $850,000 to make. The Show of Shows was Warner Bros.' fifth color movie; the first four were The Desert Song (1929), On with the Show (1929), Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929) and Paris (1929). This movie featured most of the contemporary Warner Bros. film stars.

The movie was styled in the same format as the earlier MGM film The Hollywood Revue of 1929. The Show of Shows was photographed almost entirely in Technicolor; the cost of the film meant that although it performed well at the box office, it did not return as much profit as the MGM film. The Show of Shows was originally meant to be and advertised as being an all-color talking movie; however, twenty-one minutes was in black and white—17 minutes of the first part and the first four minutes of part two.

Seen today in incomplete black-and-white duplicate prints, it remains of historical interest, showing the talent working at Warner Bros. in the early talkie period. The film features all the stars then working at Warner Bros. except for Dorothy Mackaill and Al Jolson. Virtually all the performers shown would vanish from the studio by 1931, after tastes had shifted owing to the effects of the Great Depression, which began to be felt late in 1930.

At that time, the sophisticated and musical talent that had characterized the 1920s was replaced by a new set of stars more in tune with the common man and with more sober times, headed by the likes of Warren William, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Glenda Farrell, William Powell, Kay Francis, Lee Tracy, Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Clark Gable, and James Cagney. In 1929, however, these were as yet unknown names in the movie world, with the exception of Powell, who was a well-known villain in Paramount silents. In The Show of Shows we see many of the performers who were popular in silent movies mixed in with hand-picked stage stars and novelty acts.

The emcee of the film was Frank Fay, who had an unusual style of barbed sarcasm. In an era of almost naive optimism, he stands out as a witty devil's advocate. Fay's unique style appears to have been often misunderstood by reviewers and audiences and interpreted as bad technique, but Fay is clearly sending up the film, albeit slyly. He uses this technique to good effect in introducing each act and has a running joke about doing his own song, which he eventually performs near the end of the film.