The First Auto (1927)

User Rating:

6.3/10   

Director:

Roy Del Ruth

Writers:

Anthony Coldeway (writer)
Jack Jarmuth (titles)

Release Date:

18 September 1927 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy

Tagline:

Remember---when you used to stand for an hour watching a fellow crank his "Merry Oldsmobile"---when you used to help a fellow pump a tire for an hour, and the tire was still flat!---when the batteries were run down and you had to walk ten miles to get six more batteries---when the car wouldn't go and you finally found that the tank was empty---

Plot:

Hank owns horses, stables horses and races horses. He favorite horse always wins and he is prosperous and will known...

Plot Keywords:

Horse | Race | Horseless Carriage | Auto Industry | Joke

US TV Schedule:

Mon. July 13

12:00 AM

TCM

Cast

Russell Simpson	...	Hank Armstrong
Frank Campeau	...	Mayor Sam Robbins
Gibson Gowland	...	The Blacksmith
Anders Randolf	...	The Auctioneer
William Demarest	...	Dave Doolittle, the Village Cut-Up
Paul Kruger	...	Steve Bentley
Douglas Gerrard	...	Squire Rufus Stebbins, the Banker
Charles Emmett Mack	...	Bob Armstrong (as Chas. E. Mack)
Patsy Ruth Miller	...	Rose Robbins
Barney Oldfield	...	Himself - the Master Driver

Runtime:

75 min | USA:77 min (Turner library print)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Vitaphone) (talking sequences, musical score, sound effects)

Certification:

USA:Passed (National Board of Review)

Filming Locations:

Riverside, California, USA

Company:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Trivia:

Vitaphone production reels #589-596; 6th feature film produced by Warner Bros. to be released with Vitaphone musical accompaniment and sound effects.

Soundtrack:

In My Merry Oldsmobile

the romance of what our Great Grandgrandparents laughed & cried at....

This movie is a nostalgic look back at another time. Both for us, here and now -- and for the audience it was originally made for in 1927. Just because both 1927 -- when the film was made -- and 1896-1906 -- the time-frame of the story -- are both behind us, we tend to jumble them together as being early 20th-Century, or "the past". Well -- 1896 was already the deep past for these filmmakers. They were looking backwards just as much as George Lucas was when he made "American Graffiti."

This is a patchwork of a film -- part comedy (including some old vaudeville routines. William Demerest and his clown companion are present for no other reason except comic relief. In vaudeville, the clowns in front of the curtain were there to mask the noise and movement of scenery and costume changes taking place on the stage behind the curtain.) Such clowning was obviously not necessary for the movies, but it's still there -- and we get to see what people were laughing at before stand-up monologue comedy was the only game in town.

The film is part melodrama as we see how a horse in the late 1890's could be the friend and companion of the pre-industrial era, and how the death of a man's horse could bring a man to tears. "A horse is loyal. A horse remembers! A horse knows what gratitude is!" -- words spoken by the father/livery owner who is then called a "Brute" (an animal) by his son.

With it's pre-talkie talking-and-scored soundtrack, it sometimes plays like a rough experiment in early film sound technologies (which exactly parallels the story of the first automobiles -- and how quickly they displaced the horse-centered life.) Within 3 years, silent pictures were as gone from the landscape as horse-drawn buggies. The equally experimental "special effects" fire in the engine of a moving race car isn't exactly the parting of the Red Sea -- but we still get the idea.

It also has the air of a headliner news-reel -- when surprise! Barney Oldfield, playing himself, races around the horse track so that all of America (at least those who went to the movies) could see him do what he was famous for -- speed racing!

At it's heart, however, this is a story. It is about family and about learning what matters (sometimes called family values), and of generations -- a father with both feet firmly planted in the pre-automobile age, and his son who is racing after the biggest technology of the time. They loose each other, almost loose everything else, and then find each other and move into the automobile age together -- where the father opens a car dealership and goes to the car races while the son spends his days at the horse shows. -- and "gosh, what's the world coming to next?" as a bi-plane soars overhead.

This is not a "great" movie -- but it is great fun, and a great window back both to 1927 and it's time of plenty before the stock market crashed us into the Depression; and to the 1927 recollection of 1896, when the lights of technology were just beginning to turn on. It is a wonderful piece of film history, now preserved for my great- and great-great grandchildren. --Thanks to all those doing film preservation -- we love it.