Gus Visser and His Singing Duck (1925)

User Rating:

6.2/10   

Genre:

Short

Plot:

Gus Visser performs part of his vaudeville act, appearing on the stage holding a white duck. Gus sings the song, "Ma (He's Making Eyes At Me)", and soon the duck begins to accompany him by quacking.

Plot Keywords:

Duck | Vaudeville | Singer

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Gus Visser

...

Himself (uncredited)

Runtime:

2 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

USA:Not Rated

Trivia:

One of the 50 films in the 3-disk boxed DVD set called "More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931" (2004), compiled by the National Film Preservation Foundation from 5 American film archives. This film has a running time of 90 seconds and is preserved by the George Eastman House.

Soundtrack:

Ma, He's Making Eyes at Me

An Interesting Novelty, & Part of Cinema History

This oddball feature is worth seeing both as an interesting novelty and as a piece of cinema history. Gus Visser performs one of his offbeat vaudeville routines, and Theodore Case uses the act as an experiment in his efforts to create a workable way to add sound to movies.

Case is one of a number of now-forgotten pioneers who painstakingly laid the groundwork for sound films in the years before the coming of "The Jazz Singer", which is now so much better remembered. The quest to add sound to moving pictures began almost as soon as movies themselves began, with experiments dating all the way back to the 1890s. Case's attempt is very good, and while the sound quality is far from what anyone would accept today, it is not that much worse than the quality of the earliest all-sound movies, and you can understand most of Visser's words.

The act itself is amusing, at least for a time, and it is the kind of novelty that worked rather well in vaudeville as part of a series of assorted routines. It is apparently now unknown to what extent this feature was circulated, or whether it was ever widely released, and that may account for its undeserved obscurity.

To get sound features to capture the public's interest, it would eventually take features with more going for them than a man holding a duck, but this really is not a bad effort in itself. It is definitely one that anyone with a serious interest in cinema history would want to watch.