It was a good one -- "There Was Nothing Else To Do" is one of the songs sung. It's what used to be called "a sister act": one plays the piano and demonstrates how tempo and styling can denote character; the other sings a couple of blues ballads.
It's one of the vaudeville acts that Vitaphone filmed as short subjects in the late 1920s. The idea was that the big houses, the movie palaces, didn't just show you movies: they had orchestras that played short concerts at the start of the show, and stage acts to offer something that set them apart from the neighborhood houses. Also, a lot of vaudeville houses included movies in their programs: RKO stood for Radio Keith Orpheum, and those last two were well-known for variety houses before they converted to movies ("Radio" referred to the fact that RCA was a big shareholder, and also connoted modernity). With two or three of these one-reel movies in a program, any movie house could compete with the big theaters.
It's a pretty good one, mostly because it does what it says in the title. The pianist is good, and the singer is too. I just wish I knew which was which.
It's one of the vaudeville acts that Vitaphone filmed as short subjects in the late 1920s. The idea was that the big houses, the movie palaces, didn't just show you movies: they had orchestras that played short concerts at the start of the show, and stage acts to offer something that set them apart from the neighborhood houses. Also, a lot of vaudeville houses included movies in their programs: RKO stood for Radio Keith Orpheum, and those last two were well-known for variety houses before they converted to movies ("Radio" referred to the fact that RCA was a big shareholder, and also connoted modernity). With two or three of these one-reel movies in a program, any movie house could compete with the big theaters.
It's a pretty good one, mostly because it does what it says in the title. The pianist is good, and the singer is too. I just wish I knew which was which.
