Speech: Using Your Voice (1950) User Reviews

...and get a good wire rack!

[icehole4 · 1/10 · 11 April 2002]

This short film gets very silly very quickly. The narrator violates one of his cardinal rules of good speech: He's as boring as watching paint dry. I'm sure that it might have been a little better when viewed in its time, but these days it's an object of ridicule. Rightfully skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000, this stinky short should be avoided otherwise.

Gee, another first!

Work That Mouth

[Calaboss · 3/10 · 25 February 2010]

This educational short is just about what you'd expect; a speech about speaking. We're told not to mumble, but to speak clearly, loudly, and by golly, be interesting and use low tones. Of course, these days it would be much simpler to just play a tape of anything said by Gilbert Gottfried, Roseanne Barr, or Bobcat Goldthwait and just instruct the students to NOT sound like that.

At under 10 minutes long, I was still starting to doze off when the narrator said, "...and use plenty of lip and tongue action." I came to attention thinking I had rolled over into another type of instructional video, but alas, this thing was made in 1950, and he was still just talking about talking.

I didn't get a lot out of this thing, but it's an educational short. Has anyone ever actually learned anything from one of these films?

It Was A Bad Print. I Could Hear What He Said

[boblipton · 3/10 · 3 February 2024]

A salesman jabbers away at a potential customer and loses the sale. Alas, says lecturer E. C. Buehler! He failed to be heard or understood or pleasing. Be more like E. C. Buehler, says E. C. Buehler, and bored students will be forced to listen to you in class after final exams have exhausted the teacher's strength and patience to try to teach you something.

It's a Centron short movie, which differentiates it from the usual Coronet movie in that.... well, usually it's because Herk Harvey directed Centrons. Alas, he doesn't direct this one, which would probably result in the actors sounding human. Instead he, appears in this one, as the guy standing in front of the flag.

Plenty of Lip and Tongue Action!!!!

[Mike Sh. · 24 May 2004]

Professor E.C. Beuhler, having gained immortality (or was it infamy?) a year earlier by consenting to have himself filmed while making the Knee Test for the first "Speech" short, gets a speaking role in this sequel. But for a guy who seems to be such an expert on elocution, he seems to have an awfully raspy, sloppy voice. It's definitely not what I would call pleasing. However, the good professor wisely forgoes the opportunity to use himself as an object lesson, opting instead to parade before us even more pathetic examples of people who cannot be "heard, understood, or pleasing."

Incidentally, one of these poor souls is a rather well dressed man in what looks like a business meeting type of setting. This man incoherently mutters an odd rambling story of how he had his seat taken away from him at the bus station. Now what was the point of that story, and what was the situation that inspired its telling? That's what I want to know!

A guide on how to speak

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 10 August 2015]

This is one of 2 (I think) black-and-white educational movies from the 1950s about speech and how to speak properly. The host shows us 3 principle that one needs to follow and we get to see example of how not to do it and how to do it right. Even if these 8 minutes look as if they were from the 1930s, they are certainly not as bad as the rating suggests. However, that can be said about pretty much all films parodied by MST3K. I guess many people do not even watch the original movies and just suck in whatever they are told by the MST3K guys who really don't know a lot about cinema and basically are all about style over substance. That does not mean that I think "Speech: Using Your Voice" is a great movie, but it has held up and aged much better than most other of these educational short films as I can see some of the examples and references given herein still relevant today. However, not good either enough to let me recommend it despite the prolific director and writer, something that also not too many of these films have. Thumbs down.

Just another of Centron's speech stuff

[cadreamin67 · 1 June 2003]

"Speech: Using Your Voice," Centron's last speech series film back in 1950, was no better than one of the others in the series, particularly "Speech: Platform Posture and Appearance." This one was really hard to sit through, first it talks about a guy who makes speeches so boringly that people get up and leave and fall asleep. Then they introduce the "speech" series' star actor, Herk Harvey, as John, a young man who is always in demand to make speeches. If you were steadily watching every Centron film from the company's beginning to the company's ending, you'd be begging by now for Centron to stop doing these series about sewing, punctuating, cooking and speech.