Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Just so...so bad

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

When talking about the first 'soundie', almost everybody automatically thinks of "The Jazz Singer" - wrong; it was only a part-talkie. The first ALL-talkie is a now almost forgotten little gangster drama called "Lights of New York" - and whoever's lucky enough to get the chance to watch it, won't even believe that it was made in 1928, when all the other movies were still silent or at the most contained some experimental sound sequences. The sound quality is so good, and the music numbers so lively, that you may think that this is one of the 30s' gangster movies that tried to recreate the atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties (and not one of the better ones, because the actors were still somewhat stiff and clumsy - no wonder, for they were for the first time acting in front of a camera AND talking!) - but this is the REAL thing: an immeasurable treasure of a time document made up as a movie drama...The story is simple and not very inventive: a young small town boy wants to hit the big city to make something out of himself - and unwittingly becomes the stooge for a couple of bootleggers whose boss runs a speakeasy where the lad's girlfriend works as a dancer; and so, instead of getting somewhere the decent way (which seems impossible in New York in the 1920s), he ends up with a load of 'hot' illegal booze on his hands and the gangster's men on his heels...Yes, it DOES sound like an old B movie (and unfortunately, that's what most people, i.e. the ones that at least KNOW it, seem to mistake it for today) - BUT in 1928, it was a sensation: for the FIRST time, the audience could hear the actors speaking and the music playing throughout the WHOLE movie! No need to mention, of course, that it was an enormous financial success back then...And for us today, it's BETTER than any documentary on the "Roaring Twenties": here, in this little melodrama, you can catch LIVE the atmosphere of the days of Prohibition, the speakeasies, the flappers with their bobs and fluffy dresses, the dance and music numbers of the time - for almost an hour, "Lights of New York" REALLY turns on the time machine for you and takes you back into the 20s. After witnessing THIS, any classic gangster movie of the 30s, as magnificent as it may be, looks just like a mere recreation of the REAL thing, no matter how 'amateurishly' directed and played it may seem to us today...

I love to catch early talkies on Turner Classics (the only place I can ever see them), and the earlier the better. Usually 1929 is the best I can do. I saw one called Tanned Legs that featured stilted dialogue spoken by people clustered around potted palms. Well, this one isn't much better, folks, but as an unintentional comedy it works quite well. The thing is, no one moves in this thing, except for a few chorus girls who are trotted out from time to time. The felt-hatted gangstas sit so close to each other that their foreheads are almost touching. In fact, everyone gets up-close and personal in this thing, maybe because they're afraid to move or the mic won't pick them up. It's been described as "stagey", but it's more like "nailed in place", so static that the characters begin to resemble cutouts glued onto popsicle sticks and moved around only when it's time to change microphones. I'd see it, however, if you're curious about how sound film developed. This was a quick cash grab and it worked, though the critics soon buried it. Within a couple of years we'd have Garbo asking for "whiskey, baby. . . and don't be stingy." Guess they had to start somewhere.

Though mainly notable for being the first "100% Talkie", this one is still reasonably well-regarded; it is also a fine example of an early gangster film – incidentally, I have a handful of other such efforts unwatched from that first initial burst within this most invigorating of genres.That said, the mobster of this one is more akin to the hissable villain from some old barnstormer, complete with pencil-thin moustache, rather than the larger-than-life types (fast-talking, no-nonsense, eventually hysterical) subsequently made their own – at the same studio, Warners, no less – by the likes of Robinson, Cagney and Bogart! Even so, the action here is extremely modest – being relegated to the silhouetted shooting of a cop during a bootlegging 'job' and the behind-the-curtain execution of the villain. The aftermath of the latter sequence, however, elevates the suspense quotient considerably as the killing occurs in a barber shop immediately prior to a police 'raid'…so that the victim is put up in a chair by the owner (Eugene Palette), lathered and generally treated as any other customer, before he slips down to the floor! The rest of the cast is made up of now-forgotten actors (apart from a young Tom Dugan – the Hitler impersonator from Lubitsch's TO BE OR NOT TO BE [1942] – as one of the hoodlum's stooges, here looking an awful lot like Lon Chaney!). Still, the performances (ditto the plot of small-town love rekindled in the big city, the fleecing/selling of naïve fellows by slick-looking-but-obviously-slimy-heels, and the jilted ageing mistress furnishing the villain's inevitable come-uppance) are all delightfully of their time, and the film itself very enjoyable if approached in the right frame-of-mind. Indeed, the only major let-downs here are the static camera-work and the wholly resistible (yet obligatory) musical numbers. By the way, the director had been one of the "Seven Little Foys", sons of popular vaudevillian Eddie Foy; he later changed gears to producing, with perhaps his most successful effort being the 3-D horror classic HOUSE OF WAX (1953).

It is easy to criticize this movie,which has so many shortcomings.But in all fairness we must remember what handicaps everyone was working under.Actors had to speak slowly,and enunciate very precisely to make sure that the primitive microphones could pick up what they were saying.The fact that they were shooting an entire feature as a talkie, instead of just a few isolated scenes,as in previous "talkies",undoubtedly put extra pressure on everyone. To my mind one of the funniest(unintended) aspects of is, when Hawk was telling his two henchmen to "take him for a ride", one of the henchmen looked, and was dressed, like Stan Laurel! Sort of hard to take him seriously as a hit-man! Primitive as it was,this was still a wonder to audiences who had grown weary of the limitations of silent movies.I have always like old silents, but a steady,exclusive diet would get tiresome very quickly.The jeering reaction of the audience in "Singin in the Rain" to the shortcomings of "The Dueling Cavalier" was an anachronism;that is the reaction of an audience used to PERFECTED sound movies.An actual audience of the day might have laughed,but still would have loved it.