So the geeks over at Slashdot are having a palaver over how 3D is the worst scam to come down the pike since they colorized the talkies, with special scorn for Alice, a film shot in 2D which was made into 3D later on.
That got me thinking about Teddy Turner, the man who added color to black-and-white films so they’d play in Peoria, and his horrifying masterpieces DOA on the Superstation.
So, given the perversity and perfidy of Hollywood, has anyone ever gone back and added ‘normal’ (non-orchestral, non-soundtrack) sound to a silent film? Has anyone, to our collective knowledge, put words in Rudy Valentino’s mouth ex post facto?
In 1942 Charlie Chaplin released a version of his 1925 masterpiece “The Gold Rush” with a musical score and adding narration. I remember it as pretty dreadful but it was the original artist himself doing it.
It’s really not that bad, though the original is better.
When sound first came in, there were some silent films in production that had sound sequences added (remember, very early talkies like The Jazz Singerwere not “all talking” and people would accept a silent film with sound sequences, though this quickly changed).
However, sound took over so completely that there was no reason to release silent films with soundtracks.
Remember, too, that films at the time were considered disposable: Once their run was ended, there was no reason to keep them. Other than a few blockbusters, all films vanished (often literally as studios either destroyed the film stock or just let it deteriorate).
Because of very few films were re-released at all, there was no real point in taking the time and spending the money to re-release a silent film as sound. Chaplin could do it because he had plenty of money (and plenty of time – it took him years to do his features), but the average studio didn’t need to re-release silents when they had plenty of sound films in production.
In some cases, this caused real problems. Hitchcock was filming Blackmail when sound burst forth, so while he wanted to make the film a talkie, the actress he had cast was Czech, and her strong accent did not match her role of a young English girl. Because ADR and looping would not be invented for a few years (despite what Singin’ in the Rain alleges), Hitch had a British actress speak the dialogue off-camera while the Czech actress mouthed the words during the scene–essentially a live synch. Here’s a picture. Ultimately, the film was released both as a silent and as a talkie (probably because during that transition time, not all theaters were yet equipped to handle audio).
Something you did see, though, were sound remakes of silent films only separated by a few years. Some examples:
Anna Christie: Silent 1923, Sound 1930 The Awful Truth: Silent 1925, Sound 1929 The Devil Horse: Silent 1926, Sound 1932 The Drums of Jeopardy: Silent 1923, Sound 1931 The Great Divide: Silent 1925, Sound 1929 Kick In: Silent 1922, Sound 1931 Ladies of Leisure: Silent 1926, Sound 1930 The Lodger: Silent 1927, Sound 1932 Manslaughter: Silent 1922, Sound 1930 Nell Gwynne: Silent 1926, Sound 1934 Outside the Law: Silent 1920, Sound 1930 Romance: Silent 1920, Sound 1930 Tess of the Storm Country: Silent 1922, Sound 1932 The Unholy Three: Silent 1925, Sound 1930
All the Brothers Were Valiant: Silent 1923, Sound 1928 (retitled Across to Singapore) The Bat: Silent 1926, Sound 1930 (retitled The Bat Whispers) The Charm School: Silent 1921, Sound 1929 (retitled Sweetie) The Flirt: Silent 1922, Sound 1931 (retitled The Bad Sister) Good and Naughty: Silent 1926, Sound 1932 (retitled This is the Night) Her Sister from Paris: Silent 1925, Sound 1934 (retitled Moulin Rouge) Ladies of the Mob: Silent 1928, Sound 1931 (retitled City Streets) Lily of the Dust: Silent 1924, Sound 1933 (retitled The Song of Songs) The Mirage: Silent 1924, Sound 1931 (retitled Possessed) The Sign on the Door: Silent 1921, Sound 1929 (retitled The Locked Door) So’s Your Old Man: Silent 1926, Sound 1934 (retitled You’re Telling Me!); both with W.C. Fields Twenty Dollars a Week: Silent 1924, Sound 1933 (retitled The Working Man) Vamping Venus: Silent 1928, Sound 1933 (retitled Roman Scandals)
Are you kidding? All the time. A lot of times it was obviously added afterwards, because, you know, the audience wouldn’t go to a truly silent movie (just as people on this Board have admitted they wouldn’t watch anf black and white movie).
In other cases it was a serious attempt to bring the film up to date. They added sound to the 1925 Phantom of the Opera, and Lon Chaney was pissed. He angrily declared that it wasn’t his voice, and the suits weaseled out of it with some absurd explanation. The two-disc DVD has a selection of the sound recordings used with the film. as far as I can tell, it adds nothing to it.
In later years, people took to adding slide-wistle sounds, cowbells, and the like to silent comedies. Jay ward and Bill Scott (the powers behind Rocky and Bullwinkle) built a whole TV show around this – Fractured Flickers.
But none of this answers the exact question in the OP.
The answer to that question is, as far as I know, a solid no, not even for Phantom of the Opera.
Although the notion of dubbing silent films into sound seems to make sense, it wouldn’t work well in reality. Each shot in the original would have been designed to be emoted rather than spoken. It would have been difficult to put the right words in to match the shots,since they weren’t designed for speech. A writer could bang out a new film that was intended for sound in the same length of time needed to go back and match dialog shot by shot to originals. (That’s why you get all those films mentioned by ArchiveGuy.) And why would anyone have bothered except for a couple of very major films? The public had seen them and wanted new marvels.
Some high concept artist may have re-created a silent film in this fashion. It would surprise me if nobody had ever done so. If Psycho can be given a shot-by-shot remake, anything’s possible. But colorization would be technically far easier, since you were working with an original whose shot content didn’t need any change. Silents are a different art form than talkies. You can’t just throw dialog in and expect a good result.
I don’t see how you can say this doesn’t fit the OP – I’ve watched the segments with the soundtrack added. Someone clearly was putting words in Chaney’s mouth ex post facto – and it wasn’t Chaney (as he himself angrily pointed out). That they denied it officially and advertised that it wasn’t Chaney (and how many people paid attention to that?), it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a voice speaking the Phantom’s lines when he’ (or his shadow) is on-screen.
But this dialogue was only looped over shots of his shadow, according to Exapno Mapcase’s cite, which is not quite the same thing has having to match lip flaps and facial expressions as you do when adding dialogue to a cartoon. It might well be the closest we can come, though, for the reasons Exapno mentioned. (Silent films are indeed a different art form. I’ve always been a little disappointed the form was pretty much left to molder with outdated acting styles and cinematography and effects shots while sound films got to advance. The exceptions are few and far between.)
See, I don’t think this quite qualifies. They aren’t giving any of the onscreen characters lines, just explaining the action for the audience.
That appears to be a case where a silent movie was redone for sound prior to release. A number of movies were remade like that during the transition, but I believe that they were all mainly reshort, rather than merely dubbed. I’m not sure about Canary, though. It’s one I’ve always wanted to see but somehow never caught. But Brooks is the murder victim and not onscreen long, according to IMDb, so there may not have been much that needed to be done.
Phantom was half reshot, which is why I say it’s not a full example. (I checked and found an ad in the Moberly MO Monitor-Index for March 8, 1930, that states “Lon Chaney does not talk in this movie.”) Movie companies did a bit of everything during the year or so of transition and I wouldn’t rule anything out. I’m just saying I don’t know of a full dubbing.
One other issue: silent films were shot and projected at about 20 frames per second. Sound films were shot and projected at a steady rate of 24 frames per second. In order to lip sych a silent film,* you’d need to speed it up. This required some expensive (for the time) techniques to make it work at the faster speed without the motion look all wrong. It might work for a comedy, but a drama would just not work correctly. And the number of silent films that would be worth that sort of expense and effort was tiny.
As Archive Guy mentioned, it was simpler and easier to just shoot a new film.
A handful of silent films were rereleased with a sound narration, but those were the exception, and often were done by film historians decades after the films were released (my introduction to silent comedy – not counting the Paul Terry cartoons – was with When Comedy was King, a compilation film from 1960, with a lot of footage that hadn’t been seen in 30 years).
Remember when James Agee wrote “Comedy’s Greatest Era” in 1949, most filmgoers had never seen any of the silent films of Keaton, Lloyd, or Langdon. (Keaton’s appearance in Sunset Boulevard the next year was portraying him as a forgotten has-been.) Keaton and Lloyd were massively popular (and Lloyd could almost match Chaplin in wealth and I believe he did a narrated version of Safety Last) in their heyday, but there was little clamor for their silent films to be released with sound.
*Note, too, that, despite Mrs. Doubtfire, the sound of cartoons is done first, except when they’re dubbed into a new language.
This might not be quite what the OP had in mind, but I think it’s worthy of a mention…
Phillip Glass’ Beauty and the Beast, which is based on the Jean Cocteau film ‘La Belle et la Bête’ (1946). The original soundtrack was written by Georges Auric, but this version of it strips the film of its original score and replaces it with a small orchestra and four live singers.
Again, maybe not quite what the OP has in mind, but a few years ago one of the main non-BBC British TV channels (Five?) did a documentary using a lip-reader to reconstruct what Hitler etc. are saying in some of the silent “home movies” from the Berghof. IIRC, the end result was clips of the footage with actors dubbing the reconstructed German dialogue in sync and an English translation in subtitles.
This all turned out to be as pointless as you might have guessed.
Anyway, back to the OP…something that comes to mind is Giorgio Moroder’s version of Metropolis from 1984. Although he specifically did add new music but didn’t add spoken dialogue, sound effects were added—here’s a good example.
Personally, I liked it, but then again, I also liked War of the Gargantuas. So, take that as you will.
