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Powerful

People are voting emotionally.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Director Bryan Foy, of the famous family, directed this, supposedly the first all-talking feature film."All talking," although there were inter-titles used by way of narration and introductions, and very non-intrusively.Foy went on to be the head of the Warner Brothers B picture unit and made some very good movies."Lights of New York" is by no means a perfect movie, especially to viewers more used to camera mobility and varied angles. But for its time and as a pioneer in sound production, it is remarkable.The actors were understated, a style that was not exactly in vogue until later. In fact, Jimmy Cagney mentions in his autobiography how he and some of the others of the Warner stock company were praised for that very characteristic.Since even Warners, the sound pioneer, was still learning how to use microphones and how to avoid sounds from everything but the actors, Foy deserves all the plaudits he can get for this effort.The story is about small-towners conned by slicksters from New York and tricked into involvement with bootleggers -- who are also killers. (Alcohol prohibition caused crime, a well-known phenomenon -- well-known today. Yet that lesson has not yet been applied to drug prohibition, despite the fact that this country has the highest incarceration rate and numbers in the world, mostly because of drug laws. We need someone to sing "When Will They Ever Learn?")Helene Costello plays the girl who left the small town earlier to get into show biz, and she was a truly lovely young woman. Apparently she had personal problems that seemed to contribute to her not making more movies, and I think that a loss for us, as well as for her.Most of the rest of the cast, with the particular exception of Eugene Palette and the slight exception of Wheeler Oakman, never achieved much by way of fame, but all were acceptable or better in this pioneering movie.Leonard Maltin, who knows a little about movies, rates it 2.5 out of four stars, which proves he's pretty smart because he almost agrees with me."Lights of New York" might be historically interesting more than purely entertaining, but it is that and I hope movie lovers will get a chance to see it. I believe it is on DVD.

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...

When someone asks the question, "What was the first talking picture?" the answer that immediately comes to mind is THE JAZZ SINGER (1927) starring Al Jolson. Well, that's partially correct. For anyone who's never seen THE JAZZ SINGER might expect an all-sound motion picture with songs. In retrospect, THE JAZZ SINGER does include songs, but much of the scenario was silent accompanied by a Vitaphone orchestral score. With other major studios experimenting the methods of silent films by adding talking sequences to its existing underscoring and inter-titles, LIGHTS OF NEW YORK (Warner Brothers, 1928), directed by Bryan Foy, scripted by Murray Roth and Hugh Herbert, was a step in the right direction for being the first all-talking feature length movie. As with many Hollywood firsts, LIGHTS OF NEW YORK was and still is not a great film due to awkward acting and offbeat dialogue, yet the result is another landmark during the dawn of sound made essential to the history of motion pictures.Opening with a prologue, the first inter-title reads: "This is a story of Main Street and Broadway - a story that might have been torn out of last night's newspaper. Main Street - 45 minutes from Broadway - but a thousand miles away." Because his girlfriend, Kitty Lewis, has gone to New York and made a success for herself, Eddie Morgan (Cullen Landis), a barber yearning for a better life outside his small own where nothing ever happens, asks his mother (Mary Carr), proprietor of the Morgan Hotel, for a $5,000 loan so that he and his friend, Gene (Eugene Palette) can go into partnership with Jake Jackson (Walter Percival) and Dan Dickson (Jere Delaney), guests in Room 21. At first Mrs. Morgan relents loaning the money until she meets with these "gentlemen" before heading back to New York the following morning. Story: "Broadway - 45 minutes from Main Street, but a million miles away." Six months pass. Eddie and Gene, owners of the White Way Barber Shop on 46th Street, come to realize their big mistake for being talked into having their barbershop as a front for bootleggers. Unknown to Eddie, "Hawk" Miller (Wheeler Oakman), owner of the Night Hawk Club ("where anything can happen and usually does") is not only the ring leader of the bootleg operation, but out to get his Kitty, dancer at his club, for himself, much to the jealous nature of Molly Thompson (Gladys Brockwell), his rejected mistress. As Miller plots to do away with Eddie by placing the boxes of Old Century liquor in his barbershop, Miller is later shot and killed by a mysterious assassin, leaving poor Eddie as the prime suspect.A straightforward melodrama with an amusing bit reminiscent of a vaudeville routine where a drunk approaches a cop (Eddie Kane) on Broadway asking where the other side of the street is. For a motion picture that began as a two-reel Vitaphone short, LIGHTS OF NEW YORK, with its backstage musical sounding title, is basically an underworld melodrama with gangster types speaking in gangster lingo. The most memorable line comes from Wheeler Oakman giving an order to his boys, Sam and Tommy (Tom Dugan and Guy D'Ennery) about Eddie, to "Take him ... for ... a ride." This particular scene is the one usually clipped into documentaries of motion pictures, especially when the subject matter is about early talkies. The film is also historical in a sense in offering a inside glimpse of 1920s night clubs better known then as "speakeasies," consisting of chorus girls, dancing patrons and one vocalization of "At Dawning" by the master of ceremonies (Harry Downing). With no "major star" names in the cast, the only one of some familiarity is Eugene Palette, whose distinctive gravel voice made recognizable during his long range of character parts lasting through the late 1940s. His one crucial scene finds him trying to hide the fact from a couple of detectives (Robert Elliott and Tom McGuire) that the customer sitting in his barber chair with his face covered with a towel happens to be a recently murdered Hawk Miller. Aside from Palette and Tom Dugan, other members of the cast, namely silent screen veterans Cullen Landis and Helene Costello, have virtually drifted to obscurity shortly after this film's release. Gladys Brockwell as the girl "who's loved and lost," gives a type of performance of a middle-aged Joan Crawford from the 1960s. Sadly Brockwell passed away the following year (1929) from complications sustained in an automobile accident. For being 1928 production, LIGHTS OF NEW YORK has an advance appeal of one made in the 1940s, not by Warners but something out of a Monogram Pictures programmer. Visual effects with shadows of bootleggers committing their crimes at night simply has that 1940s film noir feel to it. Often labeled as a very bad picture by historians, this remains a real curio as it did way back when, as well as a great opportunity hearing the voices of actors of the silent screen.Never distributed on video cassette, LIGHTS OF NEW YORK can be found occasionally on Turner Classic Movies where it's been playing since May 13, 1995. So the next time someone asks, "What was the first talking picture?" chances are the reply may still be THE JAZZ SINGER, but the final answer remains THE LIGHTS OF NEW YORK. As far as silent films are concerned, there's no turning back now. (**)

Okay so I gave this a 6 but to be fair you can't grade Lights of New York in any ordinary sense. The camera's immobile, the acting's on par with lumber and the script's below second-rate. I love the dialog--- Wheeler Oakman's "But... they... must not... find... Eddie" and the infamous, "Take.. him... for... A... ride" is stupifyingly awful (further proof of his thespian skills can be seen in his death scene... then he keeps on breathing!). But hey, this was the very first all-talking movie! There's every reason in the world to make allowances for every one of it's shortcomings. I've seen The Jazz Singer released around 8 months earlier and this represented a huge leap over part-talkies. It's hard to be overly critical on the technical aspects when it's apparent that everyone was dealing with new fangled sound and heavily soundproofed cameras--- not to mention sound requiring completely new types of direction. This is a gem that deserves to be seen and judged for what it is, a historical artifact. Eugene Palette is the best actor here (no surprise).