Watch Speech: Using Your Voice For Free

Fresh and Exciting

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.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

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?

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!

"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.

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!