In the long, strange history of the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, none is as strange as The Hollywood Revue of 1929, the only non-narrative film to be so blessed by the Academy. It's essentially a variety show, hosted by Jack Benny and Conrad Nagel, in which MGM showed to the world that its stars would shine just as brightly after the dawn of sound.

Some of them did, and some of them didn't—for example, this is supposedly the film that killed off John Gilbert's career, as audiences, again supposedly, disliked his "squeaky" voice. Now, watching the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene that he acts out with Norma Shearer, it's clear that he didn't have a squeaky voice. Sure, it wasn't a basso profondo bellow, but it was an acceptable leading man's voice. Other featured stars who didn't survive the transition to sound are vaudeville star Charles King, Carl Dane of the duo Dane and Arthur, and Gwen Lee. This is one of the more fascinating aspects of this film: it presents a snapshot of a Hollywood anxiously feeling its way into unfamiliar territory, and it's a document of both the performers who thrived in the talkies and those whose careers were ruined by the change.

It's often a chore to watch, though, because it's so unmovielike. Most of it is shot as if the camera were in a decent seat in the middle of a theater, with the screen stretching to encompass most of the stage. It's from this vantage point, and often only this one, that we see the activity on stage; there were some sequences during which I'd have given my last dollar for a cut or a different camera angle. Also, the first half is very rough going: you might be tempted, as I was, to turn it off and never finish it, but the last half makes the entire film worth watching.

All of the highlights come after the halfway point. The aforementioned balcony scene, shot in a primitive two-strip Technicolor, is difficult to watch at first because of Shearer's fluttery mannerisms and stilted delivery, but it loosens up with the appearance of Lionel Barrymore as a director ordering them to update the scene to modern flapper language. This allows Shearer to show off her underused flair for comedy and appealing looseness, which seldom came through in her more serious roles. Next up is an early version of the song "Singin' in the Rain" featuring Cliff Edwards (later to voice Disney's Jiminy Cricket) and a troupe of dancers. The film goes out on its highest note, which is a Technicolor reprise of the same song sung by the whole cast in front of a model of Noah's Ark, for some reason.

The film also features more than its share of the bad, the embarrassing, and the odd. It opens with an awful dance sequence featuring dancers in blackface who turn white when the film dissolves to a negative image. We learn why Joan Crawford is best known as a dramatic actress during a song-and-dance number, during which I'm pretty sure she's lip-synching anyway—she sings a verse and then dances, and during the dancing, we hear her singing but her mouth isn't moving. There's an inexplicable art deco "Tableau of Jewels" sequence just after the intermission, inexplicable because the lustre and colors of most of the jewels are lost to the black-and-white film. The Natova dance company does a mostly silent dance that features two men jumping rope using a woman as the rope. Finally, Buster Keaton has a nausea-inducing segment that flutters the film to suggest an underwater setting, and his mistreatment by the sound cinema is apparent; even though he never speaks, his segment shows him as a clumsy oaf, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of his appeal.

I can't recommend this film to anyone except those who are probably already seeking it out—Oscar completists and fans of the very early sound cinema. It's a sometimes fascinating, sometimes tedious historical artifact. It was nominated for Best Picture at the 1928–1929 Oscars, losing to The Broadway Melody.

—March 29, 2006