GamerTab That was an excellent one.

BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

gridoon2018 This movie has an important place in the history of cinema (the first all-talkie, although it still carries over a trademark of the silent era: the title cards), but when you get past the novelty value it doesn't really have much artistic value. And even though it runs under an hour, it moves like molasses. But it's still watchable. Some of the actors were clearly not destined for a long career in the talkies (Eugene Palette is the only one you might recognize, especially if you are a Philo Vance fan), but actually Helene Costello and Wheeler Oakman are not bad at all - Oakman even manages a wry delivery with some of his lines, like "cops are my best friends!". **1/2 out of 4.,

Michael Morrison 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.

earlytalkie This is it. The first all-talking feature film. Although at 57 minutes it barely qualifies as a feature. The Lights of New York has a reputation for being a pretty bad film. Even contemporary reports from back in the day rather kindly label it as experimental. Watching it today it does not seem nearly as bad as it's reputation. Sure, there are pregnant pauses between lines, and Mary Carr as the hero's mother appears to deliver her lines as though she had been drugged, but the film is more fun to see than I care to admit. The nightclub scenes are rather lively and there is a music score under a lot of the dialogue. Overall, it is considerably better than Paramount's Interference, released a few moths later. All these pioneer talkies are interesting for buffs to see today as their respective producers and directors felt their way through the first few years of a brand-new medium. The print of Lights of New York had really excellent Vitaphone sound. Much clearer than the sometimes muddy sound in Interference. I believe Interference used Movietone sound-on-film process, but I could be mistaken. You could find worse ways to spend an hour than to watch this.

theglasscharacter 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.