THE FIRST AUTO
IMDB
Título original: The First Auto
Director: Roy Del Ruth
Año: 1927
País: USA
Guión: Anthony Coldeway, Jack Jarmuth, Darryl F. Zanuck
Producción: Warner, Vitaphone
Intérpretes: Barney Oldfield, Patsy Ruth Miller, Charles Emmett Mack, Russell Simpson, Frank Campeau, William Demarest, Paul Kruger, Gibson Gowland
Duración: 76 min.
Argumento: Legendary racecar driver Barney Oldfield plays himself in the engaging little period piece The First Auto. Russell Simpson plays livery-stable owner Hank Armstrong, who is appalled beyond words when his son Bob (Charles E. Mack) comes home with one of those newfangled "horseless carriages." Throwing Bob out of the house, Hank stubbornly sticks to his stable business, only to be driven into bankruptcy by the ever-growing popularity of the automobile. When Bob returns to his hometown to participate in an auto race, his father, having temporarily gone off the beam, agrees to sabotage the boy's car to make certain that he loses. Only when he attends the race does Hank realize that he's booby-trapped his own son's vehicle. On cue, the car blows up, but Bob emerges unscathed, setting the stage for an emotional reunion between father and son. Long believed lost, The First Auto has been restored to nearly its original length and has frequently been telecast over the Turner Classic Movies cable service.
Datos Técnicos:
IMDB
Título original: The First Auto
Director: Roy Del Ruth
Año: 1927
País: USA
Guión: Anthony Coldeway, Jack Jarmuth, Darryl F. Zanuck
Producción: Warner, Vitaphone
Intérpretes: Barney Oldfield, Patsy Ruth Miller, Charles Emmett Mack, Russell Simpson, Frank Campeau, William Demarest, Paul Kruger, Gibson Gowland
Duración: 76 min.
Argumento: Legendary racecar driver Barney Oldfield plays himself in the engaging little period piece The First Auto. Russell Simpson plays livery-stable owner Hank Armstrong, who is appalled beyond words when his son Bob (Charles E. Mack) comes home with one of those newfangled "horseless carriages." Throwing Bob out of the house, Hank stubbornly sticks to his stable business, only to be driven into bankruptcy by the ever-growing popularity of the automobile. When Bob returns to his hometown to participate in an auto race, his father, having temporarily gone off the beam, agrees to sabotage the boy's car to make certain that he loses. Only when he attends the race does Hank realize that he's booby-trapped his own son's vehicle. On cue, the car blows up, but Bob emerges unscathed, setting the stage for an emotional reunion between father and son. Long believed lost, The First Auto has been restored to nearly its original length and has frequently been telecast over the Turner Classic Movies cable service.
Spoiler:
First auto, The (Roy del Ruth, 1927) DVD-zepol.mkv [528.07 Mb] 
Película encontrada en el emule. Es una película silente aunque tiene efectos sonoros sincronizados. Fue una de las primeras producciones en hacerlo.
Subtítulos en español obra de Eddie Constanti (publicados originalmente en Patio de Butacas):
https://www.subdivx.com/X6XNTQyNjU3
Comentarios:
- “…En 1987, se descubrieron en los estudios Warner más de mil discos de sincronización Vitaphone. Entre las primeras películas sonoras restauradas a finales de los años ochenta, figura una realización muda de Del Ruth, pero con acompañamiento musical y efectos sonoros, The First Auto, sobre los principios del automóvil…” (Tavernier & Coursodon en “50 años de cine norteamericano”).
- MORDAUNT HALL:
Código: Seleccionar todo
The Auto's Conquest.
HOW the automobile conquered the horse is the theme of "The First Auto," now at the Colony Theatre. This production is packed with sentiment, but it is nevertheless a good entertainment. Roy Del Ruth, the director, makes the most of the comic incidents, and the only slurring is when there is a desire to plaster on the bitterness between a father, who is a horse-lover, and his son, who is partial to the new-fangled conveyance.
The way in which the producer reminds one of the accoutrements needed in the old days for traveling by auto is humorous. Goggles and dust coats were the fashion. You see in this film the first windshield, the wonderful racer of the past—Henry Ford's 999—and it is driven in the picture by Barney Oldfield, who thrilled persons in bygone days by making sixty miles an hour.
The acting laurels in this piece go to Russell Simpson who really gives an extraordinarily good performance. In fact his work rather curbs the frequently irrepressible hokum.
Código: Seleccionar todo
Directed by Roy Del Ruth, with a screenplay by Anthony Coldeway (Glorious Betsy (1928)), this silent, written by the Irving G. Thalberg Award winning producer Darryl F. Zanuck (‘G’ Men (1935)), tells the story of how the automobile replaced the horse as the primary means of transportation etc. in our society. The life of a man who's both a livery stable owner and a winning racehorse trainer (in lieu of the buggy whip manufacturers) is used to give substance and feeling to those who were affected the most by this revolutionary time in our history.
It's 1895 in Maple City and Hank Armstrong (Russell Simpson) races his prize horse Sloe Eyes to victory once again. Meanwhile, his son Bob (Charles Emmett Mack), and a lot of the rest of the town, is excited about a new gadget dubbed the horseless carriage. Initially, only the richest man in town (Douglas Gerrard) can afford to buy the noisy, constantly backfiring new contraption, and he receives a cancellation notice of his life insurance policy from his insurance company just before he tries out the dangerous new invention. Eventually, of course, automobiles become safer and Henry Ford revolutionizes the manufacture of them such that anyone can afford one. This upsets father Hank, but not son Bob, who goes to Detroit to see the master driver Barney Oldfield (playing himself) achieve a mile a minute (60 miles per hour) at a race track.
Hank, whose horse Sloe Eyes had died shortly after giving birth to a colt Bright Eyes, even challenged, raced and beat one of these horseless carriages, but the town (indeed, the whole country) didn't care because of their fascination with the new technology. So, Hank becomes increasingly more despondent and bitter. Eventually, his business fails such that he must auction everything, including Bright Eyes. In a mini-Black Beauty-like episode, he sells his last prized possession to a man (Noah Young, uncredited) who treats Bright Eyes badly, such that the horse runs away. Hank's anger turns to sabotage against the machine he blames for his downfall, but the target of his act turns out to be the vehicle his son is scheduled to race in an exhibition the next day. Once he realizes what he's done, Hank races to stop the race but is too late to prevent his son's car from a near fatal crash. The special effects used in this scene are laughably dated to the point of being pathetic. It looks like someone scratched the film itself with a needle to simulate a fire burning. Of course, Hank eventually accepts the inevitable, as have we all.
William Demarest plays a local, egg juggling man. Actor Charles Emmett Mack, who played Hank's son Bob, ironically was the victim of a real automobile accident during filming (on the way to the set?) such that his character is conspicuously missing in the film's final scenes.
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THE FIRST AUTO
In 1927, it took only three spoken words and some sound effects to tell The First Auto, an otherwise silent story about the birth of the automobile. Director Roy Del Ruth, one of Warner Brothers' most prolific directors at the time, filled the picture with details about the birth of the horseless carriage. He even cast legendary racecar driver Barney Oldfield in a small role. But the film was far from a documentary, as writer/producer Darryl F. Zanuck built the story around the conflict between a father who raises and races horses and a son involved in the fast-rising automobile industry.
Del Ruth was a mainstay at every studio he worked for (including MGM and 20th Century-Fox), but he's probably best known for his work at Warner Bros., where he labored from the mid-'20s until 1934. He was a major influence on the studio's gritty fast-paced style before the arrival of Production Code enforcement in 1934. Among his most notable films there were the first screen version of The Maltese Falcon (aka Dangerous Female, 1931), which featured blatant depictions of all the sexuality John Huston was only allowed to hint at in his classic 1941 version; the breakneck newspaper comedy Blessed Event (1932); and three films that helped establish James Cagney's tough-guy image, Taxi! (1932), Blonde Crazy (1931) and Lady Killer (1933).
On The First Auto, he worked with a combination of established players, future stars and one tragic might-have-been. Russell Simpson had already made well over 60 films by the time he took on the role of the father clinging to his old-fashioned ways. He would go on to become a member of the John Ford stock company, playing Pa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and taking on small roles in Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), Wagon Master (1950) and The Horse Soldiers (1959). Rose, the girl Simpson's son leaves behind as he rises through the auto industry, was played by Patsy Ruth Miller, already a major silent star, most notably as Esmeralda in Lon Chaney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). She would retire from acting in 1932. Two years before playing a small role as the village blacksmith in The First Auto, Gibson Gowland had scored his greatest screen triumph, as the doomed dentist McTeague in Erich von Stroheim's legendary Greed (1925). By contrast, William Demarest, cast as the "Village Cut-Up," was still more than a decade away from his greatest screen roles, in such classic Preston Sturges comedies as The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1942) and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). In the '60s, he would win a new generation of fans as Uncle Charlie on the family sitcom My Three Sons.
The film's one tragic question mark was Charles Emmett Mack, starring as Simpson's up-and-coming son, who leaves behind the family business and his childhood sweetheart for success in the auto industry. Mack had been making films since 1921, and The First Auto, made when he was only 27, was one of his best roles. What might have followed is anyone's guess, as he only made two more pictures before his death in a car accident on the way to the studio, an ironic end considering his role in The First Auto.
