Weary River (1929)

(On Cable TV, February 2022) From a contemporary perspective, the most striking thing about Weary River is how it straddles the frontier between silent films and the earliest sound era—parts of the film are silent, whereas others have sound and music. It doesn’t work all that well—the sound segments overpower the silent passages (especially given how the title song is so predominant toward the end), and there’s not that much of an artistic justification for the passage from one medium to another. (There’s obviously sound whenever the characters are singing, but there’s not as big of a structural justification as would have been, say, the protagonist leaving prison behind to take up a music career.)  At 86 minutes long, it still feels long—one of the underappreciated impacts of sound film was a more consistent narrative rhythm, but this too is only partially achieved here. There’s some visual innovation from director Frank Lloyd (including a shot taking us “inside” a radio to the studio—fancy!) and some of the gangster/prison material prefigures what Warners would churn out throughout the 1930s. Otherwise, though, Weary River remains more a curio for students of the transition between silent and sound film—it’s not completely dull, but there’s an artificiality to the way it transitions from one paradigm to the other that calls attention to both.