Crime | Drama | Music | USA | Talkie | B&W | 57min Cast: Helene Costello, Cullen Landis, Mary Carr, Eugene Pallette The real first synchronous all-talking feature length movie. A young kid from Upstate New York named Eddie (Landis) is conned into fronting for a speakeasy on Broadway. Throughout the con there is an inevitable chorus-girl with a heart of gold (Costello), a cop-killing gangster boss (Oakman) and his downtrodden ex-girlfriend (Brockwell). Historically, Lights of New York is usually distinguished as the first all-talking feature. I try to avoid the word “first,” but it’s true that this is a fully synchronized feature, as opposed to “part-talkies” like The Jazz Singer which had interspersed passages of synchronized sound with traditional silent sequences. This film was planned from the beginning as an all-talkie, but arrived at its feature-length distinction more or less by accident. Warner Bros. had been producing Vitaphone shorts for two years, recording not only musical performances and vaudeville acts but also short dramatic playlets. This film started production as one of the latter, a two-reel short with the working title “The Roaring Twenties,” but was gradually expanded during production. It emerged as a seven-reel feature, with synchronized dialogue scenes from beginning to end. Moviegoers, swept up in the talkie craze, eagerly flocked to the box office, and Lights of New York became one of Warners’ most successful films of the year. Lights of New York in hindsight is a harbinger of things to come. The story functions as both a (rudimentary) gangster film and an (even more rudimentary) musical—two genres that Warner Bros. would come to dominate within a few short years.