Earlysoundguy.com Website Review

popular Hollywood player of the silent era who, by accidents of technology and timing, became a virtual non-entity in the talkies. For every James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson or Spencer Tracy whose stage-honed dialogue skills made them into almost-instant Hollywood stars after the transition to sound, there were many others who were forced to adapt to the change. Reginald Denny, for example, had to drop the American characters he played in silents in favor of those that suited his British accent; his billing declined slightly, but he continued a lucrative career. John Gilbert had a perfectly suitable voice that did not match his he-man image, but he was derailed by And then there were actors like Mulhall, whose precipitous drop in the motion-picture hierarchy led him from starring roles in big-studio talkies in 1930 to bit parts at the majors (and occasional Poverty Row leads) within a year or two, and then, as the ‘30s neared their end, Mulhall’s career mirrored that of a fellow player at Warner Bros.-First National, Monte Blue. Both men had built their screen careers since the mid-‘te*ns (Mulhall at the old Biograph studio, where he claimed to be the first actor with a weekly salary in three figures) and were aging into their early 40s as sound came in. They were precisely the highly experienced, high-salaried talents whom studios sought to clear from their contract rosters as folks like Cagney and Tracy came West to settle in. “Jack Mulhall still wears that wholesome Irish smile – the kind that never grows old or never wears off,” a writer from Missouri complained about by the filmgoing public, as Mulhall photographed somewhat younger than his middle age. Still, Mulhall’s First National contract was not reviewed in June 1930. In a fan-magazine blurb about his farewell to FN, Colleen Moore, Dorothy Mackaill, Milton Sills, and Corinne Griffith were also mentioned as newly freed. Griffith had retired, the writing on the wall, and poor Sills, career-vulnerable at age 48, would drop dead of a heart attack that August.