Lady of the Pavements

1929 film

January 22, 1929 (1929-01-22)

Running time

85 minutesCountryUnited StatesLanguagesSound (Part-Talkie)
(English Intertitles)

Lady of the Pavements (UK title: Lady of the Night) is a 1929 American sound part-talkie romantic drama film directed by D. W. Griffith and starring Lupe Vélez, William Boyd, and Jetta Goudal. The screenplay was written by Sam Taylor, with contributions from an uncredited Gerrit Lloyd.^[1] While the film has a few talking sequences, the majority of the film features a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process.^[2]

Plot

Disgusted that his fiancée, Diane (Jetta Goudal) has been cheating on him, Karl (William Boyd) says he'd rather marry a "street walker" than her. To get back at him, Diane arranges for Nanoni ("Little One") (Lupe Vélez), a singer at a sleazy bar, to pretend to be a Spanish girl, from a convent, to fool him.^[3]

Cast

Lupe Vélez as Nanon del Rayon
William Boyd as Count Karl Von Arnim
Jetta Goudal as Countess Diane des Granges
Albert Conti as Baron Finot
George Fawcett as Baron Haussmann
Henry Armetta as Papa Pierre
William Bakewell as A Pianist
Franklin Pangborn as M'sieu Dubrey, Dance Master

Music

The film featured a theme song entitled “Where Is The Song Of Songs For Me?” which was composed by Irving Berlin.

Preservation

The film survives in a mute print that required the use of the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system. Soundtrack discs for reels 6 and 8 survive in the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Additional soundtrack discs to this film were donated by Arthur Lennig to the George Eastman House Motion Picture Collection in Rochester, New York.

References

^ Mayer, David (March 2009). Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith and the American Theatre. University of Iowa Press. ISBN 978-1-58729-840-0.
^ Progressive Silent Film List: Lady of the Pavements at silentera.com
^ Internet Movie Database