Wedding on the Volga, reel 5


bohan_0005
Moving Image
35mm film
Film date code: 1929
Black and white
Original nitrate. Stored off site.

Content

Wedding on the Volga
WEDDING ON THE VOLGA was directed by Mark Schweid, produced by Charles Penser, shot at Metropolitan Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, completed in December 1929, and distributed by Hollywood Pictures Corp. It is a romance of old Russia told in English, and the wedding appears not to be a Jewish wedding (no chuppah). Metropolitan was a “poverty row” studio where independent producers went to make their films cheaply, and was known for turning out educational, religious, & ethnic-themed pictures. WEDDING screened in the U.S. in 1930 and at least once in London in May 1931. One of the two British reviews was decent but lukewarm, praising the sound. The second was decidedly unkind, complaining about the operatic nature of singing sequences, the poor recording, and the players’ accents. Sound films required longer shooting sequences where there was spoken dialogue, so multiple cameramen were employed. On this film, there were three: Bert Kann; Frank Zukor (aka Frank Zucker), who worked on the classic Yiddish film UNCLE MOSES; and Irving Browning, later a well-known still photographer with a long career. Sam Klein was the art director. The film uses four interior sets: a fishermen’s shack, a tavern, the heroine’s home, and a cabin. It can be seen as a filmed play, and this static staging limits the interest of some film scholars who appreciate daylight exteriors showing us city street scenes that no longer exist today. The first five reels of the six-reel film were donated to Brown Media in 2015. The sixth reel and the soundtrack (WEDDING was a sound-on-disc film) are missing. The New York State Archives’ Motion Picture Scripts Division holds a copy of the script.