‘The Painted Angel’ (1929) starring Billie Dove is a lost film–for the most part. Like many Vitaphone releases of those early talking pictures years, the discs of the soundtrack have survived (Vitaphone’s early sound system involved the sound on separate discs, linked to a projector which showed the mute film. Gee, guess there were never any problems with that set-up…) All too often the mute film or the film-free discs turn up, independent of each other. The late Ron Hutchersons ‘Vitaphone Project’, one of the most important film restoration programs, has for years been seeking to find missing elements and pairing them up again. Thus far no such luck for ‘The Painted Angel’, a movie with a story and a setting–New York nightclubs in the 1920s–that’s incredibly up my alley. As talking pictures gradually (and then suddenly) became the norm in 1928/1929, various gimmicks were deployed to maximize the entertainment value in the nascent but already incredibly popular technology. One of them was talking credits–or sometimes talking trailer advertisements. The above four minute soundtrack of the trailer for ‘The Painted Angel’ is a delightful example of this short-lived fad. Not only are the actors introduced in song but parts of the movie appear to have been dramatized–not by showing scenes from the movie but with reenactments of the story points and scenes. At least that’s how it sounds to me. By the way, the movie was based on a short story by Fannie Hurst, an extremely popular author of the day who wrote the novel ‘Back Street’, which was filmed a mere three times. In spite of her success, she is mostly known today as the butt of a Mel Brooks joke. It comes in the song ‘Hope For the Best (expect the worst).’ After singing the title the line that follows is: ‘You might be Tolstoy…or Fanny Hurst…’ Or you might be the author of a short story that was made into a movie that got lost somewhere along the way…