The transition silent stars had to make to sound movies was a treacherous one, the main problem being not that they sounded funny but that their voices didn’t always match their on-screen personas. This could work in two different ways. On the one hand, the voiceless William Powell was a standard issue supporting player, debonair enough but not especially notable. With sound, Powell’s one-of-a-kind sonorous, amused, wry and intimate delivery of lines made him a true and inimitable star. On the other hand, Buster Keaton’s mute personality defined him as a meek everyman, but adding his odd, rumbling baritone voice simply served to make him sound…stubborn, strange, not like the fellow everyone had grown to love over the previous decade.

\Which brings us to John Gilbert. The legend of Gilbert’s squeaky voice making audiences in the early sound era laugh him off the screen is firmly entrenched in Hollywood lore. But there has always been speculation that this wasn’t entirely true, that his bad relationship with MGM head Louis B. Mayer caused his decline due to Mayer intentionally putting him in absurd vehicles. I meet both theories in the middle–talkies like ‘His Glorious Night’ (such a title) were sub-par, but the bigger problem I think is that his voice didn’t really match his on-screen persona. Impossibly handsome and dashing, Gilbert in the silent era gave off an air of dangerous authority, exoticism and machismo. His voice, though, was a sort of high tenor–the kind of voice Jackie Gleason affects when Ralph and Norton are doing that play. Above are two views of Gilbert: the silent star and the sound version. I think it’s fairly obvious that the former had an authority and boldness that is simply missing in his voice. Indeed, his performance in the second clip is so absurd and his delivery so stilted that one might mistakenly believe the whole thing was a put-on. As anyone reading this surely knows, Gilbert’s downfall and subsequent suicide were the inspiration for the character Norman Maine in ‘A Star Is Born’. A number of years ago I was approached by a producer who’d optioned a book about Gilbert written by his daughter (or maybe granddaughter) and who thought there was a movie in the tale of the great but troubled star’s fall from grace. I thought (and still think) it would be a jim-dandy movie. We were both excited by the possibilities and my agent awaited a call from him to discuss deal terms for me to do a script. The call never came. The project never materialized. And I never heard from him again. I wish I could remember what the guys name was. On second thought…