DARKENED ROOMS (1929)

At a boardwalk carnival, Madame Silvara is a mentalist, fake but convincing, and when a customer wants her to take a "spirit photograph" of his dead girlfriend, she goes down the boardwalk to photographer Emery Jago and gets him to fake a picture. In Emery's shop, Ellen, a young out-of-work chorus girl, has come to have some publicity pictures made but faints from hunger. Emery feeds her and hires her as an assistant; her first job is to pose as the spirit behind Madame Silvara, with her face blurred in a ghostly way. Soon Emery decides that spiritualism might be an easy way to supplement his income so he and Ellen get into the racket with some help from Silvara. She sends them to the upper-class home of Joyce Clayton, who wants to get in touch with her aviator boyfriend who died in a crash. In a darkened room, Emery and Ellen hold a seance and claim to make contact, but Joyce's current boyfriend Billy turns on the lights and claims the whole thing is a fake. However, Joyce is a believer and goes to the boardwalk for another session. Ellen, worrying that Emery's interference will just prolong Joyce's misery and scotch things with Billy, hires Bert, an actor friend, to throw an unexpected kink into the seance, hoping that Emery will give up the act. Though not exactly a comedy, this hour-long melodrama is light in tone which works somewhat against the spiritualism plot but works for character development. Evelyn Brent, a star of silent films, is featured in one of her first talkies as Ellen and is quite good. Neil Hamilton (pictured), also transitioning to sound films, is just as good as Emery. Both are youthful, good looking and appealing, and they have nice chemistry. Though they did appear in films together again, they weren’t ever paired up like they were here, which is a shame. Gale Henry, known as a comic actress in many silent shorts, is fine as Madame Silvara. Sammy Bricker has a fun little comic relief role as a sailor who keeps dragging new girls into Emery's studio to have pictures taken. For the record, Doris Hill is Joyce and David Newell is Billy. Wallace MacDonald is Bert; he played in many silent films, but wound up as a prolific B-film producer in the 40s and 50s, mostly for Columbia. An enjoyable hour. [YouTube]