Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Great Gabbo (1929)

With Erich von Stroheim’s final feature film of the silent era, Queen Kelly (1928), having been shut down in midproduction, he took on an unusual starring role in an independently-produced full-sound film produced and directed by fallen director James Cruze.

Von Stroheim plays a mean vaudeville ventriloquist who pushes away the woman who loves him and immerses himself in conversations with his dummy. When the Great Gabbo achieves Broadway success and he again crosses pathes with his love, Gabbo must wrestle with his own neurotic illusions and her jealous singing partner. When his lover refuses to come back to him, Gabbo’s hard shell cracks to reveal the nut inside.

As was the case with several early sound films, The Great Gabbo is saddled with a number of average musical numbers (some of them silly, all of them fairly representative of late 1920s musical theatre). But the highlight of the film is von Stroheim’s slow-paced and quirky performance.

— Carl Bennett

This Blu-ray Disc edition has been mastered from a 2K HD scan of an excellent 35mm print from the Library of Congress. The print is detailed and the greyscale range is evenly balanced but there are a couple of brief moments of significant damage.

Supplementary material is limited to a poorly presented audio commentary by author Richard Barrios.

We recommend this home video edition of The Great Gabbo exclusively for the main presentation, not for the commentary.

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This DVD edition has been prepared from a 35mm restoration print prepared by the Library of Congress. The print appears to have been duplicated (for the most part) from the original nitrate negative, with the print’s excellent image detail and very broad range of greytones well-maintained in Kino International’s full-frame video transfer. On high-definition equipment, the disc renders a very filmlike image for a pleasing viewing experience.

As noted in the disc’s supplemental section, the restoration print features more footage than has been seen in theatrical prints and home video editions over the years, but musical numbers that were shot in the Multicolor color-film process are presented here in their surviving black & white form, and the “Ga-Ga Bird” production number is missing altogether as it is presumed lost.

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You can assume that the film is presented with its original soundtrack. Yes?

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