Pre-Order The Great Gabbo (1929) (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

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[Lord Dalek]

 

[Colin Jacobson]

By extreme coincidence, I first heard about "Great Gabbo" very recently when I saw von Stroheim's son worked on "Bachelor in Paradise". Since he's also credited as "Erich von Stroheim" on that movie, I was thrown for a loop and thought Daddy von Stroheim had fallen from grace. (No, I didn't realize EvS Sr. was already dead by the early 60s.)

Anyway, as I browsed a little I saw mention of "Great Gabbo" and obviously realized that's where "Simpsons" got it.

For all these years, I thought the name "Gabbo" was just a play on "Garbo"!

 

[moviepas]

In Australia Garbo is common slang for the guy who collects the rubbish for the city and is pronounced as Greta's name is and also how Erich says it in the film but others pronounce it as Gab-bo thru'out. I got a 16mm print probably on the late 1970s. Pity about the color sections being lost.

 

[dukiejosh54]

I just got this today but the music during the opening credits is missing. The version uploaded to youtube has music over the credits. Anyone familiar with this movie tell me if kino has made a mistake or if this is how the movie is suppose to be?

UPDATE: Never mind, just listened to the commentary with Richard Barrios and he said the film was originally released with no music during the opening credits.

 

[OLDTIMER]

Just received my copy of GABBO. I'm delighted with the video which is quite sharp and with a good grey scale. The musical sequences, which were originally filmed in a two-color process but are here presented in B&W, are just as sharp. This probably implies that their source was not a color print (which would not have been as sharp) but from the original negatives (or from a generation down) since these would have been B&W (from which the color matrices would have been made).
Unfortunately the sound has excessive treble which emphasises some high frequency distortion. I applied some treble cut and the sound was much better.

 

[Bert Greene]

The film showed what a smooth transition Betty Compson made to talkies. For some reason I thought she brought out her fiddle in this one, but I must have misremembered. Hadn't seen the movie in decades. It used to pop up on our local PBS station frequently, and it then remained a public-domain staple all through the years. But seeing it look so sharp and crisp really boosted the interest-level, especially being able to so clearly see all those wacko musical numbers and their crazy costumes. Spider webs, whoa! Got a kick out of seeing an unbilled Eddy Waller as the married vaudevillian, long before his b-western sidekick status in Rocky Lane westerns and the "Steve Donovan" tv-series. For that matter, our juvenile lead here, Don Douglas, eventually graduated to serial-hero "Deadwood Dick" (1940) for Columbia, before settling down to playing endless small roles as shady businessmen. Anyway, I was quite pleased with the Kino disc. The film is admittedly a bit clunky, weird, and suffers from the usual early-talkie growing pains, but I also find it oddly engaging, between Von Stroheim's prickly character and the musical numbers. Seeing it in this vastly improved picture quality makes quite a difference. Same thing with Kino's previous release of "Glorifying the American Girl" (1929).