Song of the Flame is a lost film from the early years of the Academy Awards; at least, it’s believed to be lost. At this point, only the audio track remains, preserving all of the songs from the film. You can actually listen to reels 1, 4, 5, 7, and 9 on YouTube, but who wants to merely listen to a movie that also features visuals? According to IMDB, the film is based upon a 1925 operetta with music by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach, Herbert Stothart, and George Gershwin. It's the story of “a peasant who is known as ‘The Flame,’ who leads a revolution in Russia. This peasant, who is in love with a Russian prince, saves his [the prince’s] life by agreeing to sacrifice her virginity to an evil fellow-conspirator.” Heavens, that sounds enticing, doesn’t it? It stars Bernice Claire as the peasant and Alexander Gray as the prince. Noah Beery and Alice Gentle star in key supporting roles. Beery is the only one that I’d heard of, but to be fair, Gentle was better known as an opera singer, and Claire and Gray starred in a series of operetta films together, sort of predecessors to Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Song of the Flame was their last film together, but I’ve not seen either of the other two. It was also one of the first musical films to be filmed completely in Technicolor, and it has a sequence shot in a widescreen process called Vitascope, the first color film to include widescreen. The film is also historically significant due it being released with the first Looney Tunes animated short, Sinkin’ in the Bathtub.
Oscar Nomination: Best Sound Recording
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