Song of the Flame

Song of the Flame is a 1930 PreCode musical operetta film photographed entirely in Technicolor. It was produced and distributed by First National Pictures, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. It was the first color film to feature a widescreen sequence, using a process called Vitascope, the trademark name for Warner Bros. widescreen process. The film, based on the 1925 Broadway musical of the same name, was nominated for an Academy Award for Sound Recording George Groves.

Noah Beery was widely praised for his deep bass voice, which he first exhibited in this film in the song One Little Drink. This song was satirized in the Bosko cartoon entitled The Booze Hangs High 1930. Based on the success of this song, Warner Bros. subsequently cast Beery in a number of musical films, most notably in Golden Dawn 1930. The public was so enthralled by his singing abilities that Brunswick Records hired Beery to record songs from both of these films which were issued in their popular series.The film is believed to be lost. Only the soundtrack, which was recorded separately on Vitaphone disks, survives. The extant sound discs from this film reveal a very high quality Vitaphone sound round, warm, and clear with good sound effects and a quality reproduction of speaking and singing voices as well as orchestrations. It would seem it fully deserved its Academy Award nomination for Best Sound. The score is a marvelously operatic one. All nine songs are preserved in the sound disc performances. There were four choruses as well, three of traditional Russian folk tunes and one drawn from Tchaikovskys The Nutcracker. ........

Source: Wikipedia