Vitaphone Tribute Due at the Melnitz

“The Dawn of Sound: A Tribute to Vitaphone” is a remarkable preservation/restoration collaborative effort on the part of AT&T;, the Museum of Modern Art, the UCLA Film Archive and other institutions.

The series begins series Saturday (7:30 p.m.) at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with a re-creation of the sound system’s introduction to the public on Aug. 6, 1926, in New York City.

Vitaphone was a sound-on-disc system designed to provide orchestral accompaniment to silent films shown in small-town theaters where the cost of a live orchestra would be prohibitive. However, when Al Jolson ad-libbed “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” in “The Jazz Singer,” there was no turning back: The talkie revolution was under way, and Vitaphone would soon be supplanted by the more sophisticated direct-on-film sound.

Preceding Alan Crosland’s “Don Juan,” the first feature-length silent to be accompanied by a synchronized music score (by William Axt) and sound effects, are very self-conscious opening remarks by Will H. Hays, who was head of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Assn. during the industry’s transition from silent to sound, and a selection of shorts featuring eminent classical musicians in performance.

A DeMille-like swashbuckler, Warners’ “Don Juan” has in the title role a perfectly cast, still-slim but world-weary John Barrymore pursuing the ravishingly beautiful and chaste Mary Astor. Axt’s score is appropriate stirring, and the rich and elegant sets are by the master pioneer art director Ben Carre.

One of the most famous trouble-plagued silents, MGM’s “White Shadows in the South Seas” (1928), which screens Sunday at 2 p.m., was started by documentarian Robert Flaherty, who was replaced early on by the efficient W.S. Van Dyke. The result is a choppy mix of muckraking melodrama and ethnographic footage that nevertheless builds to a surprisingly powerful and tragic ending. The film, whose synchronized score--Metro’s first--features typical Polynesian themes, is a timeless indictment of the white man’s scabrous exploitation of Third World peoples and a touching love story between a compassionate doctor (Monte Blue) and the beautiful native princess (Raquel Torres) who redeems him.

“White Shadows in the South Seas” will be followed by “A Woman of Affairs,” a 1929 silent adaptation of Michael Arlen’s “The Green Hat” starring Greta Garbo as a rich, gallant star-crossed Englishwoman who inspires the love of many but never finds happiness. The combination of the transcendently beautiful and subtle Garbo, her most frequent director Clarence Brown, her favorite cameraman William Daniels, her leading man and offscreen lover, John Gilbert--plus Adrian’s soft-edged timeless gowns and elegant Cedric Gibbons sets--results in romantic screen magic so mesmerizing it overcomes a dated and laundered plot. The film does suggest the dark undertow of the Roaring ‘20s in which the clash between free spirits and lingering Victorian mores could indeed be tragic; its fine uncredited synchronized score is alternately tempestuous and melancholy.

It’s back to Warner Bros. for the Sunday evening silent double feature, Alan Crosland’s “Old San Francisco” (1927) and Roy Del Ruth’s “The First Auto” (1927). In the first, Darryl F. Zanuck, then a 25-year-old screenwriter, would have us believe that the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 occurred because Dolores Costello, the virginal daughter of a decayed Spanish land grant family, invoked the wrath of God to protect her from the fate worse than death in an underground Chinatown harem.

The strongest element in the film is Ben Carre’s splendid re-creation of Chinatown and the Barbary Coast, which he then reduced to shambles; the synchronized score is by Hugo Riesenfeld. A rural comedy subtitled “A Romance of the Last Horse and the First Horseless Carriage,” it was also written by Zanuck. It stars Russell Simpson (best remembered as Pa Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath”) and features elaborate sound effects and a nostalgic Herman Heller synchronized score.

The series--which will include “The Jazz Singer” and the first “100% All Talking Picture,” “Lights of New York”--runs through Feb. 18. Information: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.