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Clip description
A montage establishing CBD Sydney leads to the arrival of Paula Marsh (Isabel McDonagh billed as 'Marie Lorraine’) and ‘Lady Worth’ (Leal Douglas) at a jewellery store, where they beguile store manager Keith Manion (Frank Hawthorne) into allowing them to ‘borrow’ a valuable necklace.
Note: This clip has been pillarboxed to show the maximum amount of the full frame.
Curator’s notes
The title ‘Twenty years of progress’ establishes Sydney (not named as such) in 1929-30. The montage’s accompanying music – a waltz-time piece whose massed violins and oom-pah rhythm suggests the grace and bustle of a European city – adds a cosmopolitan atmosphere of a kind the McDonaghs were keen to inject into all their films.
The sequence at the jewellery store combines shots from the silent version with those newly filmed at Standardtone’s Sydney Showground studio. Where most of the shots including those of Paula Marsh are drawn from the silent version, there are several, including those of Paula and the store manager Keith Manion, that were newly filmed with synchronised sound. Where new and old images of Manion have a visual continuity, the contrast between the new and old shots of Paula is jarring.
