Oscar Strauss Accepts a Call To Hollywood

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 980, 24 May 1930, Page 25

Oscar Strauss Accepts a Call To Hollywood

Composer Will Work For Warner Brothers Oscar Strauss is the first German composer of note to accept a call to Hollywood to produce operettas in the form of sound films. It is believed that this marks the beginning of a new development of the talkie. Strauss has succumbed to the tempting offers of Warner Brothers. Sot Vienna or Berlin, or even Brt adway, will produce the songs which the world will sing in future, but Hollywood. Strauss, composer of “The Chocolate Soldier,” “The Last Waltz,” and “Marietta,” and the colleagues in the musical comedy world who are likely to follow him, are substitutes for these foreign stars Hollywood has been sending home of late. Their voices do rot take on even as faint a semblance of an English accent as talking picture audiences are accustomed to; also their particular form of attrac tlon for the public cannot be emulated by a substitute. It is natural that Germany, as the original home of the romantic musical play, should regard this movement with interest. But at present German producers cannot afford the salaries America offers, writes an English reviewer. * Oscar Strauss declared in Berlin that he welcomed the opportunity of producing sound films, as no mood or illness of a star can mar a man’s work and the provinces can always get as good a production as the big cities. He owns that a composer has naturally more scope when the writers of libretti invent a scene which no ordinary scene-shifter could stage every night. He thinks, and even hopes, it possible that the talkie may cause audiences to make other demands on the inventors of “books” for which he and Iris fellow composers have had to provide the musical score. What Oscar Strauss did not say, but what many in musical circles in Berlin believe, is that the day of musical comedy will be over as soon as the first really good musical “talkies” have been produced, and that in this new departure lies the real future of the sound film.