Kevin Kearney: Audio Artist, Sound Designer, Analogue Location Sound Recordist

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

PRODUCTIONS and

WORKS CONSULTED

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily

reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for

them.

Cover Photo:

Kevin Kearney, Walkabout (1971)

Arnhem Land, Northern Territory

November, 1969

c Brody T. Lorraine, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA 2002

This book is an historical memory …

a balance between the personal experience

and the historical context

…

… With every funeral of potential contributors to our

film heritage, we historians lament not only the passing of

the filmmakers themselves but the fact that their unique stories

will, in many instances, not survive either.

Martha Ansara, Graham Shirley,

Joan Long and Judith Adamson

The Filmmakers Oral History Group

Balmain

Sydney Morning Herald—Letter

23 January, 1995

CHAPTER 1 

LAWN TENNIS (i953)

It’s a long way back I’m gazing, and the stage has changed since then; Just an echo finds me sometimes, bring back the scene again. Oh, the heart beats slower measure than it used to beat, alas, When a Little Irish Mother dressed us all in time for Mass. I have lounged in fast expresses, I have travelled first saloon, I have heard the haunting music that the winds and waters croon, I have seen the road careering from a whirring motor-car, Where the Careys couldn’t pass us, or our sense of fitness jar, But the world is somehow smaller, somehow less enchanting than When I saw it o ‘er the tailboard of the Old Mass Shandrydan.

OldMass Shandrydan

Around the Boree Log

John O’Brien

Kevin Joseph Kearney’s paternal and maternal ancestors go back to County Cavan, a part of the ancient Irish principality of Breiffni which forms one of the five counties that make up the northern portion of central Ireland. North east of the city of Cavan is Shantemon Mountain site of a line of standing stones where the O’Reilly family, rulers of eastern Breiffni were inaugurated in the late middle ages before many centuries later some relocated to Australia. Kearney’s family are survivors of the Irish holocaust, the Great Famine, Great Hunger or as the Irish call it, An Gorta Mor or An Drochshad when their English colonisers chose to force them to die in their own land. Known mainly outside Ireland as the Potato Famine caused by a potato fungus, it occurred between 1845 and 1851 and in six years it is estimated that more than 1 million people died from hunger and disease caused by extreme starvation with at least a further 2 million taking part in the Irish Diaspora that occurred during and after the holocaust the effects of which were, for over a century, devastating and catastrophic socially, biologically, politically and economically to the Irish people.

There is indeed a similarity to the Irish situation and that of the holocaust on the Indigenous population of Australia. Both suffered colonisation but in the case of Australia it was by the British, Irish and Europeans of all religious persuasions. Colonisation of Ireland gave control of 95% of Irish land to Protestant landlords. Similarly colonisation of Australia by Europeans, including the Irish, and others has denied Indigenous Australians over 95% of their land. The British instituted penal laws which denied the Catholic Irish population their freedoms. Similarly the actions of the European Australian government over Indigenous Australians has denied them their freedom.

Both Indigenous Australians and the Irish have been moved into concentration camps in their own countries. For example, workhouses were built throughout Ireland and Irish were moved into these workhouses. The one in Limerick was built to house 800 people but contained over 2, 515, the inmates were issued gaol like uniforms, forced to sleep in male and female dormitories and fed porridge causing many more to starve. Indigenous Australians have Palm Island, Cherbourg, Kinchella, Koonibba and many more throughout Australia with the same dormitory conditions and the same overcrowding. Both were forbidden to speak their language, practice their faith, hold public office, own land or hold any money although in the case of the Irish they could hold up to 10 pounds. In both cases these penal laws were brought about to push the Irish and Indigenous Australians into submission by force and inferiority and such laws were justified by the coloniser as necessary to diminish the character of the people they were colonising. Strangely the Irish remembered none of their own travails following their arrival in Australia.

Over the years Kearney has returned to Ireland several times and, according to the Irish people that he has met He’d be a bit of a Viking with his blue eyes and blonde hair—not a true Celt. His mother, Kathleen Veronica Mary Philomena Reilly, and his father, John (called Jack) Joseph Kearney, were both born in country New South Wales at Kingsdale and Taralga in March and January, 1898 respectively just three years after Thomas Edison began marketing his Kineto-phone, a coin operated peep show with a recorded musical accompaniment that lasted less than a minute.

Kingsdale and Taralga is the original home of the Burra Burra, Mulwarrie and Tarlo people but in 1819 their land, between Abercrombie, Taralga and Cur-rabungla to the east of Laggan, was invaded by a party led by Dr. Charles Throsby and the next year it was followed up by James Meehan who camped at Grabben Gullen on his way to Orange and Bathurst. Both Kearney’s paternal and maternal grandparents were part of the later influx of invaders and in 1900 Kathleen’s father Bernard Reilly moved from Kingsdale to another property, Athol Vale, near Crookwell. Like her future husband, Kathleen spent her formative years in the Bush and even at the age of 80 after 40 years in the same Park Parade flat in Bondi, she emphasised this belief in her memoirs, Remembrances of Athol Vale (1978), saying emphatically I am a Bush girl.

Both Reilly and Jack Kearney grew up in the period of the silent movies when films, at their most sophisticated, were screened with real time live music and sub titles although sound in varying formats had been used to enhance the film track since 1895. In 1905 and 1906 when Bernard Reilly became an elected alderman on the first Crookwell Shire council, a type of talking picture was produced by British born Joseph Perry and his three sons who had moved to Australia from New Zealand. They used a combination of both gramophone and biograph consisting of a little clock photographed revolving in the left-hand corner of the screen and this was combined with a similar clock, with an illuminated hand, which was contained in a metal box and geared to a gramophone motor. Called a cinephone, its operator had to keep the hands of both clocks moving in synchronisation through the 100 foot running time of each cinephone movie for it to work correctly (Kay: 7). But the Kinetophone, Cinephone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope and Vocafilm all failed from lack of synchronisation and very poor sound quality.

In 1912 Kathleen’s mother, Catherine Cummins Reilly, died and the widower Reilly courted the widow Brigid Mary Kearney who had a twelve year old son John Joseph Kearney who was always known as Jack. Bernard married Brigid but her son retained his father’s surname of Kearney. In May 1924 Kearney’s mother and father, Kathleen and Jack, were married in St. Mary’s Cathedral on the corner of College and Cathedral Streets, Hyde Park, Sydney. Kearney thinks that because his mother and father were step brother and step sister a veil of silence fell over any discussions of family background. Sadly as a consequence of this he knows nothing more about his father’s immediate ancestry, and very little about his mother except that The Bernard Mail car, which began carrying children to

Crookwell District Rural School in 1949, was named after his grandfather Reilly (Bayley: 99).

Kathleen and Jack’s first child, Helen, was born on March 1, 1925 the year a few short films were made incorporating music, sound effects, singing and talking. Through the mid 1920s with the aid of vacuum tubes, which made the recording and reproduction of sound much clearer and more sensitive, the early sound difficulties were being overcome. This in turn made it possible for the movie industry to move towards achieving the seminal technical innovation of analogue sound on film which would eventually allow for the continuation of permanent records to be maintained and which would eventually result in modern sound design.

Sound with film is less than 80 years old and there are people alive today who can remember a time when films were described as silent and who can remember the first time they saw a film with a sound track. The mystical element of sound has played an important role in the creative and artistic flow of life from very early times. In the pre Hellenic period sound, depicted as maternal goddesses holding lyres, was believed to be the beginning of Earth and according to the tenets of Hinduism, sound in the form of Krishna’s flute caused the birth of the world. In traditional doctrines sound is held to be the first of all things created and a concept of Sound is contained in the lament quoted in the Polmandres of Hermes Trismegistos. (Cirlot 300). Sound is the invisible component of, among other arts, analogue sound on film production and in essence, sound on film includes both creative and technical expertise coming together in a complex form of artistic technology contained in both a tangible and an intangible form. It is a very fluid enterprise and one that demands attention and tolerance of its creative inconsistencies.

Bertrand and Collins suggest it is almost impossible to discuss movies without addressing television because one changed the nature of the other (121). In 1925, during what is described as the silent film era, television (TV) began its first test transmission in London when John Logie Baird, the person the Australian television Logie award is named for, adapted the work of an earlier scientist to enable him to give the first practical demonstration of television. Americans experienced the first successful long-distance demonstration of television in 1927 when Secretary Herbert Hoover’s image was screened for selected viewers . From this moment television ran hand in hand with sound on film and there are still people who were there at the beginnings ofboth sound on film and television and Kearney’s sister, Helen Kearney Krohn Stewart, is one such person.

On 6 August 1926 the Manhattan Opera House, New York, presented a programme consisting of sound shorts featuring the violinist Mischa Elman and the tenor Giovanni Martinelli and in the same year American Francis Johnson demonstrated the concept of sound on film claiming the title inventor of the talkies. Unfortunately he failed to obtain the appropriate patents and as a result lost any claim to the financial returns involved in the invention and died penniless in Paris in 1931 (Reade 152). In January 1927, sound-over was used on several Australian short films, including Opera versus Jazz (1927), and the Duke of York’s speech on his arrival in Australia on 25 March, 1927 and when he opened the first session of the Federal Parliament in Canberra on May 9, 1927. (Australia’s Yesterdays 112).

Warner Bros. is credited with producing the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927) which was directed by Alan Crosland from a screenplay by Alfred A. Cohn starring Al Jolson and screened on October 6, 1927 at Warners’ Theatre, Broadway, New York, Frederic D. Schwarz wrote of the event saying, The Jazz Singer was in most respects, a conventional melodrama with the major portion of the dialogue appearing in the normal silent fashion of title cards and run to the accompaniment of a pre recorded score. But the film’s attraction was in the few sequences recorded on Vitaphone during which Jolson talked and sang Mammy. (88) No credit was given on the film to the three man sound team of recordist George Groves, sound supervisor Nathan Levison and sound technician William Mueller.

Warner’s Vitaphone system was not truly sound on film since it recorded sound on a separate disc to be played with the film but it is strange that when Warners were developing the Vitaphone system it didn’t think it was a good idea to use it for dialogue. It appears the company’s major reason for using the Vita-phone technique was financial and profit oriented since the pre-recorded disc allowed for the deletion of live orchestras at screenings thus affording the exhibitor, Warner Bros., a major cost saving. As Harry Warner said, ‘Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?’ (Schwarz 88) French filmmaker Jean Renoir wrote: In the silent days the majority of films could be regarded as film-maker’s films. The introduction of sound, by extending the technical range, hastened the death of that very simple system. This innovation also marked a step towards the non-interpretive reproduction of reality, or what was believed to be reality." (13)

Paramount’s Adolph Zukor produced his first sound film, Manhattan Cocktail (1928), directed by Dorothy Azner. Using the non sound on film technique of the Western Electric Sound System the uncredited sound department introduced the first version of the overhead, or boom microphone (National Enquirer 43). This innovation established and gave its name to the sound department position of Boom Operator a role which is still an essential to the moviemaking process today. As Kevin Kearney says, A sound recordist is only as good as his Boom Op. It is a role that requires a high degree of both technical and creative expertise. (2.2.03).

Many silent filmmakers never made a successful transition including Australian filmmaker Raymond Longford, Australian based Perry and American D.W.. Griffiths even though he attempted some spoken dialogue in Dream Street (1921). Perhaps those that failed shared Griffiths’ perspective when he wrote in the May, 1924 edition of Coliers that there would never be actors speaking in films because movie patrons much preferred to listen to live music. Putting dialogue on films would be an appalling action, an action that I do not want and one that I believe nobody else would want either. (Fadiman 144—5) Griffiths’ comment could relate to the fact that many of the leading actors he directed lacked voices with pitch, tone or accent rendering them unable to make the transition from the silent movies to sound. Even the use of the newly established and powerful production position of Dialogue Director, employed in the early 1930s to teach silent actors how to talk, did not help many of them. Today a dialogue director is only present on the set if there is a requirement for them to assist with such things as regional pronunciations, idioms and accents and certainly does not have the cache it had in the early 30s. But from 1927 sound with film was here to stay and is now a major component of film production. Feature director, actor and Tropfest founder, John Polsen says, Strangely, audiences will sooner put up with grainy images than bad sound and inaudible dialogue. (69)

Five years after his parents’ marriage Australia, like much of the world, experienced the Great Depression which lasted from 1928 to 1938 and affected primarily the United States, Europe and the British Empire which included Australia. Kearney’s father had joined The Farmers’ & Graziers Co-operative Grain Insurance & Agency in 1926 and, even though he took a pay cut, he was fortunate to be able to stay in this job for the next 16 years but many men had no jobs at all for the entire period and many families suffered the most dire hardship. But as often happens major innovations grow out of times of great stress and in March 1929 Fox Films became the first major Hollywood studio to switch exclusively to the analogue sound on film, a process they had bought in 1927 and under the name Movietone it quickly became the dominant industry sound standard. Fox Films chose to work with sound on film rather than Vitaphone, even though Vitaphone had been responsible for the initial sound breakthrough with The Jazz Singer.

From this beginning sound on film became and remained the international standard for 16 mm and 35 mm analogue movie productions for sixty years. Sound on film is a double system and the process incorporates two formats, sound tape and film stock which are turned into a single system when combined in a laboratory. This laboratory process requires the original location sound tape be transferred to ¡ or % magnetic tape with the magnetic sound tape being eventually combined with the film stock into one single system final print. With the advent of sound on film another element in the form of the sound track was added to the 16 mm film stock and later the wider 35 mm. stock Prior to sound the image was contained within the entire 16 mm or 35 mm film but in combining sound and vision the visual image was diminished by the width of the sound track. But even though the film stock was diminished in size, the silent film stock measurements remained a constant throughout the period of analogue film production (Borde 4-6)

Kathleen and Jack’s second child, Bernard named for Kathleen’s father, was born on April 7, 1929 just one month after the birth of analogue sound on film and one month before the first Oscar presentations of the newly formed American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took place in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Boulevard on May 16, 1929. The next month Australia’s spectacular State Theatre built to incorporate the new era of sound on film and with its band rising on an elevator opened in Market Street, Sydney and in August 1929, Australia’s first sound on film interview was recorded by an uncredited sound recordist on the mail boat Sierra for Fox Movietone News.

The use of sound effects (SFX) as a second sound track to be mixed with the dialogue track, was introduced by Head Sound Department, Douglas Shearer, on the 1930 Hollywood film, The Big House (1930). Produced by Irving Thalberg and directed by George Hill this film, through its collection of SFX, began the long journey towards sound design. To avoid what happened with the addition of a dialogue tracks, and not wanting to further diminish the vision, a new post production role came into being, the sound editor, the person who edited all of the tracks so that they could later be mixed together into one sound track and added to the vision. This innovative notion and initial collection of SFX/wild tracks gave rise over the years to more and more intricate productin/post-production sound mixes and eventually created the new role of Sound Designer.

The emergence of sound on film in Australian productions did not restrain the importation of British and American product. Australia produced fewer sound films than they had produced silent films. but new and fantastic picture theatres were built owned, in many instances, by American production, distribution and exhibition companies who would allow only their own sound films to be screened in their theatres. The American combines proved extremely stiff competitors for the few Australian producers and exhibitors that existed and Australian film historians show that with the beginning of sound on film in 1930 the quest for the survival of the Australian movie industry began. Many issues, including both political and the industrial, caused the demise of Australia’s film industry at this point in time and the momentum to rebuild would not be regained for another three decades.

Almost from the beginning credits are a contentious issue and credit for recording Australia’s first sound on film movie is a case in point. Eric Reade lists Vic Myers as Australia’s first film sound recordist for Fellers (1930) produced by Artaus Ltd, co-directed by Arthur Higgins and Austin Fay with cinematography by Tasman Higgens (287). But even as Fellers was being credited as being the first sound film, the Australian government productions This is Australia and So This is Sydney were screened in April, 1930 at the now demolished but once spectacular Prince Edward Theatre, Castlereagh St., Sydney and they were also fighting for the honour of first sound picture. Reade suggests that the honour for any first between these two films was that of first documentary with dialogue and sound effects. (148)

This was also disputed by the Publicity and Promotions Consultant for the 1929 opening of the State Theatre, Paddington born Ken Hall who in 1932 became foundation general manager of Bondi’s Cinesound Studios going on to be regarded as the most successful filmmaker in Australia’s history after making 18 feature films—17 of them for Cinesound—a success which provided an uninterrupted flow of features produced entirely in Australia. (Taylor 71-72). Hall believed that Union Theatre’s Cinesound made Australia’s first sound film, On Our Selection (1932) . Produced by its star Bert Bailey, co written by Bailey, Hall and Steele Rudd, directed by Hall with Wally Sully as cinematographer and sound by Clive Cross and Arthur Smith. Reade argues that Australasian Films started On Our Selection (1932) in 1931 and that in 1932 Cinesound (owned by Union Theatres) took over the production house, an old skating rink at Bondi Junction which was converted into a studio, and completed the production in the same year. Two years after Fellers was produced, completed and screened. The passing of years can change history and this issue of different takes on history is considered by David Perry, a founding member of Ubu Films and then the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative. In 1993 Perry wrote to FilmNews to correct an historical inaccuracy by George Miller, i.e. that Albie Thoms’ Marinetti (1969) premiered at an early Sydney Film Festival: I thought it would be a good idea to challenge George Miller’s apparent assertion before it becomes an accepted fact with all the implications which might arise from that „.I still think it’s a good idea to reassert first hand accounts of those early days because many of the subsequent histories of film work in this country have very different axes to grind than those of some other of us. Marinetti screened, at Thoms own expense at the Wintergarden, Rose Bay on 17 June, 1969 (2)

The year 1931 was a very important year for sound recording . it was the year Pfleumer and AEG designed and built the first magnetic tape recorder. German ingenuity and flair has led the way in sound and film equipment ever since and this recorder remained close to the design of the analogue recorders that were used for the next fifty years.

But not all producers embraced sound on film and, just as there were various types of sound with film in the United States, there were also various types of sound with film in Australia. For example, producer A.R.. Harwood’s film, Out of the Shadows (1931), is credited as being the first Australian sound on disc film, a process of cutting into one and a half inch thick wax discs to create the sound track. Unfortunately the sound film was never able to be screened and cameraman Reg Edwards says it was because after an uncredited Belgian soundman advised Harwood that there would be no problem cutting wax in synchronisation with the actual shooting of the scenes, he was hospitalised. His assistant took over only to be faced by a catastrophe beyond his wildest imaginings. In another first Edwards was not using arcs but had rigged up shop window lights, fitted 1000 watt lamps in them and placed them on stands. Enormous heat was generated from these lamps. Its effect on the wax recordings can be imagined. On the second day of shoot the stand-in sound recordist arrived to find that overnight the wax had sunk in the middle making the recordings useless (Reade 146). Yet even though he suffered such a disaster with his feature film, Harwood was successful in the newsreel industry. Later that same year he produced the first of the Herald Newsreel programs and cinematographer Roy Driver remembers Australasian Film’s outside broadcast (OB) van carried one ton of batteries behind the front seat to operate both the camera and sound recorder.

Early Australian sound films were certainly not inferior to the overseas imports. Just as they had done in the silent era, so European Australians made their own important contributionto analogue location sound recording in the new sound on film era. J. Alan (George) Kenyon headed producer/director Hall’s Special Effects Department at Cinesound and it was his view that Hollywood always watched with interest Australian production techniques and there have been Australian production personnel who have made remarkable technological and creative contributions to the international sound on film industry following the changeover from the silent to the analogue sound era.

Even if it was not the first sound on film production, Hall’s remake of Longford’s 1920’s silent movie, On Our Selection (1932), was a breakthrough film for the Sound Department. When production began in 1931, Arthur Smith, an extraordinarily talented Tasmanian radio engineer, liberated sound from its need to be connected to electricity. This critical innovation for sound recording required a slip-ring motor that allowed sound to be recorded by battery power while still maintaining synchronisation with the camera. The recorder was still attached to the camera but, because it was battery operated, it was able to be moved away from its electricity source (Reade 150). Freeing the recorder from an electrical connection gave the sound department an enormous advantage when recording both exterior location sound and studio sound.

Continuing on its path of sound innovation the production saw the sound team of Smith and Cross introducing their own boom pole, A wooden upright with another piece nailed at right angles to support the microphone (Reade 77). Even though the uncredited sound department on Manhattan Cocktail had designed a boom for Azner’s film production some four years earlier, boom poles were not readily available in Australia and even as late as 1969 Australian sound recordists were still building their own boom poles to their own specifications.

But Smith’s sound department overcame with even more than this on Hall’s production. In an interview given forty one years later, Hall could still remember what it was like for Smith who with two large, heavy as lead microphones had to contend with Hall’s only camera, an old Bell and Howell from the silent era which was fitted with a high-speed gate which caused a terrible noise. Again, Smith, through technical and creative expertise, diminished background noise by using a new approach to the actual process of recording. Smith’s solution was to place the camera under a canvas blimp and then to further cover it with rugs and blankets. This is a method that is still employed today to diminish such things as noisy generators in the lighting department. Further sound problems were created for Smith by the small assortment of old silent film lighting equipment of mostly, even then, old fashioned Kliegl (aka Klieg) broads or floods which were, of course, carbon arc. Almost as noisy as the camera, they hissed and fumed to ruin many a take and this Smith could not fix with a blimp. (Kay 7). But the work of the two pioneer soundmen was extremely innovative and shows why Hollywood was, and is, interested in the creativity and technical talent of Australian production personnel. Their significant sound achievements in the first years of Australia’s analogue sound on film era are still regarded by those who followed as nothing less than astounding.

In general the innovation of the battery did not really cause film productions to be shot in exterior locations. It actually had quite the opposite effect. Synchronised sound on film brought productions indoors so that ambient background and atmospheric sound could be controlled. At this time actors did not have the option of being able to post sync their dialogue so if there were any problems with the sound recording, or, indeed, their performance, there was little that could be done.

Background noise was a major problem on exterior shoots when dialogue is being filmed and even today many productions, especially those that are dialogue driven, are still shot on sound stages and if background noise is too much the actor is required to post sync alone in a sterile recording studio which is not necessarily the best situation for performance. Following the introduction of the SFX track by Shearer, SFX innovations allowed a separate track of background noise to be added to the final sound mix in the form of an Atmos track, i.e. atmosphere track, recorded at the actual shoot site when all other extraneous sounds are hopefully absent. At this time the sound recordist captures background noise which is described by French philosopher/author Michel Serres in his exploration of auditory archaeology as belle noisure and of which he says:Background noise is the sound of our being. Background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging. It has itself no background, no contradictory noise. Noise cannot be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, as every message, every cry, every call, every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence. As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise; as soon as a form looms up or pokes through, it reveals itself by veiling noise. So noise is not a matter of phenomenology, it is a matter of being itself. I think they’re moments when we are most fully ourselves. (13)

By 1932 with the beginnings of sound on film, there was growing interest in the development of commercial television and this caused the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to call for tenders with the idea of working towards ultimate national transmission. The BBC received two tenders, one from Baird which required a continuous film system and the second from EMI suggesting an iconoscope, a camera tube process which formed the first fully electronic scanning system. As Britain struggled through the Great Depression the BBC tried both systems for 12 months before considering Baird’s system too costly and unrealistic and selecting the EMI proposal in 1934 putting into practice the process of 405 horizontal lines and the 4: 3 Academy frame for their screens. The

United States and Australia which came to television after Britain used a 525 and 625 horizontal line system respectively with the same aspect ratio. The more horizontal lines the better the visual image. With the film industry’s analogue sound on film process less than five years old, tape technology simultaneously occurred and grew alongside the talkies.

Pfleumer and AEGs magnetic tape recorder had been released three years earlier broadening the appeal of the tape recorder on the international market and in 1934 AEG requested that I.G.. Farber (BASF) release the first magnetic tape on a plastic base good enough for industrial production and use with Pfleumer and AEGs magnetic tape recorder.

Yorta Yorta man William Cooper formed the Australian Aboriginal League (AAL) in 1934 to lobby for Aboriginal rights. The league included Bill and Eric Onus, Marge Tucker, Douglas Nicholls, Tom Condah and Jack and Irene Clark. In the same year Australia’s leading silent film director Longford directed his first talkie and his last feature film, The Man They Could Not Hang (1934), a remake of the 1912