Early in the sound film revolution, the major American studios decided to emulate a current Broadway trend by creating revues—films that featured discrete musical and dramatic sequences designed to dazzle all the senses and show off the various talents of their major stars. These often exposed stars’ less attractive attributes as well as exploiting what they were good at, Paramount on Parade (1930) proving, for example, that Clara Bow's singing voice was not strong. Warner Bros.'s contribution to the genre was one of the earliest and most commercially successful: Show of Shows, released in April 1929. It was as variable in entertainment, artistic merit, and technical sophistication as any of its competitors’ efforts, and was certainly as long (clocking in at well over two hours in its initial screenings) but among the musical and comic acts was an anomaly: the studio's most celebrated “serious” star, John Barrymore, famous as both a stage and screen actor and personality, making his sound film debut by delivering the Duke of Gloucester's soliloquy from William Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part One, on an impressive set featuring a menacing barren mountain, the whole affair introduced and concluded by spare but suitably ominous sound effects. Before his performance, Barrymore, clad in evening dress, steps in front of a stage curtain; the camera cuts to a medium close-up and he delivers the following introduction with an air of charm and almost diffidence. I include his pauses and emphases, particularly in the first part of the address, to convey Barrymore's informality and indeed intimacy with the audience: