Blu Ray Review: The Love Trap (1929)

Kino Lorber has released William Wyler’s The Love Trap, a very significant film featuring Laura LaPlante.  The Love Trap was released in 1929 just as silent cinema was transitioning to sound film production.  By this time, cinema had been perfected without sound, the 1920s concluding with great classics like The Crowd, The Docks of New York, and Seventh Heaven.  But sound technology promised another layer to motion pictures.

While some films that had been shot in silent form were hastily re-done as talkies (e.g. Harold Lloyd’s Welcome Danger), others were silent with sequences featuring sound dialog (such as 1927’s The Jazz Singer, noted as the first sound movie).

Laura LaPlante is a chorus girl whose inability to be graceful enough with the dance steps gets her fired from a musical by the choreographer.  Going with a friend to a singles party, she is given $50 by a playboy but escapes his advances and leaves without the money.  She arrives home to find her furniture outside, having been evicted from her apartment due to back rent.  A rainstorm occurs and she is found by a wealthy benefactor, played by Neil Hamilton. They fall for each other, but his snooty family disapproves of her common status, and his uncle, who was at the party, believes she is merely a gold digger.

LaPlante is all clumsy earnestness, playing her role with a comic authority when presenting awkwardness, while easily anchoring the more serious scenes.  Neil Hamilton (decades later Commissioner Gordon on TV’s Batman) represents unpretentious handsome, wealthy heroism. The plot, the characters, the entire attitude is vintage 1920s, just as the decade was concluding into a much different 1930s with its Depression, hobo camps, and gangsters.

Beyond its importance to cultural history, The Love Trap is also important to cinema.  Its visuals are bolstered by a synchronized score and sound effects that enhance rather than distract.  It isn’t sound for the sake of sound, as the audio is organic to the visual.  Director William Wyler chooses his shots carefully and for maximum impact, cutting from close-ups to medium shots. 

The film’s significance is matched by its being such of an amusing romantic serio-comedy, among the last of its kind from an era that defined a certain style all its own. 

Kino Lorber’s blu ray is a 4K restoration by Universal Pictures from the 35mm nitrate print provided by the Wyler Estate and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration services conducted by StudioPost, An NBC/Universal Company.  It features an interesting, informative y commentary by Professor and Film Scholar Jason A. Ney.

The blu ray is available here:  LoveTrap