Happy Days | |
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Directed by | Benjamin Stoloff |
Written by | Sidney Lanfield Edwin J. Burke |
Produced by | William Fox |
Starring | Charles E. Evans Marjorie White Richard Keene Stuart Erwin |
Cinematography | Lucien N. Andriot John Schmitz J.O. Taylor |
Edited by | Clyde Carruth |
Music by | Harry Stoddard |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Fox Film Corporation |
Release dates |
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Running time | 80 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Happy Days is a 1929 American pre-Code musical film directed by Benjamin Stoloff, which was the first feature film shown entirely in widescreen anywhere in the world, filmed using the Fox Grandeur 70 mm process. French director Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) had a final widescreen segment in what Gance called Polyvision. Paramount released Old Ironsides (1927), with two sequences in a widescreen process called "Magnascope", while MGM released Trail of '98 (1928) in a widescreen process called "Fanthom Screen".[1]
The film features an array of stars who were contracted to William Fox's Fox Film Corporation at that time, including Marjorie White, Will Rogers, Charles Farrell, Janet Gaynor, George Jessel, El Brendel, Ann Pennington, Victor McLaglen, Dixie Lee, Edmund Lowe, and Frank Richardson. It also featured the first appearance of Betty Grable on film, aged 12, as a chorus girl, and Sir Harry Lauder's nephew, Harry Lauder II, a conductor for Fox, who was drafted into the chorus.