The Last Warning, 1928

The Last Warning is a 1928 sound part-talkie American mystery film directed by Paul Leni, and starring Laura La Plante, Montagu Love, and Margaret Livingston. In addition to sequences with audible dialogue or talking sequences, the film features a synchronized musical score and sound effects along with English intertitles. The film apparently only survives in a cut-down edited silent version which was made for theaters that had not yet converted to sound. The soundtrack for the sound version, which was also released on sound-on-disc format, survives in private hands on Vitaphone type discs.

The Last Warning was also one of the very last part-talkie films Universal made, with roughly sixty feet of talking sequences added (only a minute or two). Its plot follows a New York producer’s attempt to re-stage a play five years after one of the original cast members was murdered in the theater. The film is based on the 1922 Broadway melodrama of the same name by Thomas F. Fallon, which in turn was based on the story House of Fear by Wadsworth Camp, the father of the writer Madeleine L’Engle.