Made in late 1928 and early 1929, and released on March 4, the day President Herbert Hoover was inaugurated, The Younger Generation was, like The Jazz Singer, a part-silent, part-talking picture about a Jewish immigrant family in New York. It was shot first as a silent, but when Columbia belatedly decided to join the rush into talkies, several sequences were reshot with dialogue, with several cameras being used at once to obtain all the necessary angles with the sound in synchronization. Since Columbia was just beginning to retool its stages for sound, it had to rent facilities at Al Christie’s Hollywood Metropolitan Studios (now Hollywood Center Studios). The track was recorded on wax discs and played on records in theaters; a symphonic score was used during the non dialogue sections. (…) When “Variety”’s Alfred Rushford Grearson saw The Younger Generation during its premiere engagement in March at New York’s Colony Theater, he found that “sound reproduction at this performance was as bad as it could be. Sound and action were way out of step. Lips and machine were ten words apart and dramatic lines inspired only laughs”. However, Grearson blamed the problem on the disc sound projection system rather than on Columbia’s recording: “Quality of tone production is excellent, and all five principal characters sound well”. Despite all the mechanical encumbrances, The Younger Generation (based on Fannie Hurst’s 1927 play It Is to Laugh, with a screenplay by Sonya Levien and Howard J. Green) has more emotional power than any of Capra’s other pictures of the 1920s. Capra obviously felt a strong identification with the story of a Jewish immigrant (Ricardo Cortez) who grows up in the ghetto of New York’s Delancey Street and feels he has to deny his ethnic origins to rise to success in America. (…) Despite his denials, The Younger Generation abounds with parallels to Capra’s own life.

Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Simon & Schuster, New York 1992 (revised edition, St Martin’s Griffin, New York 2000)