“‘When a man finds himself sliding downhill he should do everything to reach the bottom in a hurry and pass out of the picture in a hurry’, he said. There was always a dark reverse to the laughter and optimism. There was no apparent reason why he should not have succeeded in sound films. When in 1929 he appeared with Mary Pickford in The Taming of the Shrew, he came off very much better than his wife. He was dashing, funny, had a good voice and spoke his lines with the attack and relish of a trained Shakespearian actor. But a voice, even a good one, was not necessarily a gift to the idols of the silent screen. It may have been that while the vast sets of Robin Hood and The Thief of Bagdad could not dwarf him, a voice did – merely by removing that magical difference which set apart the silent stars, to whom eyes and face and mind were nature, by bringing him back to human scale. Whatever the reason, nothing seemed to work for him in sound pictures”.

(David Robinson, The Hero, cit.)