Alicia I love this movie so much

PodBill Just what I expected

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

calvinnme ... was my reaction and my desire when I sat through the painful talking portions of this movie. The dialogue was uninspired if not just plain weird and Delores Costello has never sounded more ridiculous. I'll chalk that up to the dialogue coach, since so many early female vocal performances in films sounded similarly falsely aristocratic. She's supposed to be a singer/dancer in a vaudeville-like troupe and they have her speaking like she's the queen of England? See Ms. Costello in Magnificent Ambersons if you want to know what she really sounded like.I still give this film an 8/10 though. As a spectacle film in the De Mille tradition done by Warner Brothers before they had truly emerged into the studio big leagues, it is a sight to behold. No special effects here - those are real buildings falling on real extras and real water pouring onto them. I know director Michael Curtiz had a reputation for holding in great disdain actors who required a lunch break, but you'd think that he at least realized they require oxygen.The silent style of the players is pretty good. In fact, so good there are a dearth of title cards in the silent portion, since everyone is so adept at conveying their feelings through pantomime. The Vitaphone musical score accompanies the action well and the introduction to the film is particularly well done with water swirling around, sound effects, and the rather haunting musical introduction.There's some historically interesting points of view being shown here too. Filmed in 1928 over a year before the stock market crash there is a rather prescient visual montage at the beginning of the film equating stock brokers and their obsession with money with the worship of the golden calf of biblical times. However, the end of the film has a moral that is not so prescient - basically equating World War I as that wasteful pointless war to end all wars when a much more horrible conflict was a little more than ten years away.I'd highly recommend this one for two reasons. For the parts that are silent it is quite a work of visual art. For the parts that are talking it is a good example of how studios were so obsessed with sound that art was thrown out the window in the process, at least for a year or two. I'd rate this as one of my favorite although somewhat guilty cinematic pleasures.

bkoganbing Noah's Ark was the attempt of young hard driving head of production at Warner Brothers Darryl F. Zanuck to produce a biblical spectacle that would out DeMille, DeMille. Like DeMille he took a Victorian era modern story and juxtaposed it with the biblical story of Noah's Ark. And like DeMille leavened his story with a little sex.The leads are George O'Brien and Dolores Costello who play an American national and a German girl who make it to France as war is declared. They fall in love and are married, but her nationality is kept a secret lest she be detained and maybe executed as a spy. When the Yanks come Over There, O'Brien joins up, but Costello gets herself in a jackpot I won't go into except to say that it involves the lecherous Noah Beery. As they await their fate, they are comforted by a minister played by Paul McAllister who seems to pop up in the story in some odd places.At that point McAllister tells them the story of Noah's Ark and the characters in the modern story become characters in the Bible. O'Brien becomes Japheth one of Noah's sons and Costello becomes Miriam, a hand maiden in the house of Noah and O'Brien's girlfriend. Noah Beery becomes the evil Mesopotamian king who demands a virginal sacrifice and guess who he has in mind. And of course McAllister is Noah.The story gets quite a bit of embellishment spiritually as elements from different Bible stories get tossed into the plot. O'Brien like Samson is blinded and condemned to work a grist mill and Noah's sign from God to build the Ark is the burning bush. In addition God is called Jehovah and as we know God had no name until it was revealed to Moses many generations later. C.B. DeMille would have scolded Zanuck for being that bad on scholarship. But he would have applauded Zanuck for the use of scantily clad maidens to show Mesopotamia's decadence.Which the modern minister McAllister and the titled narrative compare to modern times in the tradition of DeMille.Myrna Loy has a role in both the modern and biblical story. If you look you might spot both John Wayne and Andy Devine as extras drowning in God's Flood. O'Brien and Costello make an earnest pair of young lovers who face the future with the hope that no more wars will happen after the Great War as World War One was then called. It should be remembered that the United States and France led many nations to sign the Kellogg-Briand pact around the same time, outlawing war. Just about every nation that signed it did go to war at some point thereafter, except maybe Switzerland. That would have resonated with 1928 audiences as well as the added sequences of dialog which Warner Brothers as the studio which introduced sound would be expected to include.Noah's Ark is a rather dated film, but the special effects were state of the art for its time. It's a curiosity for today's viewers.

mcarlus I remember watching "Noah's Ark" when I was 12 years old in 1962 in Brazil and fell in love with Dolores Costello... what a magnificent movie. I had never watched a Silent Movie... and was flabbergasted by it... by the sheer MAGIG of the images...Before the movie itself there was a little prologue showing "Noah's Ark"'s preview at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood with red carpet and all... I think that predisposed me to be in awe with the whole thing.I loved it... but then NEVER heard of Dolore Costello or anything about the movie until the Internet Age came to the rescue...Carlus Maximus

Matt Barry NOAH'S ARK is the first epic "talkie," though most of it is silent. I got to see a restored print by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and really enjoyed it. Michael Curtiz directed. (Curtiz later directed CASABLANCA and some of the Elvis Presley films.) George O'Brien stars, with Myrna Loy, Noah Beery and John Wayne.