Silent vs sound version

Excerpt*

After [Farrell and Gaynor] returned from Palm Springs and passed the "microphone test," the pair resumed filming Lucky Star as both a silent and talking picture. For the talking portion, [Win] Sheehan hired a dialogue director from Broadway to correct the stars' diction. Furiously, Borzage banished him from the set.

"What is this?" I said, "You're a nice guy, but you've been a stage director, so have I when I was a kid, but I said you just move over around the side, will you? You're not gonna destroy the naturalness of these kids." So we finished the picture like that."

Filming on both versions wrapped on April 20, 1929. As with all films made during this period of transition from silents to sound, Lucky star suffered from the addition of dialogue. The talking version was released with a different ending from the silent version, and Borzage historian Herve Dumont says, "The dialogue not only adds nothing, by being overexplicit it detracts from the picture, reducing the metaphoric nature of the tale."

From the biography Lucky Stars, by Sarah Baker.