Napoleon's Barber is a 1928 short drama film,
and filmed in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system.
From the play Napoleon’s Barber by Arthur Caesar
The film, Ford's first talkie, is now considered to be a lost film.
New York Times Review
QuoteDisplay MoreDirector John Ford made his talking-picture debut
with the 3-reel (32-minute) Fox "featurette"
Napoleon's Barber.
Faithfully adapted from a vaudeville sketch by Arthur Caesar,
the film is little more than a shaggy-dog story.
Napoleon's Barber was used to test the efficiency of the Fox Movietone system
in "exterior" dialogue sequences, a test which the equipment passed with flying colors.
The sound recording was less effective during the interior scenes,
moving one critic to remark that the characters' voices seemed to be emanating
from their vest pockets.
The film was the first in a series of Movietone short subjects
which were ballyhooed by Fox as "feature films in themselves";
the series came to an ignominious end in 1929
with a group of poorly received Clark and McCullough comedies
by Hal Erickson, Rovi