Speech: Using Your Voice
Speech: Using Your Voice
| 01 January 1950 (USA)
Speech: Using Your Voice Trailers

An educational short film about correct speaking methods.

Reviews
Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.
Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.
Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%
SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) This is one of 2 (I think) black-and-white educational movies from the 1950s about speech and how to speak properly. The host shows us 3 principle that one needs to follow and we get to see example of how not to do it and how to do it right. Even if these 8 minutes look as if they were from the 1930s, they are certainly not as bad as the rating suggests. However, that can be said about pretty much all films parodied by MST3K. I guess many people do not even watch the original movies and just suck in whatever they are told by the MST3K guys who really don't know a lot about cinema and basically are all about style over substance. That does not mean that I think "Speech: Using Your Voice" is a great movie, but it has held up and aged much better than most other of these educational short films as I can see some of the examples and references given herein still relevant today. However, not good either enough to let me recommend it despite the prolific director and writer, something that also not too many of these films have. Thumbs down.
Clay Loomis This educational short is just about what you'd expect; a speech about speaking. We're told not to mumble, but to speak clearly, loudly, and by golly, be interesting and use low tones. Of course, these days it would be much simpler to just play a tape of anything said by Gilbert Gottfried, Roseanne Barr, or Bobcat Goldthwait and just instruct the students to NOT sound like that.At under 10 minutes long, I was still starting to doze off when the narrator said, "...and use plenty of lip and tongue action." I came to attention thinking I had rolled over into another type of instructional video, but alas, this thing was made in 1950, and he was still just talking about talking.I didn't get a lot out of this thing, but it's an educational short. Has anyone ever actually learned anything from one of these films?
Mike Sh. Professor E.C. Beuhler, having gained immortality (or was it infamy?) a year earlier by consenting to have himself filmed while making the Knee Test for the first "Speech" short, gets a speaking role in this sequel. But for a guy who seems to be such an expert on elocution, he seems to have an awfully raspy, sloppy voice. It's definitely not what I would call pleasing. However, the good professor wisely forgoes the opportunity to use himself as an object lesson, opting instead to parade before us even more pathetic examples of people who cannot be "heard, understood, or pleasing."Incidentally, one of these poor souls is a rather well dressed man in what looks like a business meeting type of setting. This man incoherently mutters an odd rambling story of how he had his seat taken away from him at the bus station. Now what was the point of that story, and what was the situation that inspired its telling? That's what I want to know!
cadreamin67 "Speech: Using Your Voice," Centron's last speech series film back in 1950, was no better than one of the others in the series, particularly "Speech: Platform Posture and Appearance." This one was really hard to sit through, first it talks about a guy who makes speeches so boringly that people get up and leave and fall asleep. Then they introduce the "speech" series' star actor, Herk Harvey, as John, a young man who is always in demand to make speeches. If you were steadily watching every Centron film from the company's beginning to the company's ending, you'd be begging by now for Centron to stop doing these series about sewing, punctuating, cooking and speech.