in a few shorts, which included a bit part as a gangster in The Nightingale (1931) and playing a police captain in The Clyde Mystery (1931). Both of those low-budget, two-reel shorts were filmed in New York City and produced by Warner Bros. in affiliation with Vitaphone in Brooklyn. Move to Hollywood, 1932 Talbot's arrival in California at the beginning of 1932 proved to be ideal timing, for Hollywood was still in the formative years of the sound era, when studios remained busy searching for potential leading actors who were not only engaging performers, but also had acceptable voices and articulate speech patterns for the early audio technologies being used and refined on film sets. Talbot possessed those qualities, for his screen test at Warner Bros. went well despite the fact that the scene Talbot performed was from a play that satirized the studio's production chief Darryl F. Zanuck. It also impressed one of the studio's top directors, "Wild Bill" William Wellman, who immediately wanted to cast the 30-year-old actor in his upcoming film Love Is a Racket. Talbot quickly accepted Zanuck's offer to join the company's growing ranks of contract players, who included the rising stars Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. Just prior to his work in Love Is a Racket, Talbot appeared as a major supporting character, Dr. Jerome Preston, in Unholy Love, a drama produced by Warner Bros. in cooperation with Albert Ray Productions. Lyle's portrayal of "Jerry" did not go unnoticed by film industry trade publications. In its July 9, 1932 review of Unholy Love, the popular journal Motion Picture Herald encourages theater owners and prospective audiences to direct special attention on three performers in the film: "Don't overlook Beryl Mercer and Ivan Lebedeff, as well as Lyle Talbot, "whom Warner Brothers are grooming for stellar roles." Some other notable films in which Talbot was cast in his first years at Warner Bros. are Three on a Match (1932), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) with Spencer Tracy, College Coach (1933) with Pat O'Brien and Dick Powell, Mary Stevens, M.D. (1933), Ladies They Talk About, and Mandalay (1934) where he portrays an alcoholic doctor trying to quit drinking. He continued to perform in a variety of co-starring roles, such as romancing Mae West in Go West, Young Man (1936), pursuing opera star Grace Moore in One Night of Love (1934), and playing a bank robber on