silent, but contained no title cards. It is currently a lost film, but a review described it as having "dizzying wipes, multiple superimpositions and vertiginous camera movements." The Last Moment was released in 1928 and received rave reviews and was a financial hit. Charlie Chaplin praised it and writer Tamar Lane called it "one of the most remarkable films that has ever been presented on the screen." With the film's success and Fejos's overnight celebrity status, major studios were suddenly competing for the former vagrant to sign contracts with them. Fejos settled with Universal Studios because its contract offered him complete artistic control. In 1928 Fejos quickly began production on his next and best-known film: Lonesome. The script was written by Edward T. Lowe Jr. and Tom Reed, and was based on a newspaper article about loneliness in the modern American cities. Carl Laemmle Jr. produced the film. In the film Glenn Tryon and Barbara Kent play two lonely New Yorkers who live in adjoining apartments but have never met. They meet by chance at Coney Island and begin a romance, but lose each other only to be reunited at their apartment building. The film was hand-tinted and stencil-colored at many points, making it already visually distinctive, but after it had gone into general release as a silent film in mid-June 1928, Universal borrowed a Movietone News sound recording truck from Fox Film on the pretext of making sound tests (their own sound stages would not be ready until late October) and hurriedly recorded "talkie" scenes and synchronized music-and-effects scores by recently hired musical director Joseph Cherniavsky to attach to three already-completed silent features; Lonesome was the first of these to be so treated, with no input from Fejos on the dialogue sequences, and this version was released on 20 September. (After this first hastily accomplished phase, Universal continued using Fox's equipment to make their own first all-talking film, Melody of Love - which is also the first film musical - in under two weeks, at which time a chagrined and angry crew from Fox came to Universal City and repossessed their sound truck.) Lonesome was another box office hit and its reputation has grown throughout the years. Georges Sadoul called it a precursor to neorealism. Jonathan Rosenbaum praised the film and compared Fejos to such better known contemporaries as F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vsevolod Pudovkin.