The Great Gabbo is a 1929 American Pre-Code early sound musical drama film directed by James Cruze, based on Ben Hecht's 1928 short story "The Rival Dummy", and starring Erich von Stroheim and Betty Compson.

Gabbo's girlfriend and assistant Mary loves him, but is driven to leave him by his megalomania, superstitions, irritability, and inability to express any human emotion without using Otto as an intermediary.

Convinced that she wants to come back to him, he confronts her with his feelings, admitting his loneliness without her and in the process revealing that he has grown past many of his old failings, such as his superstitions and obsession with his personal success.

Touted in advertising as an "all-dialog singing, dancing and dramatic spectacle", this early sound film oddly interleaves stark drama with gratuitous full-length, large-scale, on-stage musical production numbers such as "Every Now and Then", "I'm in Love with You", "The New Step", "The Web of Love", and the now-missing "The Ga Ga Bird", which was filmed in color.

The "Web of Love" number, in which the performers wear stylized spider and fly costumes, is occasionally shown on Classic Arts Showcase.

[5] Footage was used on Fractured Flickers in the segment "Hymie und Me" (Episode 14), in which the dummy is presented as a living, sentient comedian with von Stroheim as his straight man.

The Simpsons used the ventriloquist-dummy idea represented here for the episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled", where Gabbo is the name of a walking, talking, singing (and not very kind or nice) dummy who works with a man named Arthur Crandall; later episodes would show that Gabbo had been ruined by scandal and left to do performances at casinos and other low-rent locales.