23 October 1927, when ‘The Jazz Singer’ made its debut in New York, as a date lauded in film history. Even though it was highly skeptical, no one could believe the seismic nature of the change sound would bring and the apocalyptic fears of those who thought that talking pictures would diminish the art of cinema.
Sound had been the aspiration since the birth of cinema. As early as 1888 Eadweard Muybridge claimed to have discussed with Thomas Alva Edison the possibility of using the Edison recorded sound process to accompany his zoopraxiscope movie projector. Throughout the silent era there were many experiments to bring mechanically recorded sound to the cinema, and two sound formats gradually evolved with sound on disc and sound on film. Although sound on disc was initially successful, with the Vitaphone process dominating the industry, it was sound on film that prevailed.
In 1921, with ‘Dream Street’, D.W.Griffith attempted a commercial feature utilizing the sound process. Although released in a silent version, a second version premiered in New York with a spoken introduction by Griffith, as well as a sound sequence featuring a recorded song and various sound effects. Utilizing a Photokinema sound on disc process, Griffith’s experiment proved faulty because most were unable to accommodate the Photokinema equipment. The first commercial sound film opened in August 1926, when Warner Bros released ‘Don Juan’ using the Vitaphone system. Directed by Alan Crosland, ‘Don Juan’ was a swashbuckling vehicle for John Barrymore accompanied by recorded orchestral score and sound effects.
It was however, Crosland’s The Jazz Singer that made the move to sound cable Modern audiences may find it hard to understand the impact of ‘The Jazz Singer’. Based on Samson Raphaelson’s stage play, this heavily sentimental account of a Jewish cantor’s son, who alienates his father through his desire to sing jazz-the film’s definition of jazz comprises sentimental show tunes and blackface (yes, racist and very offensive) is, not a talkie. There is a musical soundtrack, but, apart from two sequences, the dialogue is conveyed in titles. However, it is the two dialogue sequences that are the key to the film’s success. In mid-performance, Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) introduces the next number with stuttering enthusiasm “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Later on, while Rabinowitz serenades his mother to Irving Berlin’s hit of 1926, ‘Blue Skies’ he breaks off to tell her that if he is a success, he is going to move her to the Bronx where there’s the Ginsbergs, the Gutenberg and the Goldbergs. Both sequences communicate a sense of immediacy and intimacy, while Jolson’s ebullient you ain’t heard nothin’ yet’ provided an irresistible strapline for the age of the talkies.
‘Lights of New York’, a gangster melodrama from Warner Bros, was the first all-talking feature. Originally permitted to make a two-reeler, director Bryan Foy took advantage of the absence of studio heads Harry and Jack Warner to expand it into his first Full length feature film. Successful with the public as it grossed around US $1.3 million, but not with the critics, ‘Lights of New York’ became an unlikely milestone.
In 1929 Ernst Lubitsch directed his first sound film, ‘The Love Parade’, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, Lubitsch brought his trademark wit to a Ruritanian romance while showing that sound and music need not make the camera static. The first sound film from King Vidor, ‘Hallelujah’, was also a musical. A story based around the lives of black sharecroppers, ‘Hallelujah’ was one of the first Hollywood films to use a completely African American cast and it combined on-location recording with Hollywood post-production.
One of the most significant directors of the early sound era was Rouben Mamoulian, Starting his career as a stage director, he was courted by the studios because they needed directors who could handle dialogue. His first feature, ‘Applause’, is a groundbreaking backstage drama set in the world of burlesque, puncturing the illusion of glamour and showing a mastery of sound. The film is full of memorable moments: a chorus line whispering messages under strident music. The sequence of two lovers in a dance hall ending their relationship, their dialogue accompanied by the dramatic shadows of dancers moving on the wall behind them.
With the United States making the transition to talkies it was inevitable that the rest of the world would follow. In England, the change was more gradual, but what is considered the first British sound film is also one of its masterpieces. ‘Blackmail’ by Alfred Hitchcock was originally intended to be a silent film and exists today in both silent and sound versions. ‘Blackmail’ is a visual performance from the young Hitchcock, combining naturalistic dialogue capturing the rhythms of lower-middle-class life, with a kind of Expressionism. The latter is demonstrated in a sequence where the terrified heroine is subjected to a neighbor’s prurient monologue, which merges into a meaningless drone from which the word knife’ emerges with shocking clarity.
In France, The Jazz Singer’s premiere was not until 1929 and the evolution of sound film was much slower. While studios changed over, sound films were shot elsewhere and silent films were converted in 1930 two notable avant-garde films appeared ‘Lâge d’Or’ by Luis Buñuel and ‘Le sang d’un poète’ by Jean Cocteau. Although both films used sound experimentally, neither qualifies as a talkie. The first real French talkie, ‘Les Trois masques’, directed by André Hugon, was shot in a rented studio in England. René Clair rapidly established himself as a master of sound with a trio of highly successful films. The first of these, ‘Sous Les Toits de Paris’, is a musical set in a working-class neighborhood that opt for poetic rather than realistic dialogue. The second, ‘le million’, is a romantic farce about a missing lottery ticket. The third, the musical satire ‘A nous la liberté’, is an anarchic study of the soul-destroying regimentation of industry that presages Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin.
The coming of talkies was attended by a long list of casualties and a generational shift that constituted, perhaps, the greatest shift in the history of cinema One early casualty was Abel Gance, whose silent films, including ‘Napoléon’, had been highly successful. His science fiction film ‘La fin du monde’ had an unintelligible soundtrack that rendered the film’s dialogue incomprehensible. Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ is famous as an entertaining account of the teething problems that attended the coming of sound. From the cumbersome camera equipment, the problems of recording directly on to the microphone, and the overdubbing of unfeasible accents, the film presents a witty cavalcade of the pitfalls of early talking pictures. The fate of Singin’ in the Rain’s imperious silent-film diva, Jean Hagen, whose shrill accent contradicts her on-screen beauty was shared by a generation of stars unable to make the transition to sound.
In Germany, the arrival of sound gave a new reason for cinema in the last years of the Weimar Republic. ‘Der Blaue Engel’ by Josef von Sternberg was an early success that brought international stardom to Marlene Dietrich. Filmed simultaneously in German and English, the story of the downfall of a middle-aged schoolmaster (played by Emil Jannings) through his obsession with Dietrich’s cabaret singer Lola Lola was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Its success was helped by the inclusion of Friedrich Hollander’s mournful song ‘Falling in Love Again’ sung seductively by Dietrich at the start of the film and with remorseless froideur towards the end. The following year saw G. W. Pabst adapt Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Die 3-Groschen Oper’, which was filmed simultaneously in German and French. The first sound film by Fritz Lang was ‘M’, which also appeared in 1931. The film’s climax, in which Peter Lorre’s killer, gripped by a mixture of anguish and hysteria, tries to explain his compulsion to do evil to a self-appointed court of hardened criminals, is one of the most powerful sequences in early sound cinema and could not have exerted a fraction of the same impact if reduced to intertitles.
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