THE END OF
THE BEGINNING

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight,

and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices. . . .

SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest

In the shadows let me come and sing to you

Let me dream a song that I can bring to you. . . .

WARREN and DUBIN, “The Shadow Waltz”

We didn’t need dialogue; we had faces then. . . . I’m still big;

it’s the pictures that got smaller. . . .

GLORIA SWANSON as NORMA DESMOND in Sunset Boulevard

1929: a year of sound and fury, signifying that the silent cinema was doomed.¹

Sound poured out of the studios in an ever-increasing cascade of talkies, part-talkies and souped-up silents. The major contribution to the torrent was the combined feature production of Warner Bros. and First National, a total of 67 sound pictures. In the same year, Paramount pulled into second place, outstripping Fox by releasing 49 sound features to the latter’s 47. This achievement was remarkable in view of the fire that destroyed Paramount’s newly constructed $400,000 sound stage at the beginning of 1929.^* In July, Winfield Sheehan, Fox’s general manager, estimated that Hollywood had already invested more than $50 million in the transformation to sound and that it would take up to ten years for the investment to start paying off. But he also noted that movie theaters were doing 30 percent more business than in 1928 and that studio heads expected to do even better business in 1930. In fact, during the first years of the Depression, the film industry turned out to be one of the few oases of prosperity.

But there was fury as well as sound. It was expressed in a crescendo of objections—particularly from critics, theater managers, and a growing army of unemployed theater musicians.

Theater critics objected that Hollywood was robbing Broadway of its talent in order to make canned versions of stage productions. Movie critics objected that talkies were destroying the art of film. Some “sophisticates,” who had never had anything good to say about Film, suddenly discovered that silent cinema was High Art and thereupon rushed to a spirited defense of the Tenth Muse, who was being wantonly throttled by those Philistines in Hollywood.

Theater managers were divided between those, like J. J. Shubert, who maintained that talking pictures posed no threat to legitimate theater at its best, and those involved with stock companies who suddenly found their profits dwindling as talkies began invading the suburbs and the provinces. In June 1929, twenty out of twenty-two theater managers at the annual convention of the Theatrical Stock Managers’ Association complained that talking pictures were destroying business for their companies in the U. S. A New York Times editorial offered them cold comfort by observing that while “Talking pictures can never completely take the place of real people on a real stage . . . in their imitation of actual plays and musical shows the talkies are taking the essence of Broadway to every hamlet in the land.”

The plight of many musicians was far worse than anything yet experienced by the theater managers. In August 1931, the Monthly Labor Review of the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed staggering information about the rise of unemployment among musicians as a result of technological changes in the film industry. In 1928 some 20,000 musicians had been employed by movie theaters across the country. Monthly Labor Review estimated that

during the two years which marked the rapid growth of the sound picture, 9,885 musicians, or about 50 per cent of the total number of musicians employed in theaters were displaced. These figures, for the country as a whole, seem to be corroborated by the figures taken from [the American Federation of Musicians] Local No.802, the organization of musicians in New York City. In 1928 there were 3,200 musicians employed in theaters in that city. In 1931 only 1,500 musicians were thus employed, showing a loss of 1,700 or nearly 53 per cent of the total number.²

All these setbacks, it will be realized, exactly coincided with the first years of the Depression. The effects, in terms of human misery, can only be guessed at now, though one or two examples furnished by Monthly Labor Review are worth recalling in relation to the euphoria that prevailed at Warner Bros. and Fox after their initial triumphs with sound movies:

Case No. 14 has had a few miscellaneous engagements for playing, but no permanent job. He is compelled to live off savings which, according to his statement, may not last through the winter. He is 56 years old and has two sons, both musicians. One son is married and has a job, but the younger son still depends on the support of the parents. He is very discouraged about the future, particularly since he knows no other trade; he is trying to get at least a temporary job with a local symphony orchestra, but is not very hopeful.

Case No. 17 was a pianist in a small theater, averaging about $40 a week. He has been without a job since October, 1930; has taken the civil-service examination as translator, and is hoping to get a job soon. He is absolutely without means except for the little income that his wife brings in by occasional sewing in private homes; of late she too has been without work. The family lacks proper means of subsistence, and at times does not know where the food for the next day will come from; it may be a case for charity.³

Stunned, confused and angered, the musicians attempted to counteract the threat of sound movies by petitioning the studios, organizing public demonstrations, and placing pickets outside movie theaters. Joseph Weber, president of the American Federation of Musicians tried unsuccessfully to calm the rank and file by assuring his fellow members that their hardships would only be temporary, that within a year or so the industry would “adjust itself back to the human element.” By April 1929 the New York Times was insisting that the crisis was already over, that musicians had every reason to be optimistic. The movie industry, it editorialized, had recently spent over $20 million in building new sound studios. “This looks like business, and not bad business for the musicians. The old silent studios carried from two to four musicians. Now they have two or more orchestras on hand for every studio. . . .”

But the crisis was not over. It was getting worse. The Times’s “solution” was based on ignorance of the number of unemployed musicians and the relatively few that could be absorbed by the new demands of the sound studios. In May 1929, as a test case for union members in the 30,000 movie theaters in the U. S., the San Francisco musicians’ union filed suit against Allied Amusements Industries, Inc., to restrain that organization’s theaters from using sound projection apparatus without also employing organists and/or orchestras. The suit got the musicians nowhere. Like all their battles against Hollywood’s new technology, it was doomed from the outset. Hordes of foreign-born musicians packed up and returned to Europe, where they expected to find that the impact of talkies was negligible. But French musicians were already up in arms about the threat that sound films were beginning to pose to their profession. They were even more incensed at the influx of musicians fleeing from America and swelling the ranks of the unemployed in France. In Britain, where a comparable situation existed, the Variety Artists’ Federation issued the following appeal to the public:

You should at the very least refrain from patronizing any place of amusement where an all-talker program has been introduced and where the management has ruthlessly discharged their musicians, artists and stage staff and substituted canned entertainment.⁴

By contrast with the theater musicians, composers—if they had any talent at all—suddenly found themselves riding the crest of the wave. In 1929 it looked as if Tin Pan Alley was moving to Hollywood. Every studio was making musicals, and theme songs were in constant demand for picture after picture following the phenomenal popularity of such ditties as “Sonny Boy,” “Charmaine,” and “Lilac Time.” At the end of 1929, George and Ira Gershwin accepted a $100,000 contract from Fox to write the music and lyrics of their first sound picture. The movie was Delicious (1931), directed by David Butler and starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. The Gershwins supplied four of their less-memorable numbers including the title song, and George ventured into writing incidental film music by scoring accompaniments for a dream sequence (music for voice and orchestra) and for a montage of the sights and sounds of a great city (orchestral background music). Most of the music written for the montage sequence was not actually used for the film, but it was later to become the basis for the composer’s Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra (1932).⁵ Aside from the Gershwins, handsome contracts also lured Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Jimmy McHugh, Harry Warren, Vincent Youmans, Nacio Herb Brown, Harry Ruby, Buddy DeSylva, and a host of other song writers to the movie capital. As commentator John Flinn noted, talent scouts were being sent to “every cabaret in New York and to every night club in a mad search for song writers and lyricists.”⁶

If the composers were doing well, stage hands and projectionists weren’t doing too badly either. While the musicians were wringing their hands in helpless desperation, Frank Gillmore, acting president of Equity, and William F. Canavan, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, smugly announced that talkies had not created any unemployment problems for actors and stagehands. And Monthly Labor Review for August 1931 noted that the talkies had actually increased employment opportunities among motion picture projectionists.

In the majority of theaters operating under an agreement with the motion picture machine operators’ union, the place of every man, assisted by a boy helper, formerly employed to operate one silent-picture machine is now taken by two licensed men operating a sound-picture machine. The introduction of sound in the moving-picture theaters has thus theoretically doubled the chances for employment among the projectionists. . . . Membership of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators shows an increase from 24,342 in 1926 to approximately 32,000 in 1931. . . . Unfortunately, however, the additional men employed as machine operators did not come from the ranks of the displaced musicians, and the situation among musicians is not improved by the greater demand for motion picture operators. Although the unions of musicians and operators have an agreement to cooperate in the case of strikes or other emergencies, there exists no understanding by which the increased demands for labor in the booth of the theatre could be filled from the ranks of labor released from the pit.⁷

Added to the cries and protests of the musicians were those of deaf moviegoers, for whom silent cinema had been a major source of entertainment. They were now suddenly confronted with movies with no insert titles but with spoken dialogue, music, and sound effects that they could not hear. Hard-of-hearing clubs throughout America appealed to the movie studios to continue making silent films—or at least to provide readable captions or subtitles for the talkies. But the studios were also getting enthusiastic and appreciative letters from the blind, who had got nothing out of silent movies but now found that they could go to the cinema and enjoy listening to musicals or to the dialogue of film dramas.

Movie patrons who were neither blind nor deaf complained about the intrusion of external noises (passing traffic, etc.), echoes from auditoria walls, and the uneven quality of sound in various parts of the theaters. From some seats the talkie dialogue was barely audible, while in others persons in the audience were in danger of losing their hearing from the excessive volume. These problems were not to be successfully overcome until the early thirties—when movie theaters were soundproofed and “multi-cellular high frequency horn loudspeakers” were introduced. Through the latter, as Dennis Sharp has noted, “It . . . [became] possible . . . to focus and unify the sound and beam it to various parts of the auditorium.”⁸ These developments were to affect radically the design of movie theaters from 1930 onwards.⁹ But meanwhile, in 1929, there were widespread objections to the talkies for developing public insensitivity to sound in general and to music in particular.

Rosa Ponselle, famed soprano of the Metropolitan Opera Company, denounced sound movies as a cacophony—“something between a hacksaw and Edison’s first phonograph. Faust and Aida” she maintained, “would sound like a mammy song” if they were made into sound pictures. The New York Times, echoing some of the current criticism of the sound quality of talkies, editorialized with tongue-in-cheek:

One of the troubles which the sound films have had is that the voices of men sound almost exactly alike. Audiences have had real difficulty in deciding which of the characters in a scene is speaking, and wry necks have resulted from the swift turnings of the cervical vertebrae to ascertain the face from which the voice is coming. Some of the finest modulations ever acquired by actors in drawing-room comedy come off the film sounding like a cascade of mush. This has become one of the super-industrial problems of America.

More serious industrial problems were brewing in Europe. During March 1929, representatives of the major film companies (and related organizations) of Germany, France, and Britain, having spent several months denouncing America’s virtual monopoly of the sound film market in Europe, met in Berlin to decide a common strategy against the growing transatlantic threat. Within a short time they revealed a merger of their interests in a $100 million trust that controlled more than 400 patents in the field of sound recording. They simultaneously announced that they were planning an extensive program of European coproductions. The companies involved were Siemens-Halske, General Electric of Germany, German and Foreign Tobis (representing Tri-Ergon), Kuechenmeister and Messter, and British and French Photophone.

The merger permitted the British and French companies to use Tri-Ergon patents, specifically those that were basic to the Movietone system. General Electric undertook to manufacture, install, and service sound equipment for all the companies involved. Related developments further helped to bring the European and American systems into compatibility. The German firms of A. E. G., Siemens, and Telefunken, in conjunction with a Dr. Koenemann, had formed the Klangfilm Corporation, to promote research into the problems of sound film. Klangfilm was soon to merge with Tobis, which owned the rights to Tri-Ergon and now had access to Oskar Messter’s patents and to Ultraphone, a sound system controlled by Kuechenmeister. The British journal Wireless World noted in April 1929:

The “Tobis” group set themselves the task of combining the different processes belonging to them, and have produced a single-unit system, which is notable for the fact that the films conform to the international standards of size and perforation, so that standard film can be used in making it, with the consequence that the cinema proprietor is able to use standard projectors or to make use of speaking films of other makes. There are only a few unimportant alterations to be made to a standard projector to enable it to be used at will for silent or speaking films.¹⁰

A major objection of the European concerns was that American companies had adopted the restrictive practice of allowing only their own films to be shown with the sound systems that they controlled. Their practice was soon to be declared illegal by courts in all the European countries concerned, but in the interim it served to confirm the charges of American monopoly and to polarize the European and American film industries.

The Federation of British Industries followed up the European merger by immediately proclaiming that it would do everything possible to combat the American talkie monopoly. A month later, in April 1928, British Instructional Films Ltd. announced its own merger with Tobis-Klangfilm of Germany for the purpose of coproducing films in England and in order “to create a solid Anglo-European front against American sound film producers.” About the same time, the great UFA organization of Germany revealed that it would enter large-scale competition with American film production by going over entirely to the making of sound movies. (In doing so, it would first use a magnetic sound-on-film recording system based on a 1913 German patent of Dr. Stille.) Meanwhile, oblivious of or indifferent to the imminent industrial war, J. E. Otterson, president of ERPI, proudly informed the press that 100 European movie theaters had already been supplied with Western Electric sound systems and that his company expected to equip at least 900 more before the end of the year.^*

An amusing glimpse of ERPI and Western Electric engaged at this period in both promotion of sound movies and public enlightenment as to how they work, survives in the form of an animated sound cartoon, Finding His Voice, directed by F. Lyle Goldman and Max Fleischer. The story credit was given to “W. E. Erpi.” It tells how a poor little strip of silent movie, muffled and unable to express himself except through visual titles (which, rather curiously, appear at the top of the screen), is brought up to date with the aid of an all-talking, all-singing jolly strip of talkie and his friend Dr. Western. Complaining that he has been out of work for a long time, the silent movie asks his audible pal, “Where did you get your voice?” Talkie assures him that he’ll never get a job unless he learns how to use his voice. Whereupon he takes his silent partner along to the office of Dr. Western—“Film Surgeon: Voices Lifted.” The good doctor obligingly takes the two movies on a swift tour of the inner workings of his sound-on-film system, at the end of which, the silent movie has learned how to find his voice and is able to join his fellow film in singing a duet.

By mid-1929 almost every capital city in Europe had had its first experience of sound movies. In most instances that meant yet another premiere of The Jazz Singer.

In the Soviet Union, where inventor Professor Shorin claimed to have developed a successful Russian sound system, there was serious talk of reneging on a deal for importing talkie apparatus from the West and ordering mass production of Shorin’s equipment. A few months earlier, in the August 5, 1928 issue of the journal Zhizn Iskusstva, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and G. V. Alexandrov made what was to become an historical statement pleading for the contrapuntal use of sound, for nonsynchronization with the visual image rather than sound recording on a naturalistic level. The statement, later to be included as an appendix to Eisenstein’s Film Form, prophetically warned against the upsurge of photographed theater in place of true cinematic art.

In the Orient two theaters in Tokyo and one in Shanghai had been wired for sound by mid-1929. The premiere presentation was, of course, The Jazz Singer, in China retitled “Song of Pious Son.”¹¹ By the end of the year American sound movies were also showing in six other Japanese cities, and in Bombay, Calcutta, Manila, Singapore, and Batavia, and plans were afoot to begin production of Japanese-language talkies in the Nikkatsu and Schojiki studios near Kyoto.

Back in Hollywood the coming of sound undoubtedly created panic among many established stars of the silent screen. Did they have the right kind of voices? Could they adapt or would they be replaced by a horde of new stars from legitimate theater? Among silent stars without stage experience an elocution teacher suddenly became much more of a necessity than a swimming pool or a new Rolls-Royce. (Mrs. Patrick Campbell was imported to coach Norma Shearer; Gloria Swanson’s teacher was Laura Hope Crews; while Constance Collier was hired to improve the diction of Colleen Moore.) “It was natural,” observed William DeMille, “that as the coming of sound cast some actors into outer darkness, it raised others into the light. Even as certain voices destroyed the glamor of a personality, others gave power and character which the silent screen could not convey.”¹²

But there is little truth to the persistent myth that all or even most of the careers of silent stars were eclipsed as soon as they spoke from the screen. In fact, there were those—like Richard Barthelmess and Wallace Beery—who took the transition in stride, and others—like Joan Crawford, Evelyn Brent, Ronald Colman, and Gary Cooper—whose popularity actually increased as they entered the sound era. The careers of Betty Compson, Bebe Daniels, Bessie Love, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Conrad Nagel, and William Powell—all either supporting players or stars whose appeal had begun to wane—improved spectacularly with the arrival of talkies.¹³

Those stars whose careers were adversely affected by the coming of sound fell into four main categories. First there were those—like John Gilbert—whose voices failed to measure up to the expectations raised by their silent-screen personalities. Gilbert, one of the “great lovers” of the silent-film period, turned out to have a rather slight, undistinguished voice instead of the strong, masculine tones expected by his fans. The preview audience at his first talkie, His Glorious Night (1929), greeted his most serious utterances with derisive laughter. The effect on Gilbert’s self-esteem was disastrous. Therafter, his career began a slow decline from which he never recovered. A second group—mainly women—were those whose voices were adequate but whose silent-screen images or acting styles increasingly failed to conform to the changing demands of sound cinema. Among them were Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, and Colleen Moore, all of whom retired from the screen in the early thirties after making easy and initially successful transitions to talkies. A third category consisted of silent comedians who were eclipsed by the rise of gag comedy typified by the Marx Brothers and Mae West or by the popularity of screwball comedies like It Happened One Night, Bombshell, and Bringing Up Baby. This group included Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon. Only Chaplin survived the transition without making any concessions to sound or suffering any decline in his reputation.

Finally, certain foreign stars established in Hollywood movies were adversely affected by the coming of talkies. “The whole problem of foreigners in sound films appeared to be this,” writes Julian Fox on the transitional period 1929—33. “Mexicans—yes; Swedes—yes; Germans—occasionally; French—providing they happened to be Maurice Chevalier or the totally unaccented Claudette Colbert, yes. But Slavs? Very definitely ‘no.’ ”¹⁴ In other words Latins like Dolores Del Rio and Lupe Velez, Scandinavians like Garbo (and to a lesser extent Nils Asther), and Germans like Marlene Dietrich (but not Emil Jannings, whose accent was incomprehensible to many Americans) either remained or became popular in the thirties, while “Slavs” like Vilma Banky and Pola Negri were definitely “out.”

But stars of the theater were definitely “in.” Ironically, as the talkie Broadway Melody of 1929 sang of the lights that were gay on the Great White Way, many of the leading luminaries of Broadway were heading West for their debuts in talking pictures. In fact, the lights became dimmer that year than at any time since World War I. Some of Broadway’s brightest stars departed, never to return, and some theaters that managed to survive the increasing competition from the talkies would be forced to close in the wake of the financial cataclysm that hit Wall Street in October 1929.

The theatrical invasion of Hollywood was headed by Jeanne Eagels, sensational star of the Broadway production of Rain. Her talkie debut was in another Somerset Maugham opus, The Letter (1929), in which she costarred with Reginald Owen and Herbert Marshall, and for which she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. (The Oscar went to Mary Pickford for her role as Norma Besant, in her first talkie, Coquette.) Ruth Chatterton, who had graced memorable stage productions of Daddy Long Legs and Mary Rose, began her very active talkie career with Sins of the Fathers (1929). She, too, was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Madame X, another 1929 talkie.

In the same year, Hollywood productions were enriched by such theatrical talent as Sophie Tucker in Honky Tonk (in which she sang two of her best-known numbers: “He’s a Good Man to Have Around” and “I’m the Last of the Red-Hot Mammas”), Beatrice Lillie in Show of Shows, Gertrude Lawrence in The Battle of Paris (in which she sang four songs by Cole Porter), George Arliss in Disraeli (Arliss had appeared in a silent version in 1921), Rudy Vallee in The Vagabond Lover, Basil Rathbone in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (he had acted in silent films with Helen Chadwick, Mae Murray, and Gloria Swanson), and Paul Muni in The Valiant (for which he received an Oscar nomination; but the award went to Warner Baxter for his performance as the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona), and Walter Huston in Gentlemen of the Press.

Ziegfeld stars Marilyn Miller, Fanny Brice, Helen Morgan, Ina Claire, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, and Harry Richman all appeared in their first talkies between 1928 and 1930, while many of the girls that Ziegfeld shows had glorified left the chorus line and headed for stardom via the silver screen. This particular contingent was led by Ruby Keeler and Barbara Stanwyck. Ziegfeld himself made appearances in Universal’s Show Boat and in Paramount’s part-color movie spectacular Glorifying the American Girl. Not even his most star-studded stage productions were able to match the galaxies that appeared in Warner Bros.’ The Show of Shows (1929), MGM’s Hollywood Revue of 1929, and Paramount on Parade (1930). If opulence and stars were all that were needed, the talkies would have rendered vaudeville extinct within three years of The Jazz Singer.¹⁵

Relatively few of the big theatrical stars imported by Hollywood in the first years of the talkies were to survive in movies beyond the mid-thirties. But a hardier breed of theatrical performer followed the invasion of the big Broadway talent. From this less-publicized group of actors were to come Hollywood’s most enduring stars.

The unsinkable Bette Davis began her Broadway career in 1929 in Martin Flavin’s comedy Broken Dishes. A year later, after two stage flops, she was signed up by Universal for her first picture, Bad Sister, in which one of the supporting actors was Humphrey Bogart. During the twenties, Bogey played a romantic juvenile in a succession of Broadway plays in which he often walked on wearing flannels and sneakers and carrying a tennis racquet. His first movie appearance was in 1930 in a Vitaphone short (they had reached no.960 by this time!) in which he costarred with Ziegfeld singer Ruth Etting and Joan Blondell. Unimpressive performances in ten features and an ignominious retreat from Hollywood back to legitimate theater were to occupy him until his triumphal return as Duke Mantee in the screen version of The Petrified Forest (1936). Edward G. Robinson, by contrast, had had an impressive stage career in the twenties, receiving critical acclaim for performances in plays by Ibsen, Shaw, and Pirandello, and also thrilling theater audiences with his portrayal of a Capone-like gangster in Bartlett Cormack’s play The Racket (1927), an anticipation of his unforgettable performance in Little Caesar (1931). In Robinson’s one silent film, The Bright Shawl (1923), he had played the supporting role of a Spanish grandee. But in his first talkie, The Hole in the Wall (1930), which was also the first talkie of his costar, Claudette Colbert, he played the lead, and his performance in the role of Tony Garotta established him as the Italian-American gangster type. The ever-versatile James Cagney, an expert hoofer in the vaudeville of the twenties, co-starred with Joan Blondell in Marie Baumer’s drama, Penny Arcade. Al Jolson bought the rights to the play and sold them to Warner Bros. on condition that Cagney and Blondell repeated their performances for the screen adaptation. Penny Arcade, retitled Sinner’s Holiday (1930), brought Cagney and Blondell to Hollywood. A year and three features later, Cagney starred in The Public Enemy. The rest is movie history.¹⁶

Few screenwriters of the silent period made successful transitions into the sound era. Notable exceptions were Frances Marion, Anita Loos, Bess Meredyth, C. Gardner Sullivan, Jules Furthman, and Ernest Vajda. Frances Marion had written scenarios for Mary Pickford (e.g., Pollyanna, 1920) and adapted Fannie Hurst’s Humoresque (1920) for the first of two versions of that story to be directed by Frank Borzage. Her first screenplay of the sound period was the pace-making prison melodrama, The Big House (1930). Anita Loos, whose earliest scripts were for D. W. Griffith in 1913, entered the sound era with the screenplay for his disastrous final film, The Struggle (1931), but continued with such commercial successes as San Francisco (directed by W. S. Van Dyke, 1936), Riffraff (directed by J. Walter Rubin, 1935), and The Women (directed by George Cukor, 1939). Her perennially popular novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was filmed in 1928 (screenplay by Loos and her husband, John Emerson) and again in 1953, as a vehicle for Marilyn Monroe (screenplay) by Charles Lederer). C. Gardner Sullivan wrote such sermonizing melodramas as Hairpins (directed by Fred Niblo, 1920), The Soul of the Beast, and Human Wreckage (both directed by John Griffith Wray, 1923), and also the screenplays for Cecil B. De Mille’s talkie epics, The Buccaneer (1938), Union Pacific (1939), and North West Mounted Police (1940).

Jules Furthman began screen writing in 1918, under the pseudonym of Stephen Fox. Among the several dozen of his scripts filmed in the silent years were Hotel Imperial (directed by Mauritz Stiller, 1927), The Way of All Flesh (directed by Victor Fleming, 1927), and The Docks of New York (directed by Josef von Sternberg, 1928). His screenplays of the sound period included more films by von Sternberg (Morocco, 1930; Shanghai Express, 1932; and The Shanghai Gesture, 1941) and Victor Fleming (Common Clay and Renegades, both 1930, and Bombshell, 1933), as well as films directed by Raoul Walsh (The Yellow Ticket, 1931), Tay Garnett (China Seas, 1935), Frank Lloyd (Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935), and Howard Hughes (The Outlaw, 1943). Among his later scripts was one for Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959). The handful of other screenwriters who survived the silent period included Julien Josephson, Edmund Goulding, Sonya Levien, Harvey Thew, and Grover Jones.

At the end of the twenties Hollywood became a mecca for writers who had never written a screenplay but were experienced in writing dramatic dialogue. They did much to make the first two or three years of the talkies sound like filmed theater as well as look like it. They were to be followed, however, by a generation of screenwriters who understood that cinematic dialogue requires an idiom of its own. The screenplays of Norman Krasna, Ben Hecht, Walter Reisch, Gene Markey, Donald Ogden Stewart, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Charles Lederer, Dudley Nichols, Robert E. Sherwood, Kubec Glasmon, Francis Faragoh, Morrie Ryskind, and Nunnally Johnson—all of whom wrote their first Hollywood scripts between 1929 and 1934—were full of brief, vivid scenes and characters who spoke a language that was concise, racy, and dynamic, echoing the ceaseless, teeming vitality of America’s burgeoning cities.

Many genres of the silent cinema declined in popularity or disappeared altogether with the coming of sound. But gangster and mystery/detective melodramas got a new lease on life. They offered superabundant opportunities for talk and noise, for stretches of dialogue in which police and detectives, gangsters and other villains sometimes strained the patience of audiences with long-winded explanations or self-revelations; for interminable courtroom scenes; for the sounds of machine guns, exploding bombs, screeching cars, police sirens, and whistles; high-pitched screams of threatened heroines and low-pitched growls of man-hunting bloodhounds. Also, two new genres, the musical (established with the Jolson pictures) and the gag comedy (strongly boosted by the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, 1929), began to vie in popular appeal with the gangster melodrama.

The year before Cagney took to toting guns through a long succession of movies, Alan Crosland was back at Warner Bros. directing On with the Show, the first “audible prismatic feature film”—sound movie in two-tone Technicolor. Several studios, including Warner Bros., also released other sound movies containing color sequences.

With the 1928 film In Old Arizona (directed by Raoul Walsh), Fox had tried the experiment of making a feature in the great outdoors. MGM, not to be outdone, encouraged director Sam Wood to take his Movietone apparatus into city streets, where he found that he was able to record dialogue for his feature So This Is College? quite audibly above the din of heavy traffic. These films convincingly demonstrated that—at least when Movietone was being used—talkies did not have to be made exclusively in the insulated confines of sound studios. The camera could be liberated from its booth, and the actor could again become mobile. More spectacularly than the experiments of Walsh and Wood, director W. S. Van Dyke announced that he was having tons of sound equipment crated and shipped abroad to make a talkie in the jungles of Africa! This film was to be his very successful Trader Horn (1931).

The Fox Company, impressed with the technological “perfection” of their sound system as well as by the soaring profits from their sound movies, announced in March 1929 that their studio would be going over entirely to the production of musical and dialogue pictures. Columbia released a similar statement a few days later. The other studios held back, but one by one in the next few months they capitulated to the inevitable, declaring that they too were in the business of making talkies, talkies, and only talkies.

Fox’s general manager, Winfield Sheehan, was placed at the head of a new $10 million sound studio complex, to be called Fox Hills. When completed, it was stated, the plant would cover 180 acres and incorporate 25 sound stages. It was a whole continent, a billion dollars, and half a century away from where it had all started: in Edison’s laboratory in West Orange.

The spreading ripples of motion picture sound technology and the widespread acceptance of the talkies as an institution that had arrived to stay were evident in three unrelated news items appearing in 1929. In the spring the New York Times noted that the White House had been wired for talkies. An editorial commented, “If any stubborn persons have resisted the overwhelming invitation of the talkies, they may as well give up now. The President and Mrs. Hoover have accepted the innovation.” In October the same paper published a glossary of more than 100 terms used by motion picture sound engineers, many of which had gained currency outside the studios. They included such “new” words as dubbing, flutter, boom, mixer, movieola, and camera blimp. But the major news event that showed unequivocally that the sound era had “arrived” was Hollywood’s own approval of the talkies: for it was a talkie, Broadway Melody that received the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1929, while Oscars for the Best Actor and Actress went to performers who had also appeared in sound features.

And so, for better or worse, sound had married image: the talkies had been born, and Hollywood had legitimized the birth. What next? “I think,” wrote D. W. Griffith in 1929, “that the talking picture, when it is made into a rhythmic and cogent whole, will be an eighth art, a combination and synthesis of all the arts, and hence will be more flexible and useful to the complex twentieth century.”¹⁷ It took fifty years from the invention of the phonograph to the birth of the talkies. It has taken considerably less than half a century to prove Griffith’s prophecy correct.

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* See Appendix B for a detailed listing of Hollywood sound productions for 1929.

* An elaborate diagram showing the use of various sound systems by American and European studios appears in Business Week, September 17, 1930, p.22.