THE VOICE OF
VITAPHONE

The decisive events leading to the coming of talkies occurred during the mid-twenties and involved the association of Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., with Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Warner Bros. followed no long-term policy with regard to the development of sound cinema. Indeed, they were to be directed by the unpredictable nature of public response (particularly as far as reception of The Jazz Singer was concerned) rather than by any astute insight into the future of the medium. However, in retrospect, we can now discern three major phases in Warner Bros.’ involvement with sound films. The first culminated with the making of Don Juan (1926), in which, following the tradition of silent cinema, the sound used was primarily musical accompaniment. The second phase was to produce The Jazz Singer (1927), out of which the transitional concept of the parttalkie emerged. The third and final phase was realized with Lights of New York (1928), which inaugurated the conventional dialogue film of the sound era.

Some three years before the Warners were to come into the picture, a little-publicized experiment took place. It was eventually to have shattering consequences on film industries all over the world, but at the time not one studio head seems to have bothered about it. In October 1922 at Woolsey Hall in Yale University, Edward B. Craft demonstrated the synchronization of a phonograph record and a projected motion picture. Sound engineers, the only people seriously interested in the experiment, were more concerned with the record itself than with the synchronization, for Craft was giving the first public demonstration of a system for the electrical recording of phonograph disks. It was the outcome of combining electromagnetic reproducers (the work of Crandall, Kranz, and H. D. Arnold, c. 1913–15) with improvements (by J. P. Maxfield and his associates and H. C. Harrison) in wax disk recording and the phonograph.¹

The recording system was imperfect, but its possibilities aroused the interest and activity of researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Bell Labs and Western Electric Company were both subsidiaries of American Telephone and Telegraph Company; the former was the research branch, the latter the manufacturing and marketing arm. These organizations had obvious, vested interests in technological developments relating to sound.

Mainly through their invention of a mechanical filter that greatly refined the quality of sound recording, Bell engineers managed to improve considerably upon Craft’s system. Their apparatus was ready by 1924, and RCA, Victor, and Columbia, the major phonograph recording companies, promptly obtained licenses from Western Electric to use the new system (whose advancement of the art and science of sound recording was to be paralleled only by the much later development of the longplaying high-fidelity microgroove record). This successful and lucrative outcome of their work encouraged Bell engineers to consider further applications of the new sound system. Recalling Craft’s attempt to synchronize film and phonograph record, they proceeded to experiment along the same lines. Only after the expenditure of millions of dollars did they become aware of Hollywood’s indifference–even downright hostility—to sound pictures. Then it became clear to them that most, if not all, film companies regarded sound pictures as the kiss of death.

It was well known in Hollywood that previous dabblings with such innovations had proved to be technical failures and financial disasters. And even if a new system turned out to be technically perfect, it was generally agreed among studio heads that the transition to sound would be a very costly gamble that could be disastrous to the whole industry. Sound studios would have to be built, and theaters would have to be equipped with the new apparatus. And what would happen to all those millions already invested in silent films? What would be the effect on the industry’s lucrative overseas market if talking pictures with American dialogue replaced silent films whose titles could be easily translated? What would become of silent movie stars who were not trained to deliver spoken dialogue, but whose reputation as silent stars had been “created” by expensive promotional campaigns and whose popularity sustained the studios and represented their greatest assets? “What,” as Variety asked, “would happen to the class theatres with expensive orchestras and stage shows, if any jerk-water movie joint was to be able to give its patrons gorgeous feasts of music via the screen?” Oblivious to these and other questions, Western Electric and Bell sank more and more time and money into experiments they felt sure would interest the film industry as eagerly as the development of electric recording had interested the phonograph record industry.

The energies of the Bell people were concentrated on perfecting a sound-on-disk system. Their ignorance of the needs of the film industry may be gauged from the fact that the apparatus they originally built was designed to synchronize records with films running at 75 feet per minute. As film was normally projected at 90 feet per minute, their system would have required modifications to every projector wired to their apparatus. Fortunately, this little oversight was corrected when, in due course, Warner Bros. came onto the scene. But, as we shall see, other shortcomings were not discovered until their system was already in use for the production of sound movies for commercial exhibition.

As Edward Kellogg noted, “To provide sound for pictures, using the disk-record system, it was necessary to have records which would play continuously for at least the projection time of a 1000-ft. reel (about 11 min.), to plan a synchronous drive, and to use electrical reproduction in order that, with the help of amplifiers, adequate sound output could be had.”²

After much trial and error, what the Bell people eventually produced was a combination of several important technical developments: First, “an electrical system of recording, employing a high quality microphone and a record-cutting mechanism . . . second . . . an electrical needle reproducer in the grooves of a sound record [where it was sensitized] by electrical vibrations. The electrical currents from this device pass[ed] into an amplifier and then operate [d] a high quality speaker capable of filling the largest motion picture auditorium.”³ Third, a method for making the change from one record to the next without any interruption in the recorded sound.

Sixteen-inch one-sided disks were used; when played at 33⅓ rpm, the speed at which the sound had been recorded, this size supplied the sound equivalent of a standard thousand-foot reel of film. Interconnected projectors providing imperceptible transitions from reel to reel were already in general use in most cinemas. The corresponding switch from one record to another was managed by the use of a double-amplifying rheostat, “the points on one side of which led to the electrical ‘pick-up’ of one reproducing instrument, those on the other side leading to the other. These points were numbered, and the switch served both as amplifier control and as switch-over. If record number one was being played on point 5, record number two could be switched to by a single quick turn of the dial to point 5 on the other side. This would open the circuit between number one’s pickup and the loudspeaker, and close that between number two’s pickup and the same loudspeaker. The amplification would be the same in both cases.”⁴ The final development in the Bell system was the use of a “link between the reproducer and the audience in a theater. An adaptation of the public address system . . . [made] it possible to pick up electric vibrations from the reproducer, amplify them, and by means of properly located loudspeaking telephones, transform them into sound.”⁵

One of the first uses of the new system was the completion, in 1924, of Hawthorne, a talking picture about the Western Electric factory in suburban Chicago. E. S. Gregg has described it as “the first industrial sound picture ever to be seen and heard.”⁶ During the same year, Bell technicians prepared a number of short test films of songs and dance bands to demonstrate their newly developed system to the heads of the most important Hollywood film companies. The Warner brothers were not invited. Their company was too small and insignificant at that time. But Edison, Jesse Lasky, and several executives from MGM were among those who attended the demonstration programs. Their responses, when enthusiastic, stopped short at investing in the system or at expressing any interest in the production of sound movies in Hollywood.

Meanwhile, separate and more aggressive approaches to the film industry were being made by Walter J. Rich, an independent entrepreneur with little direct knowledge of Hollywood. He nevertheless convinced Western Electric that he was the man to promote the new synchronization system and to persuade the Hollywood companies that the sound era had arrived and that they should make haste to join it. Rich’s agreement with Western Electric provided that licenses to use the system were to be negotiated with him as well as with Western Electric. (In due course this provision was to involve him in dealings with Warner Bros., whom he had not bothered to contact during his promotional efforts.) By spring 1925, before Warner Bros. came into the picture, Rich had spent $36,000 of his own money in promoting the system without managing to sign up a single company. He thought and talked on the grand scale but achieved little and was never more than incidental to events that led to the coming of sound.

Despite Rich’s activities, during 1923–25, events were transpiring that would involve Warner Bros. in the experiments of Bell Laboratories. Since 1903, when they traveled through Pennsylvania and Ohio, exhibiting an overworked print of The Great Train Robbery, Sam, Harry, Jack, and Albert Warner had been active in the film industry–first as small-time exhibitors, and later, with increasing success, as distributors and producers. In 1923 they established Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., a production company whose greatest assets were the popular dog-star Rin-Tin-Tin and the talents of John Barrymore (in that order of importance). When the new corporation began to rack up healthy profits and a rapid increase in production became desirable, more studio space and equipment and an effective, widespread distribution system were needed. These requirements were fulfilled by buying the ailing Vitagraph company, with its acres of well-equipped studios and an established network of foreign film exchanges.

Stepped-up production meant that more publicity would be needed. At that period radio offered the most exciting medium for advertising films, and a film company that was affluent enough owned a radio station or even a radio network. Warner Bros. could not afford to establish a new radio network, but late in 1924 it did buy the equipment of a radio station that had gone bankrupt. It was the best investment the company ever made. As Jack Warner notes: it was “one of those freak rolls of dice–a radio station was almost directly responsible for the fantastic upheaval which took us from a net income of $30,000 for the first eight months of 1927, to a staggering profit of $17,000,000 for a similar period only two years later.”⁷ However, such a development was inconceivable in 1924. The immediate concern of the Warners was to transport the heap of apparatus to their studio and get it working.

The installation job was given to Western Electric. As a result, Benjamin Levinson, a radio expert and Western Electric’s engineer in charge of the work of setting up KFWB (as Warner Bros.’ station came to be known), got to meet Sam Warner. The two men became close friends, and Levinson enjoyed explaining to Sam Warner the intricacies and marvels of the apparatus that the studio had just acquired.

Early in 1925, Levinson visited Bell Labs in New York and chanced upon a showing of one of the short test films that had been prepared the year before to demonstrate the new system to the Hollywood executives. According to E. S. Gregg, “He heard the natural sounds of the steps of a pianist going to his instrument; he heard the clicks as the pianist unbuttoned his gloves, the life-like sounds as cane, gloves, hat and coat were tossed aside. He heard for the first time the music of the piano as it came from the screen with startling fidelity. He was greatly impressed.’’⁸ Back in Los Angeles and in the company of Sam Warner, Levinson could not contain his enthusiasm.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m bringing you hot news. I just saw in our New York Laboratories the most wonderful thing I ever looked at in my life. A moving picture that talks!”

. . . “Benny,” said Sam with a shake of the head, “haven’t you been around the show world long enough now to know that a picture that talks is something to run away from?”

“I know, I know,” said Levinson impatiently. “You’re thinking about the old ones. ‘Cameraphone,’ ‘Kinetophone,’ all those things. But this is different. This is a talking picture that works like radio! Vacuum tubes. Amplifiers. Listen while I explain it to you. . . .”⁹

According to Fitzhugh Green, Levinson made Sam Warner promise to attend a demonstration at Bell Labs, telling him, persuasively, “there’s more money in it than there ever was in movies.” Green, writing close to the events, nowhere mentions that Jack Warner influenced Sam’s decision to attend the demonstration. However, as recently as 1965, Jack Warner claimed in his autobiography that it was on his “enthusiastic urging” that his brother “went to New York and there, with eyes popping like a kid at a French peep show . . . saw a series of shorts in which voices and music came from the screen.”¹⁰ It is not clear why Jack Warner should have been so enthusiastic about an invention he had never seen or heard. What is clear is that he wants his readers to believe that he was the most prescient of the Warner brothers. (Later in the same book he states, “I started production on our first sound film, Don Juan.” [Notice the “I.”] Elsewhere brother Jack speaks of “we” [all the Warner brothers], but here he claims credit for being the sole, personal producer of the first sound feature film, a claim that this writer has been unable to substantiate in Warner Bros. promotional material, in trade advertising for the film, or in any of the published and unpublished sources he has consulted. It should be noted, incidentally, that while Jack Warner clearly identifies himself as the producer of Don Juan, he somehow omits to mention the name of the man who directed the picture. He does remember Alan Crosland when he gives his account of the making of The Jazz Singer, but this little piece of information is overshadowed by the revelation that it was none other than Jack Warner who had the brilliant idea of offering the lead to Al Jolson.)

With or without the inspiration of his brother, Sam Warner attended a demonstration of sound films at Bell Labs in April 1925, when he was visiting New York to finalize the takeover of Vitagraph. If anything, he was even more impressed than Levinson. The synchronization and the sound quality seemed remarkably natural and clear to him. The idea of producing sound movies began to appeal to his imagination. Back in California he tried to convey his excitement to his brother Harry. But Harry was ice-cold on the subject of talking pictures; he knew all the horror stories about earlier ventures into sound movies. Also, as he was in charge of the company’s financial affairs, he knew better than Sam did how heavily it had gone into debt to buy Vitagraph. It would be lunacy to gamble even more borrowed money on an untried novelty. Accordingly, he refused to see the invention or even talk about it.

Undaunted, Sam arranged what was ostensibly a social meeting between his brothers and officials from Bell Labs and Western Electric. Actually, it was a ruse to get Harry Warner to attend a demonstration of sound movies, and it worked. Harry “was very much impressed, but didn’t want the Western people to know it. It was when they showed an orchestra that he got his great inspiration of providing film with musical accompaniment.”¹¹ He was to explain subsequently:

“The thought occurred to me that if we quit the idea of a talking picture and brought about something the motion picture theatre of the present day really needs—music adapted to the picture—we could ultimately develop it to a point at which people would ask us for talking pictures. If I myself would not have gone across the street to see or hear a talking picture, I surely could not expect the public to do it. But Music! That is another story. . . .”¹²

Later, when he was alone with his brother, Harry admitted that he thought the system had possibilities.

“But Sam,” he added, “I wouldn’t be so foolish as to try to make talking pictures. That’s what everybody has done, and lost. No, we’ll do better than that: we can use this thing for other purposes. We can use it for musical accompaniment to our pictures! We can film and record vaudeville and musical acts, and make up programs for houses that can’t afford the real thing or can’t get big-time acts. Think of what it would mean to a small independent theatre owner to buy his orchestra with his picture! Not to have an organ! Not a musician in the house! Not an actor—and yet his whole show. . . .”¹³

Thus was envisaged what was to be the first of the three major phases of Warner Bros.’ development of sound cinema.

Now that Sam and Harry were both seriously interested in the new sound system, Warner Bros. was ready to open negotiations with Western Electric. At this point it was discovered that the company would first have to settle with Walter J. Rich. Rich was promptly approached, and having given up hope of interesting any of the big film companies, he was more than willing to deal with Warner Bros. For a fee of $72,000 he agreed to “go in with [Warners] on a share and share alike basis”¹⁴ and permit them to negotiate freely with Western Electric for permission to use the new sound system.

In June 1925, “Stanley Watkins, who had been head of [J.P.] Maxfield’s experimental sound crew at Western Electric, took his men to the Vitagraph studio, in Brooklyn, and set up shop. Inside the big glass stages, they built a box 50 feet square and 30 feet high. This would be their new set, but it had to be sound-proofed. So the crew and Sam Warner, who . . . left the studio only to sleep, hung rugs over the walls of the box stage to insulate the place for sound.”¹⁵ Vitagraph studios had not, of course, been designed for the making of sound movies. Despite the efforts of Watkins and his crew, acoustic problems arose from the outset. “Draperies were hung up in the rafters to muffle sound. . . . Ed DuPar . . . was the cameraman on this early project. He achieved as much camera mobility as possible by running four cameras on a take. One master camera ran continuously on a long-shot set-up while the others were used to get cut-in shots. Sometimes he would make ten or twelve changes on the close-up camera in the course of one ten-minute recording.”¹⁶ At this period, the sound system was being used at Vitagraph on the basis of Rich’s agreement with Western Electric and his recently-formed partnership with Warner Bros. So far Warner Bros. had not signed a contract with Western Electric.

By spring 1926 short test films using the new sound system were being made quite regularly at Vitagraph. Two of the short experimental pictures made at this time were later released for public exhibition. The first was a speech by elderly Dr. Watson, who had collaborated with Alexander Graham Bell in inventing the telephone. The second, rather more ambitious effort was titled The Volga Boatmen. It required the construction of a studio set depicting a river bank along which eight sturdy men—two quartets of Russian singers—proceeded laboriously while singing the “Volga Boat Song” and tugging at a rope supposedly attached to an unseen boat. “For this opus they imported loads of salt to simulate snow and braced one hefty member of the [sound] crew off stage so the ‘boatmen’ could have something to pull on.”¹⁷ The inspiration for this masterpiece, reputedly directed by Sam Warner himself, was doubtless the release, early in April 1926, of Cecil B. DeMille’s feature film The Volga Boatman, starring William Boyd, Robert Edeson, and Victor Varconi. If DeMille heard about the competition he was unlikely to have been disturbed by it. The Warners would have a much longer haul than their boatmen before they could make sound pictures that offered any serious opposition to the ambitious silent features of the major studios.

Before legalizing their arrangements with Western Electric, the Warners decided to keep their venture into sound films separate from the regular, silent film-making activities of their Hollywood studios. Early in April 1926 they established a new company, Vitaphone Corporation (no doubt a deliberate echo of Vitagraph), and named the sound system Vitaphone. On April 20, 1926, the new corporation formally leased the Vitaphone system from Western Electric and also secured rights to sublicense the system to other film companies. In due course, Warner Bros.’ control of these sublicensing rights was to antagonize other studios when they in turn sought to make the transition to sound; and more than any other single factor it was to lead to the promotion of rival systems and the eventual triumph of sound-on-film over sound-on-disk.

But at this stage Warner Bros. had the field to itself. It was a questionable advantage when none of the other studios had shown any interest in sound movies, but nevertheless one that had to be exploited in view of the company’s heavy and increasing investments in the system. Rich suggested arranging demonstration programs for film exhibitors, who might thereby be induced to sink some of their money into Vitaphone. But the Warners knew show business better than Rich did. Realizing that they had something unique, they decided that the best way to exploit it was to use it in a unique way—to present it in a package that no other film company could offer. Instead of demonstrating experimental films to exhibitors, they would use the system to create a spectacular show that everyone would want to see. (The same idea was behind Clément-Maurice’s Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre of 1900 and in the exploitation, years later, of such technical developments as Cinerama and 3-D). Thus, from the outset the public would associate Vitaphone with entertainment of the highest order. The inspiration was Harry Warner’s. As he subsequently explained, “I said to my partners, ‘Let’s get the greatest artists and the best orchestra in the country. Let’s have confidence in this and put all our muscle behind it. We’ll know the result after we have opened the first show. . . .’ ”¹⁸ He conceived a long, elaborate program, consisting of a number of short films exhibiting the talents of musical virtuosi of the concert stage and opera house, followed by a lavish feature film. In every part of the show the “miracle” of Vitaphone would be evident.

Once the die had been cast and the Warners were firmly committed to promoting Vitaphone on the grand scale, it became imperative for them to raise large amounts of capital. The creation of the whole program for the premiere of Vitaphone would finally involve Warner Bros. in an expenditure of almost $3 million. Within a year after the agreement with Western Electric, the company had so overextended itself that the future of Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., depended entirely on the success or failure of the gamble with Vitaphone.

For the short films that would make up the first part of the program the Warners planned to present leading artists of the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York. Eventually, upwards of a million dollars was spent in hiring the chosen artists, obtaining their temporary release from contracts with Metropolitan Opera and various record companies, hiring the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and securing rights to use certain copyrighted music.

It was decided that the program’s feature film would be Don Juan, the latest vehicle for John Barrymore. Originally intended as a silent movie, the film was already in production in Warner Bros.’ Hollywood studios. Its budget had been fixed at half a million dollars, but when the decision was made to include the movie in the Vitaphone program, an additional $200,000 was ploughed into the picture, thus insuring that it would be one of the most expensive films of 1926, and certainly the costliest Warner production up to that time. This additional investment did not include the considerable expense of supplying the sound accompaniment, which utilized a specially commissioned score.

The short films for the premiere program were made in Manhattan. Vitagraph studios proved to be totally unsatisfactory. The production crew was “isolated in Flatbush from everything, except the subway. The Coney Island line of the BMT ran above the surface—right past the studio windows. Every time a train passed, the record needle jumped in anguish. Working conditions in Flatbush went from bad to worse.”¹⁹

Obviously, at this period no sound studio where feature films could be made existed anywhere in the world, and Warner Bros. had no immediate plans to build one. A compromise location had to be found, and the old Manhattan Opera House, which was known to have good acoustics, was chosen. The Vitaphone Corporation took a year’s lease on the building, and soon electricians, carpenters, and sound engineers were swarming over the place, installing miles of wiring, and setting up arc lamps, cameras, and recording equipment.

“S. S. A. Watkins was in charge for Western Electric. He had a group of men including H. C. Humphrey, R. C. Sawyer, and George Grove. Sam Warner carried on the Warner Brothers’ end. With him he had Ed DuPar, a cameraman, and Bert Frank, a cutter. On occasion Herman Heller, musical director of the Warner Theatre in New York, came over. Heller was the first ‘Talkie’ director because all the first numbers were musical.”²⁰

Now that production had begun, in earnest, on a program intended for the largest possible public audience, a series of difficulties became apparent that had been latent or nonexistent while the test films were being made. As Fitzhugh Green observed: “It was easy to make pictures, easy to make records; but another matter to make them together. Conditions that were ideal for the one were so often not at all ideal for the other.”²¹ The Manhattan Opera House turned out to be scarcely any improvement over the Vitagraph studios. The most serious problems arose from noise of all kinds, which impaired the quality of the sound recording. Close to the Opera House, part of the New York City subway system was being excavated, and workmen were blasting into the rocky surface of Manhattan while recording sessions were in progress. Aside from the disruptive sounds of explosions, shock waves would knock the stylus out of the groove and ruin a well-nigh perfect disk.

A host of other unexpected noises plagued the recording engineers: interference from static electricity; echoes, resonances, and various extraneous sounds (such as coughs, footsteps, passing traffic), most of which were inaudible to listeners in the Opera House but were nevertheless picked up and amplified by the Vitaphone system. The system also proved to be ultrasensitive to the sounds emitted by the studio arc lights: not only the barely audible “sizzle” but also the normally inaudible emission of radio waves and harmonics. In addition, the records themselves produced uncontrollable surface noise, and it was discovered that the Vitaphone apparatus was sensitive to radio broadcasts and was sometimes unexpectedly recording radio programs along with the intended sounds.

But the most serious obstacles were created by the cameras themselves. First, they were hand-cranked, which meant that even the most assiduous and unwearying cameraman could not maintain a speed regular enough to insure perfect synchronization with phonograph recordings. Motor-driven cameras had to be devised to replace the standard hand-cranked apparatus, but the sound of their whirring mechanism was clearly discernible on every recording made at the outset of production in the Manhattan Opera House. Most, if not all these difficulties had to be mastered quickly. Unfortunately, not all the immediate solutions were ideal ones for the art of motion picture making. Thus by housing the camera in a soundproof booth, camera noise was eliminated—but at the cost of the camera’s former mobility and flexibility. The booth constructed for this purpose was

about seven feet high, four feet deep and three feet wide, mounted on rubber tired swivel wheels, with a door cut in the back for the ingress and egress of the camerman and his machine. There was a square hole in the front of it for the camera to “shoot” through. And in order that no camera noise should come through this hole, felt sound insulating material was fastened, in the shape of an inverted pyramid between its edges and the outer part of the lens; the lens stuck its glassy eye out from the depths of a felt-sided tunnel.²²

After one occasion when the door of the booth had been left open accidentally and the camera noise ruined the take, it became the practice to lock cameramen into the booth during the recording sessions. But no way was found to avoid frequent disruptions from noises outside the Opera House; this problem was not solved until the construction of sound studios insulated against exterior noise.

The other difficulties were easier to cope with. Radio sounds and some surface noise were prevented by covering every part of the Vitaphone apparatus with a metallic “shield” that was impervious to static and radio waves. Unfortunately, this shield proved ineffective as a barrier to sounds emanating from the arc lamps; the only solution here was for Frank N. Murphy, Warner Bros.’ chief electrician, to devise an entirely new lighting system employing incandescent lamps. The system he developed was a major advance in studio lighting, and within a short time in most studios it had entirely replaced the old arc lighting that had been used during the silent era. Echoes and resonances inside the building were reduced or eliminated by hanging heavy drapes or placing scenery flats at suitable locations to break up extensive wall surfaces. With these and other quickly improvised methods, the shooting and recording sessions were able to proceed more or less on schedule.

As mentioned earlier, the Warners expected that the effectiveness of Vitaphone in providing musical accompaniment of silent pictures would decide the future of the system. Accordingly, special consideration was given to the score of Don Juan. Since the film would have to demonstrate unequivocally Vitaphone’s superiority over the live cinema orchestra, organist, or pianist, it was essential to provide a memorable, original score played in perfect or nearly perfect synchronization with the picture. William Axt, David Mendoza, and Major Edward Bowes were selected to write the music. Axt, a film composer of some eminence, had previously written the music played by theater orchestras as accompaniment to The Big Parade and Ben Hur (both 1925). His success with the music for Don Juan was to earn him the first studio contract ever given to a film composer—though curiously it was to come from MGM not Warner Bros. Axt went on to provide the scores for numerous films during the first years of the sound era. By contrast, the careers of Mendoza and Bowes were short-lived. Mendoza did collaborate with Axt on at least three other films before 1929, including the score for Fred Niblo’s Camille (1927), starring Norma Talmadge and Gilbert Roland. Bowes also supplied music for Camille. Axt, Mendoza, and Bowes watched Don Juan many times, familiarizing themselves with the moods, actions, and personalities they would have to express or intensify musically. They timed every shot with stop watches and then set to work to write a score which compounded original themes and melodies from classical compositions and which, when played at the correct speed, would synchronize with the film.

When the score was ready, Henry Hadley, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, rehearsed it while watching the picture on a screen behind the orchestra. The speed of the music was carefully adjusted to the picture, and various additions, excisions, and changes were made to the score until the timing was perfect. The recording sessions could now begin. One visitor to these sessions was a reporter for Moving Picture World, who rapturously noted his impressions in that journal’s issue for July 10, 1926, less than a month before the film’s premiere:

The other afternoon at the Manhattan Opera House we heard the New York Philharmonic Orchestra recording for Don Juan via the Vitaphone. . . . It was playing what will be admitted as one of the finest scores that ever accompanied a picture . . . Warner Bros., with the Vitaphone, are in a fair way to rewrite a big chapter of picture presentation. . . . The influence of a beautiful and appealing musical score, going hand in hand with the picture, will be profound in every center, large or small. The effect on the social structure of the country, aside from its effect on the picture business will be as marked as the influences of any one of the great inventions in electrical and physical science.

In August 1926, the Warners believed that the future of their organization depended on the accuracy of this prediction. No one was discussing talking pictures: synchronized music would decide the success or failure of Vitaphone and Warner Bros.

Meanwhile, Warners’ Theatre, in New York, where the first Vitaphone show was to be premiered, was being wired for sound and decorated for the gala event. What the latter involved may be imagined from this description by Peter Milne in Moving Picture World for August 14, 1926:

The theatre had been closed for a week prior to the opening, during which time an army of workmen transformed the interior of the house to more closely resemble a legitimate theatre. There is novelty in the new decorations from the lighting of the interior itself to the dressing of the lobby of the house.

The technical installations were another matter. They required less labor but were far more complex. First, the projection booth had to be equipped with amplifiers, a monitor or control horn (to enable the operator to gauge the sound in the auditorium), a disk attachment for the projector, and a “Control gear by means of which one or other projector” might be “put in use at will and the volume of sound adjusted to any particular requirement.”²³ (Contrasting photos of Warner projection booths in 1926 and 1928 appear in F. Green’s The Film Finds Its Tongue, 1929.) Next, in order to insure the existence of a self-sufficient power supply, a power room, containing a generator, a transformer, a battery charger, and a generous supply of batteries, was installed. Finally, the stage was equipped with concealed speakers in duplex form. A contemporary account describes them as four horns “twelve and fourteen feet long, and coiled . . . they are placed in back of a special screen . . . two mounted at the line of the stage and pointed upward towards the balconies, and two mounted at the upper edge or above the screen, and pointed downward.”²⁴ This arrangement was found to provide satisfactory sound distribution throughout the auditorium.

The first Vitaphone show had been prepared hurriedly. Work began late in April 1926 and was completed only three months later, on August 1, 1926. Three days later the show was given its first preview, for all those who had been involved in its production. The next evening, August 5, there was a preview for executives and engineers of Western Electric and Bell Telephone. Everyone was impressed. But then, of course, it was “their baby.” The big question remained unanswered. What would the reviewers and the public think of Vitaphone?

Advertisements were already doing everything possible to influence their reactions. The striking four-page, red and black announcement that appeared in the leading trade journals was typical:

EXHIBITORS!

If you think the world has been thrilled before, wait until August 6th when WARNER BROS. will present the

VITAPHONE

At the Warner Theatre, New York, in conjunction with the World Premiere showing of

“DON JUAN”

Story by Bess Meredyth Directed by Alan Crosland With the world’s greatest actor

JOHN BARRYMORE

Opening night $10 Admission Plus Tax. . . .

The rest of the announcement detailed the supporting program of short films, which offered the talents of Giovanni Martinelli (“the world famous Metropolitan Opera tenor”), Efrem Zimbalist (“acclaimed the master violinist in both Europe and America”), Mischa Elman (“known to every man, woman and child that loves music”), Harold Bauer (“the pianist numbered among the immortals of music”), Marion Talley (“the Metropolitan Opera Sensation of the Year”), Anna Case (“the favorite of Europe’s royalty and the American public”), the Metropolitan Opera Chorus (“singers heretofore appearing only with the Metropolitan Opera Company”), and Henry Hadley and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (“Mr. Hadley himself, conducting this unparalleled aggregation of 107 symphony artists”)—all “presented on the Vitaphone by Warner Bros. by arrangement with the Western Electric Company and the Bell Telephone Laboratories.”

Another, prophetic and even more boastful advertisement appeared a week later, in the August 7 issue of Moving Picture World:

EXHIBITORS! Do you realize that on August 6th motion pictures will have been completely revolutionized by “VITAPHONE”? On that day “VITAPHONE” will bring the realization of a new future to the theatres of the world; a future brighter in its aspects, broader in its scope, and greater in its possibilities than any other period in the development of motion pictures.

What the telephone means to modern life; what the railroad means to modern travel; what the world’s greatest inventions mean to civilization today—that is what Warner Bros. bring to motion pictures in “VITAPHONE.”

Nothing in the history of motion pictures compares with the importance of this one event! Through “VITAPHONE” it will now be possible for the world at large to see and hear that which was heretofore impossible. . . .

Like the rumblings of a coming storm, word-of-mouth comment comes low and slowly, but gathering power as it sweeps onward, it carries like lightning to the far corners of the world. Such will be the praise for “VITAPHONE”! Already you have heard of it. And on August 6th the whole world will thrill to the greatest news the entire motion picture industry has ever heard. The World Premiere of “VITAPHONE”—remember the date, August 6th, 1926.

In August 1926 Warners’ Theatre, at Fifty-second Street and Broadway, New York, was the only theater in the world equipped to present Vitaphone. The public premiere attracted a distinguished and formally attired audience, which included Hollywood moguls William Fox and Adolph Zukor; theater producers and impresarios Lee Shubert, Marc Klaw, and E. F. Albee; singer Amelita Galli-Curci; financier Otto Kahn; entrepreneur Walter J. Rich; and most of the performers whose talents were displayed in the short films. As the audience filed into the theater on that historic Friday evening, they were handed programs in which they read the following statement expressing Warner Bros.’ high aims and hopes for Vitaphone and the ease with which the system could be operated, but patently excluding any mention of plans to make talking feature films:

The Vitaphone will revolutionize the presentation of motion pictures in the largest metropolitan theatres as well as in the smallest theatres in the smallest towns. It will bring to audiences in every corner of the world the music of the greatest symphony orchestras and the vocal entertainment of the most popular stars of the operatic and theatrical fields. Its use is not confined by any means, to the presentation of pictures. It will be available for use in legitimate theatre, and, in the educational, commercial and religious fields as well as in the field of amusement.

The invention will make it possible for every performance in a motion picture theatre to have a full orchestral accompaniment to the picture regardless of the size of the house. The apparatus, by means of which the combination of motion pictures and sound will be reproduced in theatres, is no more complicated, from the standpoint of operation, than an ordinary motion picture projector. No special skill or technique is required by the operator. If the film breaks there is no interference with the accuracy of synchronization. The sound system is not controlled by the film itself.²⁵

Such claims were soon found to be more than a little exaggerated, but at this stage they served to impress potential investors and exhibitors who might easily be discouraged at learning not only that it would cost a minimum of $16,000 to install Vitaphone equipment in the average movie theater but also that the system was not simple to operate (or fix, if anything went wrong) and that all the bugs were not yet out of it.

With so much at stake, the Warners were leaving as little as possible to chance. Only a week before the premiere, Harry Warner was to announce that “no time would be lost in taking steps to put the Vitaphone accompaniment within the reach of all exhibitors,”²⁶ Publicly the premiere and the advertised claims about Vitaphone seemed to be having the desired effect. A boxed news item on the front page of Moving Picture World noted that “Other producers and distributors present at the Vitaphone premiere . . . were keenly interested in the possibilities the invention offers. There is the probability that an arrangement will be effected whereby other producers will employ the Vitaphone.”²⁷

At first, however, the truth was rather different. Shortly after the Don Juan premiere, Harry Warner was confronting his brothers with a serious question. “The show is open and everything is fine, but who is going to buy our machines? . . . I have gone around to the heads of several companies and tried to persuade them to participate, but as yet I must admit we have not succeeded.”²⁸ And in March 1927, at an interview with Joseph P. Kennedy, held at the Harvard Graduate School of Business, Harry revealed the hard facts involved in trying to persuade exhibitors to install Vitaphone in their theaters.

Mr. Kennedy: Do you lease or sell the Vitaphone?

Mr. Warner: We take the cost of the machine and we lease it on that basis to the man who runs the theatre. . . . Then we charge him a tax of ten cents a seat a week. . . . That does not mean that that is the way it is ultimately going to be done, because I personally believe that the man who has a small theatre in a small town will not be able to pay that much money. . . . We shall have to modify our policy to meet the requirements of the situation.

Mr. Kennedy: What, approximately, does it cost to install?

Mr. Warner: We have got it down to the cheapest figure. In a theatre of nine hundred or one thousand seats, it costs $16,000; in the next size, the theatre of about fifteen hundred seats, $18,000; in the larger theatres, $22,000; in a theatre like the Roxy, $25,000. That is the actual cost to us.²⁹

The dubious gamble with Vitaphone must be seen in the context of Warner Bros.’ economic standing in 1926. The company was almost incalculably in debt, and had shown a net loss of more than a million dollars for the year ending March 1926 (according to Kinematograph Weekly, London, July 15, 1926).³⁰ Though part of this deficit was the price of becoming national distributors—and included the purchase of Vitagraph—most of the loss could be attributed to the declining appeal of Warner Bros.’ silent movies. It was no exaggeration in the fall of 1926 to say that Vitaphone would make or break the company.

But meanwhile, economics aside, what exactly did the audience see and hear as they settled into their seats in Warners’ Theatre on the evening of August 6, 1926?

At 8:30 the house lights dimmed. As the curtains opened, on the screen, in long shot, could be seen the willowy figure of Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers Association and nominal head of the American film industry. Hays began to approach the audience. As he came nearer, the first sounds could be heard coming from the screen: the image was clearing its throat. It took up a stiff, formal pose standing between an ornate chair and a book-laden table. Then it began to speak. The words were clearly audible throughout the theater and were perfectly synchronized with the movements of the speaker’s lips:

No story ever written for the screen is as dramatic as the story of the screen itself.

Tonight marks another step in that story.

Far indeed have we advanced from that few seconds of the shadow of a serpentine dancer thirty years ago when the motion picture was born—to this, the first public demonstration of the Vitaphone which synchronizes the reproduction of sound with the reproduction of action.

And farther and farther ahead is the future of pictures, as farflung as all the tomorrows, rendering greater and still greater service as the chief amusement of the majority of all our people and the sole amusement of millions and millions, exercising an immeasurable influence as a living, breathing thing on the ideas and ideals, the customs and costumes, the hopes and ambitions of countless men, women and children.

In the presentation of these pictures, music plays an invaluable part. Too, the motion picture is a most potent factor in the development of a national appreciation of good music. Now that service will be extended as the Vitaphone shall carry symphony orchestrations to the town halls of the hamlets.

It has been said that the art of the musician is ephemeral, that he creates but for the moment. Now neither the artist nor his art will ever die.

Long experimentation and research by the Western Electric and the Bell Laboratories, supplemented by the efforts of Warner Brothers, have made this great new instrument possible, and to them and to all who have contributed to this achievement I offer my congratulations and best wishes.

To the Warner Brothers, to whom is due credit for this great premiere, marking the beginning of a new era in music and motion pictures, I offer my felicitations and sincerest appreciation.

It is an occasion with which the public and the motion picture industry are equally gratified.

It is another great service—and ‘Service is the supreme commitment of life.’³¹

At the end of his speech, the figure on the screen stood silent for a moment. Whereupon the audience spontaneously applauded, as if responding to a live figure. The illusion was complete as the image bowed, apparently acknowledging the applause. “No closer approach to resurrection has ever been made by science,” observed Professor Michael Pupin of Columbia University, after witnessing this, his first “talkie.”³²

When the picture faded out it was followed by titles announcing the “Overture ‘Tannhäuser’ by Richard Wagner, played by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Henry Hadley conducting. Presented by the Vitaphone Corporation (a subsidiary of Warner Bros.).”

Mordaunt Hall, who attended the Vitaphone premiere for the New York Times, was greatly impressed with the lifelike quality of the Hays speech. “There was no muffled utterance nor lisping in the course of the talk,” he noticed. “It was the voice of Hays, and had any of his friends closed their eyes to the picture on the screen they would have immediately recognized the voice. Every syllable was audible and clear.”³³ Charles Edward Hastings, writing for Moving Picture World, observed that the speech “was delivered with singular clarity, the tones coming clear, distinct and natural.”³⁴ Neither Hall nor Hastings lend any support to the much later recollection (or assumption?) by Richard Griffith that Hays’s “flat, middle-Western voice was slightly ‘out of sync.’ with his image on the screen. . . .”³⁵ Possibly Griffith’s impression was that of the speech as it is preserved in the sound-on-film conversion of the original–a form in which the speech is, indeed, somewhat “out of sync.” with the image. At any rate, his comment should warn us to beware of assumptions or conclusions based either on recollections long after the event or on questionable familiarity with the original experience.

Hall was as impressed with the overture as he had been with the speech. The orchestral rendering seemed to him remarkable not only for the “clarity of the tonal colors and softer interludes” but also for the “thrilling volumes of the full orchestra.” Hastings offered a more guarded assessment. After describing how the overture was presented—“with ‘close-ups’ of sections of the orchestra, according as strings or horns were carrying the theme”—he added: “the work of Mr. Hadley, when directing, was accurately timed. The full tone, in the closing movement, illustrated fully what may be expected from the Vitaphone.” Epes W. Sargent, also reviewing the show for Moving Picture World, went on to clarify what could be expected.

In the work of the Philharmonic orchestra, the string section came out as brilliantly as though the players were in the pit. The wood choir was a bit muffled and tubby, and when the heavy brasses came in there developed a curious covered effect, as though the instrument had too much tone to deliver. On the other hand, the tympani, of even deeper tone, came through clearly. . . . In brief, the Vitaphone seems to work best at opposite ends of the scale; the high notes and the low. The middle registers, whether instrumental or vocal, still lack clarity. The volume of tone seems to govern clearness to a considerable degree, for the solos were much better than the concerted numbers. However, the device gives far greater audibility, a far more correct rendition of tonal values and at most points is free from the suggestion of the phonograph horn.³⁶

Promotion for the program placed much emphasis on the fact that Vitaphone had recorded the full complement of the New York Philharmonic’s 107 players. But shortly afterwards, Harry Warner was to admit that the recording people had discovered that an 80-piece orchestra sounded better than a 107-piece orchestra when recorded on Vitaphone—“because, if you crowd too many musicians into a small room, naturally you get a very large volume of tone.”³⁷

When we see this filmed overture today—in a sound-on-film version, the only one that is occasionally accessible—its static cinematography seems to outweigh the importance it once possessed as a masterly achievement in sound recording. It is dullness incarnate and seems interminable. In fact, the only persistent complaint about the first Vitaphone show in 1926 was that some of the items in the concert section went on too long. The overture was the longest, and the experience of having to sit through it probably influenced the decision to restrict future short Vitaphone films to seven or eight minutes instead of the eleven to fifteen that was typical of the first show.

In filming the overture, the orchestra was placed in the orchestra pit; the stage was concealed by a closed curtain that was flanked by two twisted columns. As with sequences in many musicals of the thirties, the audience was being invited to believe that what they were watching was a live show in the theater. Indeed, in all the concert items that preceded the feature film a conscious effort was made to persuade the audience that they were in an opera house or concert hall rather than a movie theater. In the overture this impression may have been supplied by the limitations imposed on the camera; but in most of the other items the sense that one was watching theater was mainly created by the obviously theatrical scenery. The overture opens with a long shot of the entire orchestra and soon cuts to a slow pan across the string section. Thereafter, the same long shot and slow pan are monotonously repeated. The string section receives most of the camera’s attention, simply because it is in the foreground and thus the most accessible to the camera. One expects—but does not get—close-ups of the percussion and woodwind players. They are more remote from the camera. It would have taken a zoom lens or mobile camera to focus on them, but neither was available. The camera was imprisoned in a soundproof booth whose rubber wheels allowed for a minimum of movement. (By comparison with this filmed overture, the celebrated film Instruments of the Orchestra [directed by Muir Mathieson, 1946], in which Sir Malcolm Sargent used Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell as a means of demonstrating the orchestral role of various instruments, seems like a brilliant essay in montage.)

The overture film concludes with an irritating visual incongruity. Hadley lowers his baton and takes his bow in the usual long shot that shows the entire orchestra. Then there is a sudden cut to Hadley alone, in medium shot, bowing in front of the closed curtain on the stage above the orchestra pit. With another abrupt cut we are back to the familiar long shot and Hadley is requesting the orchestra to rise and acknowledge the applause. Presumably the problems of editing the film in relation to the recorded sound required the insertion of the disconcerting cutaway to Hadley alone on stage: the shot was probably filmed after the rest of the shooting, when the full orchestra was no longer available.

The solo performance films that followed the overture were no less static, but this fault was less evident because of their comparative brevity. Published accounts of the Vitaphone premiere appear unanimous in praise of violinist Mischa Elman playing Dvořák’s “Humoresque,” accompanied by Joseph Bonime at the piano. Charles Edward Hastings found this part of the program “one of the most entrancing things, as interpreted by the Vitaphone, that we have listened to.”³⁸ Mordaunt Hall observed that “every note that came to one’s ears synchronized with the gliding bow and the movements of the musician’s fingers.”³⁹ Elman followed “Humoresque” with another piece, not listed on the program, which Hastings described as apparently “selected . . . for the purpose of illustrating the synchronization purpose of the new invention. As Elman swayed to right or left and touched the bow against the strings, sound and movement touched it off in perfect accord.”

A light interlude in this mainly classical presentation was provided by a short film of guitarist Roy Smeck in his “Pastimes”—performances on the banjo, ukelele, harmonica, and Hawaiian guitar. “The numbers were jazzy, and the production wholly satisfying, the audience relishing this offering.”⁴⁰ The particularly favorable audience response to this part of the show was to play an important part in determining the character of the next Vitaphone program.

After Roy Smeck came Marion Talley, star of the Metropolitan Opera Company, singing “Caro Nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto. This part of the show was the most severely criticized for its real or apparent shortcomings in synchronization. Hastings, rising to the defense, charitably ascribed these shortcomings not to any defects in the Vitaphone system but to the fact that the “movements of Miss Talley’s lips limped . . . Miss Talley’s tones are formed in her throat before the lips have apparently been framed for these tones, as we, the audience, watch the young lady. The Vitaphone caught the tones as formed.”

Marion Talley was followed by “An Evening on the Don,” a medley of Russian songs and dances which did not, however, include that earlier Vitaphone masterpiece, The Volga Boatmen.

The last three short films were among the most memorable. First, Efrem Zimbalist (violin) accompanied by Harold Bauer (piano) performed variations on a theme from the Kreutzer Sonata. Even today, with their original Vitaphone performance rechanneled and filtered through an entirely different sound system, Zimbalist and Bauer offer a sensitive interpretation of Beethoven’s work. What followed their duet was widely considered to be the highlight of the show—Giovanni Martinelli’s impassioned rendering of the aria “Vesti la guibba” from Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci. Martinelli appeared in Pierrot costume and sang the famous aria against a simple theatrical set. Mordaunt Hall went into raptures over the performance, proclaiming that “Nothing like it had ever been heard in a motion picture theatre. . . .” Hastings was more restrained but nevertheless considered Martinelli to be “the individual hit of the Vitaphone prelude. His voice seemed to blend more naturally with whatever Vitaphone has to offer, than the other soloists.”⁴¹

To conclude this concert of stars that preceded the feature film, there was an impressive finale in which Anna Case sang the Spanish number, “La Fiesta,” accompanied by a dance divertissement by the Cansinos, the Metropolitan Opera Company’s Chorus, and the 107-piece New York Philharmonic now under the baton of Herman Heller. The finale was staged in an elaborate hacienda courtyard set, and the singer and her accompanying dance troupe were appropriately and ornately costumed. Music, costumes, and setting prepared the audience for the feature that was to follow.

The Vitaphone prelude lasted approximately an hour. It was followed by a ten-minute intermission and then by the feature, which ran for one hour and forty-nine minutes.

The feature opens with an epigraph-title: The tale they tell of Don Juan, immortal lover and doubter of women, is bold with life and color—a merry, insolent tale slashed with intrigue—yet its beginning is as gray as the old Spanish castle of Juan’s earliest memory.

There follows a prologue in which Don Juan de Marana is shown at the age of five. In an episode somewhat reminiscent of Poe’s tale “A Cask of Amontillado,” the boy’s father, Don José (John Barrymore), is informed by his servant, a vindictive, hunchbacked dwarf, that his wife, Donna Isabel, is having an affaire. The outraged husband pretends to leave his castle, but suddenly reappears when the dwarf apprises him that Donna Isabel and her lover are together in her bedchamber. Aware that his presence is about to be discovered, the hapless lover hides in a recess in the wall that was left open when a hidden treasure chest was removed. But Don José realizes what has happened and orders the recess to be sealed up permanently. As the servants begin to brick up the wall, Don José mockingly asks his wife, “Think you of any reason why they should not seal the wall?” She remains silent, endeavoring to conceal her guilt. Her lover is entombed alive. But Donna Isabel’s silence is of no avail, for in the presence of their tearful child, Don José turns on her, denounces her infidelity, and drives her from the castle forever.

Five years elapse. Don José’s disillusionment with women is complete. Convinced that the entire female sex is as wanton and unfaithful as his wife, he expresses his contempt for women by surrounding himself with sycophantic courtesans, with whom he indulges his unbridled lust. At length, Elvira, one of his mistresses, goaded by jealousy at his display of interest in another woman, stabs him in full view of his impressionable, ten-year-old son. Before dying, Don José tells Elvira, “My three-fold debt to woman is now complete: life—disillusionment—death.” And he enjoins young Don Juan: “Beware giving your love to women. Go out into the world and take their love when it pleases you—smile—and forget!” With that the prologue comes to an end. The story begins.

Ten more years have passed. The scene has now shifted to Rome: The mighty Vatican soaring heavenward amid a seethe of corruption—scented velvets brushing against the plague sores of the wretched. Incense—purple—wine—gold. The city is divided by the rival factions of the Borgias and the Orsinis. Don Juan (John Barrymore), already notorious throughout Europe as the irresistible lover, the man of countless affaires, has taken up residence in the Eternal City. His home is a place “where innocence might enter but never depart.”

Cesare Borgia (Warner Oland) and his sister Lucrezia (Estelle Taylor) are proceeding through the streets of Rome in the company of their lecherous kinsman Donati (Montague Love). (Lucrezia’s lady-in-waiting, Mai, is played by a very young and beautiful Myrna Loy.) Lucrezia, hearing about the celebrated Don Juan, commands him to attend an audience at the Borgia palace, the Palazzo Santa Maria. To the same audience she invites the Orsini Duke Della Varnese (Josef Swickard) and his lovely daughter Adriana (Mary Astor), whom she plans, in due course, to marry to Donati as a way of bringing Varnese’s wealth and power under the control of the Borgias.

Meanwhile, Don Juan’s humor and adroitness in handling numerous assignations are depicted in a sequence in which he juggles his latest inamorati—the wife, niece, and mistress of Duke Margoni (Lionel Braham)—in and out of his palazzo under the very nose of the suspicious nobleman. Margoni is actually persuaded that the rumors that had sent him angrily to Don Juan’s home were spread by his jealous wife as part of a trap to compromise the Duke himself. Don Juan tells Margoni: “Your lovely wife suspects your affair with Imperia and sent messages to bring you both here. She came herself to catch you together.” Margoni hurriedly departs, expressing his gratitude to Don Juan.

En route to Lucrezia’s reception, Juan takes time out to philander with one of Lucrezia’s maids. On the verge of being discovered by Lucrezia, he extricates himself, dextrously leaves his manservant, the effeminate Pedrillo (Willard Louis), in the arms of the maid, and proceeds to the audience with Lucrezia, with whom he promptly makes an assignation. But when he beholds Adriana, he is instantly more attracted by her than by Lucrezia.At the reception he frustrates a Borgia attempt to poison Varnese, and as an expression of her gratitude, the innocent Adriana promises Juan anything he wishes. Juan interprets her promise as an invitation to yet another assignation. And so, while Lucrezia impatiently awaits his arrival in her bedchamber, he climbs instead up to Adriana’s balcony and enters her room. The unsuspecting girl is taken completely by surprise. Her horror and revulsion at his passionate advances are new experiences for the Great Lover.^* Accepting his first defeat, he retreats from Adriana’s presence, suddenly aware that the pangs of true love—a sensation hitherto unknown to him—are stirring in his breast. Later, the couple meet in the chapel garden, and a more sympathetic Adriana listens to Juan’s plea: “You have given me a new faith—faith in the goodness of women. Teach me—help me—so that I may never lose that faith again.”

Juan’s new faith is soon put to the test and found wanting. Discovering Adriana in the company of Donati, he misinterprets their being together as a demonstration of her fickleness. He does not realize that Adriana and Varnese are in the power of the Borgias and that the girl is being forced to marry Donati in order to save her father’s life. Without more ado, Juan throws himself into the arms of Lucrezia. And soon he has resumed his old libertine existence.

Meanwhile, plans for Adriana’s forced marriage go forward. On the day of the wedding, Juan becomes involved in a tragic love triangle. One of his mistresses commits suicide when her husband discovers her intrigue with Juan. The jealous, grief-stricken husband goes insane. He calls the wrath of God down upon Don Juan. Conscience-stricken, the Great Lover watches as the man he has wronged is taken off to jail, charged with murdering his wife. Simultaneously, wedding bells ring out. Unable to suppress his love for Adriana, Don Juan sets out for the Borgia palace.

As Donati comes to claim his bride, Juan suddenly appears and challenges him to a duel. A savage fight ensues. Juan kills Donati, but upon the orders of Cesare Borgia, he is immediately seized and thrown into a dungeon. Adriana is dispatched to a torture chamber, her punishment for being implicated in Donati’s death. In his cell, Juan is visited by Lucrezia, who offers him a seductive alternative to death. But this time he proves immune to her charms. Whereupon she tells him that Adriana had been faithful to him and that the girl had been forced into a marriage contract with Donati. Lucrezia then departs, leaving Juan to ponder these facts and his imminent fate.

After she has left, the prisoner in the adjoining cell dislodges a stone in the wall, and Juan crawls through the hole to meet him. Juan’s fellow prisoner turns out to be the deranged husband of his dead mistress. The insane prisoner instantly assumes that God has thrown Juan into his clutches. But before he can wreak revenge, the unexpected occurs again. The dungeon wall had been weakened by the breakthrough, and another stone is dislodged, allowing the Tiber’s waters to pour into the cell; it also allows Juan to make a hasty escape.

Overpowering Neri, Adriana’s would-be torturer, Juan assumes the man’s garb, tricks and defies Borgia, and then escapes from the palace with Adriana, who is now obviously in love with her rescuer. A wild pursuit follows, but as a swordsman and horseman Don Juan is more than a match for the Borgia cavalry. After giving the coup de grace to his most persistent pursuers, Juan, with the adoring Adriana beside him, rides off towards Spain, into the sunset and into the pages of legend.

Love and infidelity are the central themes of Don Juan. The prologue and story contrast these themes by effective plot inversions. The experiences of Don José and Don Juan are closely paralleled and closely contrasted. In the prologue the father repudiates love and turns to libertinism; in the story the son does the opposite. Don José discovers his wife’s infidelity and rejects her forever, after entombing her lover in a wall. Don Juan mistakenly assumes that Adriana is unfaithful and promiscuous when he finds Donati in her bedroom. He decides to reject her forever, but his love compels him to return to the Borgia palace and kill the man she is being forced to marry. For that he is entombed in a dungeon; he escapes through a breach in the wall made by none other than a man whose wife he had seduced.

Such interrelationships of plot and theme are interesting but superficial. The film’s passions and motivations, situations and resolutions are movie clichés, and Don Juan would scarcely merit further attention if they were all it had to offer. But it is not all. Don Juan was and still is a charming “swashbuckler,” whose individual performances are never less than highly competent and in several instances are outstanding.

Barrymore, of course, is the most memorable. In general, he is at no disadvantage in comparison with the Errol Flynn of Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk. His Don Juan is, by turns, impudent, sardonic, witty, graceful, and athletic (in the “balletic” style of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.). Perhaps the strongest objection to Barrymore’s performance is that he follows Don José’s injunction to “Smile!” with such irritating persistence that he might, at times, be rehearsing for a toothpaste commercial. But this complaint is trivial and cannot minimize the quality of his interpretation. Estelle Taylor’s Lucrezia Borgia plausibly combines poise and elegance with a feline malice, cunning, and seductiveness. As Donati, Montague Love gives us a lusty, full-blooded villain, whose open rascality and eagerness for the fray mark a refreshing change from the more conventional, secretive, foxy, and cowardly villains of silent screen melodrama. As the innocent heroine, Mary Astor provides a delicate, delicious, and altogether desirable alternative to the evil Lucrezia; while supporting actors Willard Louis (Pedrillo), Warner Oland (Cesare Borgia), and John Roche (Leandro, the deranged husband) give impressive performances.

Aside from being an actors’ vehicle, Don Juan is a film of considerable visual beauty—especially in its sets and costumes. Among the most striking sets are Don José’s opulent banqueting hall, the circular, sunken lounge in Don Juan’s Roman residence, and the interior of the Palazzo Santa Maria—a detailed reconstruction of a Renaissance palace.

The multi-colored souvenir program of the first Vitaphone show contained a brief but informative article titled “Behind the Scenes with the Makers of Don Juan.” This anonymous piece noted that the carefully designed Spanish-Moorish and Italian buildings in the film had been built with great fidelity to original palaces in Spain and had been erected as if they were permanent structures. Even the dungeon in which Don Juan is incarcerated was a replica of a real dungeon in the prison of the castle of St. Angelo.

The flower-decked chapel garden scene in which Juan declares his “new faith” in women combines beauty of setting with impeccable costuming. Barrymore moves gracefully through this scene clad in a flowing, elegantly draped white robe that tastefully contrasts with his dark costume, the somber trees, and the gray, ivy-covered, ancient chapel walls. Other costumes are no less impressive in themselves and in relation to their settings—Lucrezia’s sumptuous gowns, the gorgeous dresses of the courtesans, and the striped, tight breeches that Barrymore wears during the great duel scene—these and other examples of the costumer’s art are in abundant evidence in this film.

However, our primary interest here is not visual but aural—namely the film’s musical accompaniment, response to which is bound to be primarily subjective. And so, whether or not it is effective as incidental music, the listener may be inclined to dismiss it as trite and uninteresting. The present writer finds it generally effective, seldom trite, and sometimes enchanting. In particular, he considers the main title theme to be a perfect musical expression of the film’s romantic mood—as memorable as Angelo Lavagnino’s lovely score for The Naked Maja (1959) and André Previn’s rich, brooding music for Minnelli’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962)—the compositions with which it should most obviously be compared.⁴²

But aside from these personal judgments, there are more objective aspects to the music for Don Juan. It is a remarkably sophisticated score, which supplies, develops, and counterpoints separate themes for the main characters and for important incidents and moods. Don Juan himself is provided with two themes: a “love” theme (first heard across the main title and credits) and a “lust” theme (first heard in the prologue when the boy Juan and his father, Don José, enter the hall of the courtesans in the Marana castle).⁴³ Adriana and Lucrezia each have distinct themes—the first appropriately plaintive and wistful, the second appropriately seductive and sinister. A somber “Borgia” theme is used indiscriminately for Donati, Cesare, or all the Borgias. A striking fanfare and march tune are heard repeatedly in scenes showing the Borgia troops or as the prelude to scenes of combat or the great duel. Ironically, the same music is used when the faithless Donna Isabel is given her “marching orders” by Don Juan’s father. The aid of Tchaikovsky is summoned on two occasions—in the banqueting scene at the Marana castle and at the wedding feast in the Borgia palace—when a well-known passage from his Capriccio Italien is quoted. Parts of the prologue music sound like ersatz Wagner, and the phrases that introduce Rome under the Borgias suggest Berlioz in one of his off moments. But these are brief lapses in an otherwise original score.

The sophistication and effectiveness with which the music is employed can be exemplified by two sequences. Early in the film, Juan climbs up to Adriana’s balcony, enters her bedchamber, and tries to seduce her. When she resists and spurns him, he suddenly realizes that he is in love with her. The sudden change in Juan is conveyed mainly by the music. As he seizes her, the “lust” theme is fully developed; its jauntiness emphasizes his mockery of Adriana’s ineffectual resistance. When the girl faints and Juan takes her in his arms, the “lust” theme gives way to the tender, romantic “love” theme. The music and the cuts from the unconscious Adriana to Barrymore’s changing expression tell us all we need to know: love has supplanted lust—the Great Lover is in the grip of the Grand Passion.

In a subsequent scene, Don Juan and Lucrezia are standing on a balcony in the Borgia palace. Suddenly, below them, they observe Adriana being accosted by Donati. The scene is brief and there are no helpful intertitles, but the music alone makes us aware of various attitudes and cross-purposes at work. Thus, Lucrezia’s theme is obliterated by Adriana’s as Juan notices her in the garden below. It is immediately clear who dominates his interest. His feelings for Adriana, and perhaps her developing love for him, are then succinctly expressed by a snatch of the “love” theme. But it is suddenly drowned by the somber Borgia motif, as Donati appears from out of the shadows. The music here conveys to us not only the impending rivalry of Don Juan and Donati for the possession of Adriana but also the impression that the evil Borgia power is in the ascendant. In the scoring for this scene, as in many others, one notices the effectiveness with which Vitaphone was used to permit precise synchronization of shots lasting as little as three or four seconds with comparably brief musical passages.

With the film as a whole, one also notices that although music is provided throughout the picture, there are only two places in which sound effects are used, and they have been skillfully worked into the score: the ringing of cathedral bells for the wedding of Adriana and Donati and the sound of the deranged husband rhythmically beating on Juan’s door. A possible third use of sound effects occurs in the duel scene, where there are faint suggestions of the clash of swords, but the volume of the music and the surface noise on this part of the sound recording make it difficult to determine whether the effect is real or imagined. The two sound effects that are indubitably in the film function psychologically as well as realistically: as symbols of Juan’s aroused conscience (the beating on the door and the tragedy that follows it) and irresistible love (Juan’s reaction to the wedding bells). There is even a rudimentary but intelligent attempt to create a montage of these sound effects: they are intercut, suggesting Juan’s inner conflicts that compel him, despite his conviction that Adriana is as “Faithless as all women,” to return to the Palazzo Santa Maria and rescue her. In short, Don Juan demonstrates a creative and sometimes original use of music and sound effects. Lack of historical and critical interest in the film indicates that most of the historians and critics who have made an effort to see it have neither looked at nor listened to it very carefully.

Surprisingly little is known or has been written about Alan Crosland, the man who had the distinction of directing the first two sound feature films. Few directors of importance have suffered from comparable indifference. Lewis Jacobs in his Rise of the American Film (1939) mentions him in passing as one of a number of former Army Signal Corps cameramen who became movie directors—as if this trivial fact was more significant than having directed both Don Juan and The Jazz Singer. Paul Rotha in The Film Till Now (1930; revised edition 1949) dismisses Crosland as the “maker of Bobbed Hair, Three Weeks, and that abominable costume picture with John Barrymore, Don Juan, followed by another as bad, The Beloved Rogue.” The place of Don Juan in film history seems to have eluded him, though several hundred pages later in the same door-stopping volume, his cowriter, Richard Griffith, shows a better awareness of the film’s importance. In their recent histories of cinema, both Gerald Mast and David Robinson refer to Don Juan without bothering to mention who directed the picture. Kevin Brownlow in The Parade’s Gone By is one of the few film historians to show any interest in Crosland—though his book adds little to the generally available knowledge of this central figure in the transition from silent to sound cinema. However brief, an attempt to repair the deficiency is worth making.

The bare facts of Crosland’s life and career are these. He was born in New York on August 10, 1894. After receiving an education at Dartmouth, he embarked on a career as an actor and stage manager, most notably for the Annie Russell company. For some three years he played minor roles in productions of Shakespeare and such classic comedies as She Stoops to Conquer and The Rivals. It was here, presumably, that the lasting influences of period drama and comedy of manners originated: both are abundantly evident in his surviving films. Crosland’s acting career suddenly ended when he switched to journalism. He became the drama critic for the New York Globe and simultaneously began writing short stories for movie magazines. The stories caught the attention of the Edison (Film) Company, and in 1912 he accepted an appointment as that company’s publicity director. Subsequently he became Edison’s casting director. Various conflicting sources indicate (1) that in 1914 he left Edison and joined the Pomona Company, for which he worked until 1917, mainly as Alice Brady’s director; (2) that he left Edison only briefly between 1912 and 1917, in order to direct a picture sponsored by the Curtis Publishing Company. He was so successful in this undertaking that on his return to Edison he was made a full-fledged director. During 1917 and 1919 Crosland served in the Army Signal Corps as a cameraman.

Upon his discharge from the military, he became a director for the Selig Company, and before joining Warner Bros., in 1925, he directed numerous pictures for Selznick Films, Cosmopolitan Pictures, and various other companies. His earliest films for Warner Bros. seem to have been Compromise (1925), starring Clive Brook, Irene Rich, and Louise Fazenda; and Bobbed Hair (1925), starring Marie Prevost, Kenneth Harlan, and Dolores Costello; the latter film, anticipating a certain notorious best seller of recent years, was based on a novel by twenty different authors. Prior to Compromise and Bobbed Hair Crosland directed at least twenty-six films. Kidnapped (1917), evidently an adaptation of Stevenson’s novel, appears to be his first identifiable film. He also directed commercially successful adaptations of Stanley Weyman’s Under the Red Robe (1923) and Elinor Glyn’s “scandalous” novel, Three Weeks (1924). One of his specialities was movies about flappers and the flaming youth of the jazz age: The Flapper (1920), Youthful Folly (1920), and Sinners in Heaven (1924) typified this side of his work. Under the Red Robe exemplified another aspect that was to culminate in Don Juan: namely, Crosland’s special interest in lavish costume pictures.

The anonymous New York Times reviewer of Under the Red Robe passed over the film’s cliché-ridden plot and had little to say about the acting. Instead, he commented mostly on the movie’s pictorial qualities.

The scenes in many sequences of this film are so attractive that without much else they would be worth viewing. . . . There is an especially beautiful sequence where cavaliers are shown tackling each other in the middle of a shallow, fast-running brook, and other scenes in a forest, which might just as well be that of Fontainebleau. . . . The costumes in this film are especially good. . . . This picture, like many others, may have outstanding failings, but the costumes, the exteriors and some of the sets make it a production that is satisfying on many points.⁴⁴

When Crosland joined Warner Bros. in 1925 he was already established as a major director with the reputation of making pictures that responded, with commercial success, to the popular tastes of the twenties. He was the perfect choice to direct the pictures that would gauge the popular appeal of Vitaphone. The Warners’ faith in him was not misplaced. The Jazz Singer, which he directed the year after Don Juan, broke all existing box-office records. Doubtless Crosland’s name would be better known today if his most celebrated films had been artistic triumphs. Even now his films give us a clearer sense of the taste of the period than such critically admired but far less popular movies as The Crowd (1928) and A Woman of Paris (1923)—though for every hundred or more revivals of silent films by Vidor, Chaplin, Stroheim, and Griffith there is barely a single opportunity to see Don Juan. The Jazz Singer is shown more frequently, but what merits that film possesses are usually ascribed to Jolson at the expense of Crosland.

But before Jolson arrived on the scene, Crosland was already the world’s most experienced (indeed only) director of sound feature films. And in the late twenties, Warner Bros. kept him busier than any other director on the lot. Thus, between his completion of Don Juan and the start of shooting of The Jazz Singer, he directed three major features. Typical of Crosland, two were romantic costume dramas: When a Man Loves (1927), with a script by Bess Meredyth and starring John Barrymore and Dolores Costello; and The Beloved Rogue (1927), based on a story by Paul Bern (later to become the ill-fated husband of Jean Harlow), with art direction by William Cameron Menzies (subsequently director of Things to Come, 1935) and starring Barrymore and Conrad Veidt. The third film, Old San Francisco (1927), was a melodrama based on a story by a young man named Darryl F. Zanuck; it starred Dolores Costello and Warner Oland and employed a Vitaphone accompaniment consisting of a musical score by Hugo Riesenfeld and ear-splitting sound effects of the earthquake of 1906. Although Bryan Foy was to have the honor of directing the first all-talking feature, nearly three months before the release of Foy’s Lights of New York (1928), Warner Bros. premiered Crosland’s Glorious Betsy (1928), a costume drama with talking sequences, starring Dolores Costello and Conrad Nagel.

All of Crosland’s twenty-two subsequent films were sound movies. They included On with the Show (1929) and General Crack (1929), which used Technicolor as well as sound—the first combination of these technical advances in feature film-making. Among his films of the thirties were the Technicolor Song of the Flame (1930), an operetta by Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, George Gershwin, and Herbert Stothart; Big Boy (1930), in which Al Jolson played a jockey (in blackface) and sang “Liza Lee”; Viennese Nights (1930), an original operetta (also in Technicolor) written for the screen by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II, and starring Walter Pidgeon and Jean Hersholt; Captain Thunder (1931), a Mexican bandit picture starring Victor Varconi and Fay Wray—some two years before King Kong was to lift her to immortality atop the Empire State Building; Hello Sister! (1933), Crosland’s completion of the last, abortive directorial effort of Erich von Stroheim; Massacre (1934), a pro-Indian Western starring Richard Barthelmess and Ann Dvorak; and The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), the first Perry Mason film, starring Warren William and Mary Astor.

Crosland was married twice. His first wife, Juanita Crawford, whom he divorced in 1930, was the mother of his son, Alan Crosland, Jr., who was eventually to follow him into the film industry. His second wife was the actress Natalie Moorhead. They were divorced in 1935, the year before his untimely death at the age of 42. On July 10, 1936, Crosland sustained serious injuries when his car crashed into an obstacle beside a street excavation on Sunset Boulevard. He died shortly after his arrival at Beverly Hills Emergency Hospital. A professional to the end, in his last moments he asked the nurse to convey to his assistant, Carol Sax, directions for shooting certain scenes in the film he had been working on when the accident occurred.

An even more neglected figure than Crosland is his screenwriter, Bess Meredyth. She started as a film actress (appearing, for example, in Kalem’s The Desert’s Sting, 1914) and in 1917 she gravitated to writing photoplays. According to Lewis Jacobs, between 1917 and 1919 she wrote the scripts of no fewer than ninety feature films. Her credits during the twenties included the screenplays of Ben Hur (1925) and The Sea Beast (1926) (an adaptation of Moby Dick, starring John Barrymore as Captain Ahab) as well as Don Juan. In the late thirties Jacobs referred to her as “one of the top-ranking writers” in Hollywood. She was still active in the late forties, writing original screenplays and adapting the work of other writers. Today, general indifference to her numerous and significant contributions to American film is exemplified by her omission from Richard Corliss’s The Hollywood Screenwriters, with its detailed appendix of fifty filmographies of important Hollywood screenwriters. Like Crosland, her career is a subject eminently worthy of further research.

To return to the premiere of Vitaphone: there can be no question that initial public response was encouraging. The show drew crowded audiences, and their prolonged applause expressed positive enjoyment of the concert items and the feature film. The New York run lasted nearly eight months (until April 1927), during which the program was seen by over half a million persons and grossed $789,963. It was a record run for a Barrymore picture, and when it left New York, it was equally successful in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit, and St. Louis, as well as in many European capitals.

Many reviewers were ecstatic about Vitaphone. A reporter for London’s Kinematograph Weekly described the show as a “sensation,” and went on to say that “It was universally admitted that no earlier experiments had achieved anything like the same degree of success in regard either to exact synchronization, volume or tone. The ‘Vitaphone’ is amazing in all three particulars. . . . There is general agreement here that if the test was typical and if the apparatus is portable and ‘commercial’ it opens up amazing possibilities of the reproduction of the finest music in the meanest theatres.” Charles Divine (New York Evening Telegram) described it as a “miracle of sound.” “Marvellous invention,” wrote Rose Pelswick in the New York Evening Journal, “It is almost uncanny in its excellence. Vitaphone is revolutionizing. Go see it for yourself and be convinced.” “It is impossible to imagine,” said Regina Cannon (New York Graphic), “Vitaphone is the eighth wonder of the world.” John S. Cohen (New York Evening Sun) offered a similar assessment: “Vitaphone is unquestionably one of the wonders of the world. It marks a new development in the history of motion pictures.” Dorothy Herzog (New York Daily Mirror) also announced without reservation that Vitaphone “marks a new era in the amusement world: a glorious credit to those who have worked to perfect it.” With comparable conviction, Eileen Creelman (New York American) declared that Vitaphone has “marched triumphantly into the motion picture industry. So remarkable is this synchronizing machine it seemed incredible that the figures on the screen were only shadows.” No less enthusiastic, if rather more restrained, were comments by F. D. Perkins (New York Herald-Tribune), who recognized the show as a “complete success,” and Palmer Smith (Evening World), who described it as “highly effective,” adding his belief that “Vitaphone is making possible high quality presentations and adequate thematic musical accompaniments for films generally.”

Despite such a glowing critical reception and the considerable public interest in Vitaphone, the results of the first presentation were fairly inconclusive. It was not clear whether the public interest could be developed and exploited or whether it was merely transitory. However, Warners had too much at stake to accept the idea that Vitaphone might be an ephemeral novelty—while the rest of the film industry had too much at stake to entertain the notion that it might not. The latter assumed that the success of the first Vitaphone show was a mere fluke or the passing appeal of a mere curiosity. The public would soon get over it and Warner Bros. would collapse if they were foolish enough to go on sinking their money into such a gimmick.

However, Warner Bros. had learned a few things from preparing and presenting the first show. First, they had become aware of the technical problems and limitations involved in using Vitaphone for making several different kinds of sound movie. A speech, virtuoso musical performances, an orchestra, a dance ensemble, and a full-length feature film—each had raised different problems and had taught different lessons in the use of sound in film-making. Solutions had been found for many of the worst problems, and technicians were already at work finding ways to cope with the others. Epes W. Sargent summed up the technical situation thus: “Vitaphone . . . is a gigantic step forward, but not yet a perfect step.”

Second, the recorded musical accompaniment to Don Juan had certainly heightened the moods and dramatic intensity of the picture, and the job of writing the score had introduced composers William Axt, David Mendoza, and Edward Bowes to the problems and opportunities of composing for sound movies. But the advantages of Vitaphone were primarily evident to exhibitors who could not afford live orchestras in their theaters. Yet the question still remained: how many could or would want to afford the alternative expense of the system. During the late teens and twenties, the public had increasingly taken for granted the provision of specially composed music for silent films, but there was no reason to suppose that they were conscious of or interested in Vitaphone’s value in supplying synchronized scores.

Finally, critical and popular acclaim for concert items in the first Vitaphone program convinced the Warners—temporarily—that they were on the right track in using Vitaphone as a medium for vocal, instrumental, and orchestral music, while the enthusiasm shown by the audience for the short film of Roy Smeck playing the guitar supported the view that its use could also be extended, quite lucratively, to presenting vaudeville acts.

The Warners proceeded to affirm their faith in Vitaphone by having two more of their New York theaters, the Colony and the Selwyn, wired for sound. They also announced that all their silent films for 1927 would be provided with Vitaphone accompaniments. Several Vitaphone short films of a lighter and more popular nature were already in production. Clearly, Warner Bros. was now in the grip of the sound revolution. The year 1927 would reveal whether that revolution was to be triumph or a disaster.

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* According to Variety, Barrymore bestowed 127 kisses during the film; many were unwillingly received by Mary Astor in this scene.