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IV. The Age of Talkies (1931-1936)
In 1926 a new century was introduced at the Warner Theatre in New York City, and the whole world was to accept it as an epoch-making event. The film found its tongue. The curtain fell on the scene of silent pictures, and the new scene was opening up for talkies.
It took three long years, however, for the sound film to cross the Pacific Ocean. It made its debut in May, 1929, in the form of a few reels of Fox-Movietone. The people welcomed this miracle with greatest enthusiasm. By 1930 nearly all the imported films to be publicly shown in this country were sound films. European and American revues, musical shows and war stories — all sound — cast an immediate spell over the movie fans of Japan. And silent pictures gradually came to be regarded as no longer worthy of the name of cinema. The Japanese film, too, had to find its tongue so that theatres might not be all empty.
After unsatisfactory attempts such as “Furusato” (The Nativeland, Nikkatsu, 1930) and “Komoriuta” (Lullaby, Shinko, 1930), the Shochiku succeeded in producing the country’s first creditable sound film in 1931, and that was “Madamu to Nyobo” (Neighbour’s Wife and My Wife). It was a petit-bourgeois comedy directed by young Heinosuke Gosho, but proved such a big hit that the most conservative film industrialists were awakened to the destined future of the Japanese sound film. Though rather late in starting, the Nikkatsu, the great rival of Shochiku, began to take it seriously. It was the following year, 1932, however, that truly ushered in an age of talkies, for in that year were produced some really good works: “Haru to Musume” (Spring and the Maiden, Nikkatsu) directed by Tomotaka Tasaka, “Tabi wa Aozora” (A Journey under a Blue Sky, Nik¬ katsu) by Ko Inagaki, “ Arashi no Naka no Shojo” (A Maiden in the Storm, Shochiku) by Yasujiro Shimazu, and “Chushingura” (The Vendetta of the Forty-Seven Ronin, Sho¬ chiku) by Teinosuke Kinugasa. Especially Yasujiro Shimazu’s “Arashi no Naka no Shojo” won great popularity by its excellence of realistic representation, and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s “Chushingura” was loudly acclaimed for its superior technique of “talkie” montage.
Thus the first step was taken in the development of sound films. But before the second step could be taken, there was to be overcome a great difficulty, which had to do with technical problems, on the one hand, and on the other, financial. The former was the question of patents in connection with the taking and showing of the sound film. The two American companies that possess talkie patents, Western Electric and R. C. A., did not wait long to present their excellent patents to the film market in Japan. The Nikkatsu joined forces with Western Electric, and the J.O. Studio (of whose founding mention will be made later) adopted the R.C.A. system, each starting active
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