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BRITAIN LAGS IN TALKIE RACE 307
expose of the coal bosses' hostility to the labour unions. Perhaps born of their own experience in fighting the Patents Company, the Warners became the champions of the persecuted in such pictures as The Life of Entile Zola, with the notorious Dreyfus case as its focal point, The Story of Louis Pasteur, in which Pasteur faces public contumley before he proves the value of inoculation, and The Magic Bullet, with its publicly despised but invaluable quest by Dr. Erhlich for a treatment for the venereal diseases.
Britain was slow to follow Hollywood's lead. English exhibitors and producers took the stories of the talkies' success in America with a pinch of salt. The general opinion seemed to be that the talkies were merely a passing phase and that it would be foolhardy to jeopardise the position of the British industry at that juncture, for the Quota Act had just come into force.
The Jazz Singer opened at the Piccadilly Theatre on September 27th, 1928, and a talkie of Edgar Wallace's play, The Terror followed it in October of the same year.
Britain was nearly a year behind America in the talkie race, for race it soon became. There was no doubt that the British public was just as enthusiastic about talkies as its American cousins, but the newspapers busied themselves with printing the opinions of famous persons, who probably did not go to the cinema anyway, on the new innovation. Almost without exception, overwhelming failure was predicted.
But the public knew what it wanted and it cared little that the sounds emanating from the speakers were harsh or that the films themselves had little but banalities to utter.
The British film industry at last became aware that all was not well in its camp. The public were deserting silent pictures, even good ones, to spend their money on talkies.
Burlington Pictures, at Elstree, had on the stocks an almost completed picture called Kitty from a novel by Warwick Deeping. They decided to make the last reels with dialogue.
The difficulties were many. There were no sound-proof stages in Britain, if one excepts the little Phonofilm studio at Clapham, and but a handful of technicians versed in the production of sound films. Accordingly, it was arranged to ship the stars to New York and to complete Kitty in a sound-proof studio there.
The first half of the film was sound synchronised but without dialogue. The first spoken word was introduced in the middle of a