The stars (1962)

PART FOUR THIRTIES Sound was introduced to the movies in 1927, not in features but in a series of newsreels and short subjects. Its first great success was in a film about Lindbergh's return to America after his historic flight. Despite the great box-office appeal of this little picture, the important studios continued to regard sound merely as an interesting novelty. One or two of them experimented with musical accompaniment and sound effects in their superproductions ( The Big Parade and Wings were among them ) , but it remained for a minor studio, Warner Brothers, to take the big gamble. They produced The Jazz Singer, basically a silent film in which, from time to time, Al Jolson opened his mouth to sing and, lo, song seemed to issue from his mouth. It was an almost insufferable movie, the sentimental story of a cantor's son from New York's Lower East Side who refuses to follow in his father's footsteps and insists on becoming a musical-comedy singer on Broadway. People came, they listened, and they were conquered. Warner's quickly followed with an a//-talking film, Lights of New York, another banal musical, in which, in its first crude form, that long-term staple, the backstage story of the kid waiting for the first break, had its trial run. The studio's next effort, The Terror, dispensed with the main title and credits; Mr. Conrad Nagel, of the gorgeous voice, decked out in mask and opera cape, delivered this information to the audience. By 1929 Variety was reporting that "sound didn't do any more to the industry than turn it upside down, shake the entire bag of tricks from its pocket and advance Warner Brothers from the last place to first in the league." Sound was, in short, a total revolution — it changed the techniques of making films, radically altered their content, changed the nature of the typical star personality and altered the financial balance of power in Hollywood. As to technique, the most important immediate effect of the revolution was regressive. The camera, which had grown progressively freer since the days when Griffith first liberated it, suddenly became static, a merely passive observer and recorder of action. Since its whirrings could be picked up by the microphone, it had to be enclosed in a soundproof booth, which effectively immobilized it. Temporarily it became necessary to use as many as three cameras to give the director and editor a variety of shots to which the sound track could later be synchronized. The suddenly cumbersome camera simply could not be moved. In the first two years of sound it was recording virtually nothing of interest anyway. The movies tended to be either closet dramas with no scope and less interest than a stage play, or huge musicals in which Rockette-style choreography was featured as a kind of accompaniment to the blaring sound track. From film critics and scholars there arose a terrible clamor. The movies, they cried, were finished as an art form, and it is certainly true that the carefully composed aesthetic of the silent film was suddenly in need of amendment. It had been based on the fact that, like all the fine arts, the movies inherently lacked one of the dimensions of total reality. The theory was that in this art, as in painting, music and poetry, the lack, far from being a handicap, was actually a useful limitation, imposing on the artist an artificial barrier which, 113