Al Jolson
Pas le Première,
Mais Pas Trop Mal

Arguably the most important decade in the history of the world was that from 1921 to 1930.

No, it's not because that was the decade where the automobile became affordable. Or that it marked when the first first true commercial radio stations began full operation. Or that Robert Goddard launched the first liquid fueled rocket.

Nope. That was the decade that led to the demise of the silent motion picture.

Decade? Shoot. It took about three years. The first really successful sound feature film was in 1927. By 1930, the silent era was dead and gone.

The careful reader will note some qualifications just stated. That is we're talking about successful and sound features. Naturally sound films didn't just pop up in 1927 any more than the lightbulb did in 1879.

First of all, there is a difference between sound films and talkies. Recorded sound for a film is almost as old as motion pictures themselves. The idea was simple enough. If you wanted sound for a film, you just made a recording while you made the film. Then you'd play both back at the same time. Hey, presto!, you had a talking film.

You may read on the Fount of All Knowledge that the first sound film was the Chronophotophone invented in 1892 by Dr. Georges Demeny. However, this was actually a slide presentation - then called a "magic lantern show" - accompanied by a recording. The Chronophotophone, we read, had "moderate" success in Paris.

Lack of sound was always seen as a basic flaw in the new motion pictures. You would see scenes with crowds, watch people talking, and even see ocean liners blowing their whistles in absolute silence. Watching a film with absolutely no sound was (and is) a weird and not terribly enjoyable experience. So to add some sound, the theaters hired piano players to play tunes that fit with the action.

Another solution was to have actors stand off stage (or behind the screen) and read the dialogue while the on-screen actors mouthed the words. So you not only had to rent the film but also had to hire actors - kind of defeating the purpose of showing a motion picture. Such shows, though, were less popular than having the silent films with the dialogue cards with the live piano music.

As for the development of true sound motion pictures, as early as 1886 Thomas Edison had his assistant William Dickson work on the problem. By 1894 Tom was able to market what he called the Kinetophone. This was one of Tom's Kinetoscope motion picture machines - ergo, the Edisonian "peep show" - with one of his cylinder phonographs installed into the cabinet. So you had a sound track to go along with what you were watching.

There was, though, no real attempt to synchronize the sound with the action. So what you got was, yes, just a film played at the same time as a recording. But playback speeds of the different equipment was not always reliable and so the Kinetophone might do for a film with background music, but it wasn't that useful for producing films with actors delivering dialog.

There were two approaches to producing true sound motion pictures and they were developed simultaneously. One that evolved from Edison's approach was sound-on-disc. That is you shot the film and used a phonograph to record the sound. But to provide synchronization of the film and sound, you ran the phonograph with the same motor as the camera. And of course when showing the film, the projector and the phonograph likewise shared a common drive. If things ran right, you had a talking picture where the sound kept with the action.

With sound-on-disc, there was also the problem of time or rather the duration of the film. Until the digital era all motion pictures were broken up into reels where the projectionist had to start the following reel just as soon as the previous one ran out. For practical purposes the reels were limited to 10 to 15 minutes. This meant that the phonographic disc had to be big enough to provide uninterrupted sound for about 1000 feet of film.

But at that time commercial recordings lasted about 3 minutes. These platters were often 10 - 12 inches across and were played at 78 revolutions per minute. But to stretch uninterrupted sound to over 10 minutes, the soundtrack discs were pressed at 16 inches in diameter and were played at 33⅓ rpm. This speed later became standard for long playing records, but at the time this was specialized equipment.

Even if you had cameras, projectors, and sound discs that were linked mechanically, problems arose. Before the digital age, the film was kept in place with sprockets that fit into the holes on the sides of the film strip. But if the film slipped - common enough - the sound would no longer be synchronized. The effect of such a malfunction was shown in one of the more humorous scenes in Singing in the Rain.

Everyone knew, then, that the best solution was to have a soundtrack actually recorded on the film itself. Then you would have a special projector that would project the moving images and play back the sound at the same time. Using sound-on-film the sound and images would never get out of synchronization. The problem was that sound-on-disc became well-developed during the first two decades of the 20th century, but sound-on-film technology was just emerging.

Practical sound-on-film, like all inventions, was a long drawn out process. It started from interesting observations and developed over many years until there was a workable invention.

In the 1870's, it was discovered that the electrical resistance of selenium metal would change depending on how much light you shined on it. And since we know that...

Voltage = Current × Resistance

... we see that voltage and current in a circuit with selenium can change with the amount of light. As most electrical devices - from thermometers to radios to television sets - are volt or amp meters in disguise, use of selenium devices was recognized as a key to producing sound-on-film.

By the end of the decade, the American George Carey had created the first true photocell. Since a microphone produces variable voltage in a circuit, the sound could change the amount of light emitted from a photocell. But since variation of the light could also be recorded onto a strip of film, you could make a visual record on film of the varying sound. Then a light shown through the film onto another photocell would produce variation in the voltage of the circuit. And the varying voltage could then be converted to sound on a speaker.

Simple, no?

Well, no. The idea of sound-on-film worked in principle but as you can see it was rather complicated. So in 1923, Lee de Forest, a prolific American inventor who pioneered sound technology in general and amplifiers in particular, began making short subjects with sound-on-film. But they failed to attract interest of the Hollywood moguls. Part of this was because of the nature of the films - often vaudeville performances - was seen as increasingly old hat. There was also the problem that Lee's system recorded at 21 frames per second and the major movie houses had projectors that ran at 24 fps. So the sound came out at a higher pitch, producing some rather ludicrous effects.

There was also the reality that the photocells for the playback did not produce that great of a sound. But by 1926, the American inventor Ted Case had devised a photocell called the Thalofide cell or (for some reason) the AEO-light. This was a photocell prepared from thallium sulfide and it did produce a higher quality sound. That year Ted demonstrated his sound-on-film method to William Fox, the owner of Movietone Newsreels.

So in 1927 Movietone began producing newsreels with sound. They were popular with the public and Movietone - at the time a small player in newsreel producers - quickly rose to be a major film company.

William immediately decided to use his new Movietone sound system for a feature film. This was Sunrise which was about a man who decides to drown his wife so he can be with his girlfriend. Although praised as a groundbreaking existential film, the film has a rather silly plot, and in any case it wasn't a talkie but simply a silent film with a synchronous musical soundtrack and added sound effects. It was released in late September 1927 and flopped.

Then a couple of weeks after Sunrise opened came The Jazz Singer. Almost everywhere you'll read that this was the first commercially successful true talkie. It's the story of a Jewish cantor who goes into spittle flinging diatribes when he finds that his son - who was to follow his dad's avocation - also likes to sing jazz. The film's plot was a variation on the tale of the prodigal son, and the sound track was mostly the songs. The film, though, did have spoken dialogue which was used sparingly but effectively. The movie was a hit.

The Jazz Singer did not use sound-on-film. For one thing William Fox had purchased the critical patents from Ted. But the producer of The Jazz Singer, Jack Warner - yes, of the famous Warner Brothers - also thought the quality of sound-on-film was still too poor for a top notch movie. On the other hand, in the mid-1920's electric recording onto phonograph discs was producing sound of near modern quality.

So the Warner Brothers decided to use a linked sound-on-disc system called Vitaphone. In 1925, Jack saw a Vitaphone demonstration and was convinced this was the future for cinema.

As always there was good news and bad news. The bad news was that most movie theaters were still set up for silent films and had no sound systems. Even by the start of 1928 only about a hundred cinemas had been properly wired for sound. So the projection rooms had to be renovated for the new state of the art equipment. But the good news was these were good-old-monopoly days (not like now, of course), and the motion picture studios owned most of the theaters. So they could afford to put in the new equipment.

The Jazz Singer wasn't the Warner Brothers' first foray into sound. In 1926, they had produced Don Juan which starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Don Juan was released in 1926 and used a Vitaphone soundtrack. Like Sunrise, Don Juan was not a talkie but a silent film with a musical score and sound effects.

But it's The Jazz Singer that has gone down in cinematic history. So you might be shocked! shocked! to learn there are critics that argue that The Jazz Singer was not! not! not! the breakthrough movie that pushed cinema to the talkies. Instead, they say that only came in 1928 with The Singing Fool.

Now the champions of The Singing Fool don't claim The Jazz Singer didn't do well. Heaven forfend! It turned a nice profit. But silent films - such as Ben Hur - were still doing better. Even after the positive reception of The Jazz Singer there were some producers who thought that talkies would turn out to be a flash in the pan.

It's certainly true that The Singing Fool skyrocketed to the top of the box office and also produced records that sold millions. On the other hand, it was within two weeks after The Jazz Singer premiered on Broadway that Warner Brothers announced that all films for the next year would be sound (not all "talkies" necessarily but all would have Vitaphone soundtracks). Today's consensus, then, is that The Jazz Singer was the real innovation and that The Singing Fool cemented the success of the talkies.

The arguments, though, are not really worth belaboring. The point to remember is that both films starred Al Jolson.

Al was the early 20th century super-megastar. Born Asa Yoelson in 1886 in what is now modern Lithuania, Al was eight when his family settled in Washington, D. C., where his dad was the cantor for a synagogue.

Al - like George Raft - learned to sing and dance on the street corners. Since this was not a bad way to make money - the passers-by tossed him pennies and nickels - Al honed his skills to where he was able to get work as a singer and dancer in vaudeville.

Although today it remains a subject of controversy, Al often performed in "blackface". That is he used black colored make-up to appear (to white audiences) as an authentic African-American minstrel. Even well past the mid-20th century, blackface was a quite popular entertainment genre (again to white audiences) and was sometimes used by some of the most popular singers and comedy teams. It even was featured in cartoons intended for kids.

Blackface performances usually had a strong element of ridicule. Once in a Quaint Town in the American Southwest, the town's civic leaders - including the mayor and the school superintendent - put on a blackface show. The names of the characters were insulting to the extreme and their speech and dialogue were not only stereotypes but grotesque parodies of African American dialects. We have no idea what the town's black citizens thought of the performance because they were not allowed to attend.

What may seem odd is that Al's performances were praised by the black critics and the reviews in the African American press were almost always laudatory. At first this may seem strange given how often black commentators panned the "minstrel shows". On the other hand, if you actually watch Al's films, you will see significant differences in Al's routines and other blackface performers.

Al simply played himself. His words - singing or spoken - and his dance moves are exactly the same whether he was playing backface or not. The result was that people today tend to look at the film excerpts and scratch their heads. Why did Al wear the make-up in the first place?

Personally Al harbored no prejudice himself. He's on record fighting against the discrimination leveled against black performers, met with them socially, and - quite rare for the times - invited them to his home.

But although Al did perform blackface numbers in The Jazz Singer, the story was about a Jewish singer whose dad was a cantor. Clearly the film was crafted around Al's own life although Al's mom, unlike in the movie, had died when he was a boy.

But back to the point. The success of both The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool were not just because they were sound films but because they were sound films that featured Al Jolson.

By 1920 Al was the biggest star in Hollywood. The Warner brothers knew that if you had a film where people could both see Al and hear him sing, they would flock to the theaters. Certainly sound would have come along anyway. But whether the film was The Jazz Singer or The Singing Fool, it's Al Jolson that really brought in the era of sound.

As to why Al is not remembered that much, well, that's because to modern viewers used to concerts with megasized multiscreen video displays with massive ear-shattering sound systems and rock stars that gyrate across the stage while lip-syncing their pre-recorded songs, Al's singing and dancing seem dated. His voice had a high pitched nasal quality that even in his own lifetime was parodied by comics. In the Three Stooges short, All the World's a Stooge, Curly does a brief Al Jolson imitation.

That said, the more you listen to Al the sheer exuberance of his performances grows on you. So it's no surprise that Al still has his - often passionate - fans.

People still quibble if The Jazz Singer is a true "talkie". Most of the words are in the songs, and there are only a few sentences of spoken dialog. Instead, the general consensus is that the first feature film to employ dialogue in the modern sense was the Lights of New York. It appeared in 1928 and shortly before The Singing Fool.

By 1930 the Silent Era was over. Oh, sure, Charlie Chaplin produced the silent Modern Times in 1936 and the film has been praised by contemporary critics and film historians alike. In the US, though, it was a box office flop. On the other hand in 1940, Charlie had a hit with The Great Dictator - and it was a talkie.

In 1976, Mel Brooks produced what was probably the last silent movie which was titled - what else? - Silent Movie. Yes, yes, purists maintain that the brief role of the famous mime Marcel Marceau negates the claim of the film being a true silent picture. Pah! Philistines! In a Personal CooperToons Opinion, the film is a masterpiece of cinema and well merited both its critical and financial success.

References

Jolson: The Story of Al Jolson, Michael Freedland Vallentine Mitchell and Company, 2007.

Jolson: The Legend Comes To Life, Herbert Goldman, Oxford University Press, 1988.

"You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet: The Moment Al Jolson Sounded the Birth of the Talkies", Michael Freedland, October 7, 2017.

The Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay, Alexander Walker, Morrow,, 1979.

Journal of the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers, Vol. 64, June, 1955, pp. 291-302.

The Coming of Sound, Douglas Gomery, Routledge, 2005.

"A Brief History of Sound in Cinema", James Cameron, February 24, 2016.

Motion Pictures with Sound, Alexander Walker, Cameron Publishing Company, 1929.

"The First Known Motion Picture with Live-Recorded Sound: Invention of the Kinetophone (1894 - 1895)", Jeremy Norman's HistoryofInvention.com, 2018.

"Timeline: 1923 Detail - April 15, 1923. The First Sound on Film Motion Picture Phonofilm is Show in the Rivoli Theatre in New York City by Lee de Forest", America's Best History.

"The Pre-World War II Sound Era: Introduction of Sound", History of the Motion Picture, Encyclopedia Britannica.

"Fox Movietone News: It Speaks for Itself!", Fox Movietone News.

"Case Research Lab: Behind the Cayuga Museum stands the Case Research Lab, the Birthplace of Talking Movies", Cayuga Museum of History and Art and Case Research Lab.

"'Thalofide Cell'" - A New Photo-Electric Substance", T. W. Case, Physical Review, Vol, 15, Issue 4, p. 289, 1920.

"How Long Should a Short Film Be?", New York Film Academy.

The Complete Films of Charlie Chaplin, Gerald McDonald, Michael Conway, Mark Ricci, Citadel Press, 1988.

"Al Jolson", Wikipedia. Although there are many caveats about Wikipedia articles, the one on Al is well-referenced and informative.

"Al Jolson - Misunderstood Hero or Villain?", Eddie Deeze, Today I Found Out About, October 9, 2014

"Al Jolson", Internet Movie Data Base.

"Lights of New York", Kitty Lewis (actor), Cullen Landis (actor), Bryan Foy (director), Murray Roth (writer), Hugh Herbert (writer), Warner Brothers, 1928, Internet Movie Data Base.