The Dawn of Sound

When revising the history of film, the invention of sound seems to emerge out of nowhere: one day there was Metropolis (1927); the next, Al Jolston appeared, singing the death song for silent film. Sound had fallen from the sky, a blessing and a curse. The truth was, sound had been in the works since the first days of film, as they had the technology to record sound—the problem was with synchronization and amplification. During a thirty year period, there were more than enough tries at making a talking picture. Many came close, but more failed, and it was not until the invention of the Vitaphone and the release of the Jazz Singer (1927) that talking pictures garnered any success. Although adding sound to films was thought initially to be the final freedom, for every advantage, it brought on ten new problems. Singin’ in the Rain (1952), a musical satire of the early days of talkies, took these real-life problems and situations and presented them in a comical light. Take away the laughs though, and you have a very real portrait of the early days of talking cinema. Studios were literally shut down, and millions of dollars were converted to prepare for sound. Cameras were confined to enormous boxes, because the sound of the camera would otherwise be picked up on the microphones. This was one of the reasons why the creative camera movement of silent film was quickly eliminated, and film was reverted back to the uncomfortable and stagnant medium shots with little camera movement. It was as though a literal step back of about fifteen years had occurred, and many of the mistakes of early silents were being repeated.

The group that probably suffered the most from the introduction of sound were the actors. Some of the biggest stars of the day were quickly put out of work. Actors like Clara Bow, the it-girl, and Emil Jannings, the first Best Actor winner at the Academy awards, were through because of their thick accents (Bow was from Brooklyn, Jannings from Germany). In the case of John Gilbert, his overtly theatrical and high-pitched voice just did not match his leading man body. The studios quickly (and fearfully) released films featuring some of their biggest stars to see how the audience would respond to their voices. Staying with the example of Gilbert, his first sound picture, His Glorious Night (1929), was a critical and box office failure, and is actually the inspiration for the film being made in Singin’ in the Rain. Gilbert was drawn an unlucky hand, as he had some abysmal dialogue to work with (he’d often repeat the line, “Darling I love you, I love you, I love you!”), and Hollywood conspiracy theorists suggest that producer L.B. Mayer held a grudge against Gilbert, and told the sound technicians to speed up his recordings slightly to make him sound the fool (this might hold some truth, because in Queen Christina (1933), while his voice is a bit too affected, it is definitely not squeaky or high-pitched).

This is not the only case of sound-related career sabotage. Actress Louise Brooks suffered a similar fate when she refused to return to Hollywood to dub her voice for the film The Canary Murder Case (1929). Tired of her disobedience, producers hired another actress – who had an unpleasant voice with a mild Midwestern accent – to dub it. The audience assumed it was Brooks, and she was not only thrown out by the studio, but also by the public. Not all of the actors failed though; many made a smooth transition to sound, and there were several who were more suited to sound than they were to silents. The most notable case is probably actor William Powell, who in silents played heavies and villains, but with sound in the talkies, his voice actually allowed him to become a leading man.

Most early talkies felt like a step back in time, before the great innovators of silents had changed the landscape of cinema. The camera box and use of microphones limited the movement of not only the camera, but also of the actors. An ongoing joke in Singin’ in the Rain was the problematic placement of the microphone during filming. First, it was hid in a potted plant, but indignantly, actress Lina Lamont (played by Jean Hagen) exclaimed, “I can’t make love to a plant!” The next attempt was to sew the microphone into her dress. This solved the problem, until the sensitive sound device picked up the beating of her heart. Finally, they decided to hide it in the flowers in her right shoulder, which worked in theory, until Lamont would move her head and her voice was once again missed by the microphone. Although it is rare to witness the extreme of having an actor speak directly into a plant, it is very often the case with these early films that you can easily determine where in the room they are hidden.

It was Rouben Mamoulian who was the first director to use a prototype of the boom mike. He became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of hiding the microphones in the room, so he took a broom and attached a microphone to it, and held it above the actors out of the shot. Despite being first and foremost a stage director, Mamoulian was a risk taker in the early days of sound. Along with this innovation, he also did some of the first and most daring tracking shots of the early talkies. However, despite these risks he took, they were an uncommon gesture in early talking cinema. In fact, a large amount of the very first talkies hardly lived up to its name, as they were merely silent films with dialogue added later, done only because it was the new trend. For this reason, many early films simply feel awkward, and are often lacking in sound ambiance. The more awkward films don’t have sound for characters walking down an empty hallway, while others still suffer from what I could only be called “static sound”—the effects are there, and they are well integrated, but they are superfluous. People became just as much in love with the idea of sound as they were of motion only a few decades before. There were just too many little scenes or instances that served no purpose to the plot, but were used purely to showcase sound. This is one of the main reasons why many of these films feel aged to the average viewer—there is too much filler.

Of course, things were not all grim in these early days, and more than a few excellent films emerged. Needless to say, sound was of a tremendous invention that gave filmmakers new opportunities they had never imagined before. Also, for the more talented directors, these constraints offered a new challenge. Usually, the more constraints there are, the more opportunities there are for creativity. I’ve already mentioned Rouben Mamoulian, who did tremendously creative things with the camera and sound. His early films, such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and Love Me Tonight (1932), are standouts of technical adventure and achievement. In Love Me Tonight, Mamoulian takes the sounds that the audience has fallen in love with but are beginning to tire of, and transforms them into music. The opening scene is a slow build up of “noises” that eventually mount up to the music for the opening song. Other filmmakers though, like Josef von Sternberg and Fritz Lang, were also quick to learn and used sound seamlessly.

One last case that is worth noting is Charlie Chaplin, who didn’t actually make a full transition to sound films until the 1940s. City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) are not technically silent films because they both have soundtracks, and Modern Times contains dialogue. Still, there is no doubt they are silent films by our modern understanding. Initially, it seemed as though he, like several other silent mavericks, thought that talking films were a fad. A testament to both his stubbornness and his patience – not to mention, his own studio and financing – Chaplin was able to endure through the advent of the talking film while retaining his silent-oriented style with great popularity and success (in 1931, City Lights was a top five box office draw). And by the time he had fully shifted over to making talking films, most of the initial problems with sound had been resolved, and his two aforementioned films had even started to increasingly incorporate sound. Thus, Chaplin had already developed some knowledge in using sound before making a complete transition to talking films. Nonetheless, Chaplin can still be considered an exception to the rule of this era.

I think I have said enough on this subject of sound, although there are many interesting tidbits I left out. Pre-code film in particular was a defining element of this era, but I think it merits its own lengthy discussion. It’s an era that often goes unnoticed, despite its historical importance, as well as the surprising quality of many of the films. As much as the silent era was an era of great discovery and evolution, cinema as we know it today emerged with the coming of sound. It’s worth taking that little extra effort to see where it all began.