BOB ALLEN ASKS...

WHY THE JAZZ SINGER?

...and puts forward a personal theory

October 6th 1997 was the 70th anniversary of the premiere of Warner Bros' production, The Jazz Singer.

Ask movie trivia experts what was the first talking picture and you can be fairly sure they will say The Jazz Singer. Why?

From the first appearance of the Kinetoscope in 1894, showmen and inventors endeavoured to provide sound for moving pictures. In the 33 years between the Kinetoscope and The Jazz Singer, literally hundreds of patents for making pictures talk were filed throughout the world.

Many ingenious ideas, for mechanically and electrically interlocking phonographs with film cameras and projectors were developed. A lot achieved their aim and many exhibitions of talking pictures were given. However they were all limited by the lack of suitable amplification and the movies stayed silent apart from live musical accompaniment and sometimes occasional spot sound effects.

Audiences were quite happy with the then, silent movie state of the art. Visual story telling in the late teens and the twenties had developed to a very high standard; even today, the classics of the period are very watchable.

So what caused the great public reaction to the The Jazz Singer, giving it the privilege to be regarded as the first talking picture? It was made as a silent film but intended to have a recorded musical score and several synch songs sung by Al Jolson. It was never intended to be a talking picture. Harry and Jack Warner were most definitely anti talking pictures, as were all Hollywood producers at the time.

The picture was a sellout, one of the big box office hits of all time. The public flocked to see it. Why? It wasn't a great story. If it had been shown with only a musical score it would have been quite ordinary.

The song numbers can't have been all that much of a novelty. The public had seen musical and comedy short sound films before, like the earlier Vitaphone programmes shown with Don Juan and The Better Ole. Or they may have even earlier, in 1923, seen the Lee de Forest Phonofilms programme shown at the New York Rivoli.

A reason for earlier lack of interest could have been poor sound quality. The 1923 Phonofilm shorts were sound-on-film, which was still in it's infancy. W.E. Theisen, in an article in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers written in 1934, says of Phonofilm "The quality of the reproduced sound was not of sufficient excellence to interest the public greatly. The sound was so incomplete in harmonics, so limited in range of intensity and so unmistakably a 'canned' product that illusion was impossible."

So perhaps it was greatly improved sound quality that impressed the public. The Jazz Singer was Vitaphone sound-on-disc using Bell Telephone Labs then state of the art Orthophonic recording with reproduction through Western Electric high power amplifiers and newly designed loudspeakers.

Most commentators at the time, and now cinema historians, claim that it was Jolson's ad libs before and after song numbers, that caught the public's imagination but surely those short snippets, which weren't meant to be in the movie, didn't; really give an impression of what talking pictures would be.

Maybe what the public liked was that the song numbers similar to those they had watched in supporting shorts were now integrated into a feature story film so making the music singing and talking all part of the experience.

My own theory is that it was 'natural' sound that intrigued the movie going public. The following is an extract from a BECTU History Project interview in which one time boom operator Fred Tomlin recalls seeing The Jazz Singer in a London cinema.

"Before I got into the (film) business I worked for J Lyons on their engineering staff. I was single at that time and earning good money. At every opportunity I used to go to the West End to the cinemas. When they fetched over The Jazz Singer, I thought, well I'm going to see that. It was on at the Rialto in Coventry Street. I was sitting there watching the film and they were in a cafe and suddenly you can hear all the sounds of the glasses and cups and all that. It was marvellous to hear all this, it really was, and then of course he (Jolson) had to sing a song. I thought 'cor bless my soul'. Well you couldn't keep me away from the West End cinemas because they had all the best films and then of course it was The Singing Fool and whatever came afterwards. I was always at the Cinema." (Note, Fred is now 89 and an Honorary member of AMPS)

When In Old Arizona , the first feature talking picture to be shot on location out of doors, was released, the big rave from critics and public was not for the production or story but for the naturalness of the outdoors, the wind and the crackling of bacon frying. One member of the audience said how he expected to hear people speak but it was the other sounds that surprised him - a train whistle, the bark of a dog, the hoof beats. But what especially amazed him was the off-screen footsteps of a man, heard before he could be seen.

Certainly, silent movies were a great art but watching them was like looking at life through a large sound-proof plate glass window, dependent upon mime, gestures and title cards to tell the story; the characters lived in a soundless world. Any musical accompaniment and the sometime spot effects supplied by a stage crew were also outside of the frame that surrounded that silent world.

The sounds of "the glasses and cups and all that" which so impressed Fred Tomlin removed that 'plate glass' and the audience was in the world with the characters they were watching, it was no longer a noiseless world. The noises people and things made lent reality to the action, and the talking was just another way of telling the story.

Whatever it was that the cinema going public found fascinating about The Jazz Singer, and whether or not it was the first talking picture, the way they turned out and queued to see it convinced the Hollywood producers that sound had arrived and the rush to get on the 'sound wagon' was on. Silent movies were finished.

POSTSCRIPT : Not all who saw the The Jazz Singer were favourably impressed. This is how the author Aldous Huxley felt about it.

"The film concludes with a scene in the theatre with Mammy mine in the stalls and the son warbling down at her the most penetratingly vulgar mammy song that it had ever been my lot to hear - my flesh crept as the loudspeaker poured out his sodden words, that greasy sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed".

And amongst film directors who were anti-talking pictures:

D.W. Griffiths: "We don't want and never shall the human voice in our movies".

Paul Rotha: "A film in which the speech and sound effects are perfectly synchronised and coincide with their visual image is absolutely contrary to the aims of cinema. It is a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the use of film."

...and Gilbert Seldes 1929 comment - "The tinkle of a glass, the shot of a revolver, a footfall on a hardware floor and the noise of a pack of playing cards being shuffled, all sound alike" doesn't quite tie up with Fred Tomlin's memory of early talkies.