Question: Was 1929's The Jazz Singer really the first movie with sound? Answer: "First" is always a dangerous word: It needs a lot of qualifiers. By consensus, The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length "talkie," though only about a quarter of the film had dialogue or musical sequences that were integral to the plot (as opposed to a musical score that accompanies the action). It was not the first feature film with synchronized sound; that's generally acknowledged to have been the John Barrymore picture Don Juan (1926), which had both a synchronized score and sound effects, but no dialogue. And The Jazz Singer certainly wasn't the first film with dialogue throughout — that credit generally goes to the gangster movie Lights of
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Question: Do you know what movie Bill Murray is watching on TV in Broken Flowers?
Answer: Bill Murray plays an aging, emotionally disconnected lothario in Broken Flowers, and he's watching The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) when his girlfriend announces that she's packed the last of her things and is leaving him forever. The film was obviously chosen for the way in which it echoes the themes of Broken Flowers, starting with the fact that its Don Juan (played by silent-film star Douglas Fairbanks; it turned out to be his last film) is also middle-aged and forced to reckon with his past.
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