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: I have been searching for the movie The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond, but all the videos for sale on eBay require you to have a player that can read European videos.
Answer: It's serendipitous that you should have asked this question less than a week after the new 25th-anniversary edition DVD of The Jazz Singer (1980) crossed my desk. It streets in October from Anchor Bay Entertainment. I'm hoping that the fact that you mentioned video doesn't mean you don't have a DVD player; if so, I hate to be the one to break the word, but video is a dying technology, at least as far as the home market for commercial films is concerned.
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