Was 1929's The Jazz Singer ...
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 New York (1928). But The Jazz Singer, a much remade and imitated story of the culture clash between immigrant children and their first-generation American children — in this case Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson, a big vaudeville star) from New York's Lower East Side, who scandalizes his family and community by changing his name to Jack Robin and becoming, yes, a jazz singer rather than a cantor like his devout, Orthodox Jewish father — was the shape of thing to come. Its enormous success proved that silent movies were the past and talking pictures were the future.
