Facets' College Corner: The Transition to Sound

Editor's note: Singin’ in the Rain is not only a classic American film, it is also an illustration of the problems and issues that directors and producers faced during the early sound era. Here student Magda Wiech from the Introduction to Film class at Oakton Community College points them out for us in her very detailed essay.


The Transition to Sound

The arrival of sound in the movie industry was a long process. In the years after the introduction of sound, films incorporating synchronized dialogue were known as "talking pictures," or "talkies." The first feature-length movie originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927.

The Jazz Singer was a huge hit and started the transformation of the film industry to synchronized sound, or sync sound. Like every revolution, this one involved many problems and challenges that movie studios had to overcome. Some of these problems are illustrated in Singin’ in the Rain.

Singin’ in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, and the memorable Jean Hagen, was released in 1952. However, the action of the film is set in 1927, shortly after the release of The Jazz Singer. The movie is a funny caricature of the transition era from silent movies to sound.

To convert to sound, filmmakers faced three key problems: financial, technical, and artistic. Singin’ In The Rain illustrates all three of these problems, more or less.

The major financial problem involved the cost of conversion. The movie studios had to convert to sound to stay in business. People no longer wanted to see silent films. The new sound equipment was very expensive. Studios had to invest in the new machines and new soundproof buildings. The theatre owners also faced enormous expenses, because they were forced to buy sound projectors, speakers, and wiring to link the two.

Singin’ in the Rain touches on this problem briefly in the scene where R.F. (head of Monumental Studio), arrives at the staging area and announces that they are shutting down production for few weeks because after seeing The Jazz Singer, the public is “screaming for more talking pictures.” This scene relates to the economic costs of the transformation. Shutting down production of a movie was very expensive. And, within a short time, studios had to hire new staff, including actors, diction coaches, and sound technicians, not to mention purchasing new sound equipment.

Studios also had an excess of silent movies that were already made and waiting for release. These backlogs of these movies were either released as silent films, with the studios knowing they would flop, or studios added dialogue to them to make them more profitable. Some of them were totally remade as talkies, but many unreleased silent films were just destroyed.

During the transition, moviemakers also faced technical problems such as amplification and synchronization. These problems are clearly depicted in two scenes in Singin’ in the Rain.

One of them takes place on the sound stage while filming The Dueling Cavalier. During a love scene, star Lina Lamont struggles with speaking her lines into the microphone, which is hidden in a bush. Not only were there no boom mikes at this time, the mikes that did exist were non-directional. Microphones were routinely hidden in the set design near the actors. In this scene, Lina cannot focus. As a result, the director is missing every other word. Frustrated and annoyed, the director has a new idea of hiding the mike in Lina’s cleavage. It does not help much; this time, the microphone picks up Lina’s heartbeat. The last attempt of the increasingly aggravated director is to sew the microphone to Lina’s dress. The mike is sewn into her shoulder, but this effort also fails as R.F. walks in, pulls the wire, and swoops up Lina with it.

This scene focuses on the issue of recording with a single microphone. All the actors had to be clustered together, so they could all be recorded by one microphone. The scene also spotlights the problem of inadvertently recording unwanted sounds (for example Lina’s heartbeat), which were recorded along with the dialog. This scene takes us straight to my favorite scene, and the funniest in the film, which is the preview screening of The Dueling Cavalier.

From the very beginning of the movie, the audience hears the amplified sounds of Lina playing with her pearls as she says her lines, along with the swishing of her big dress. Things get more comical with the entrance of her costar Don Lockwood into the scene.

The rustling of his costume, loud steps, and the noise that he causes by throwing his cane away makes the whole scene more absurd. The audience is exposed to every possible sound that could be made along with clothing noises to go with body movements, which at one point are louder than the dialogue itself. When we think that things can’t get any worse, the sound goes out of synchronization. As a result, Lina is talking in a male voice, and the male character is talking in Lina’s. Bad dialogue, over-the-top acting, and problems with amplification and synchronization create one big ridiculous picture.

The preview scene also spotlights artistic difficulties of transition era.

During a dialog scene with Lina, Don says repeatedly: “I love you, I love you, I love you…” while the audience is bursting with laughter. One audience member comments, “Did somebody get paid for writing this dialog?” This moment highlights the difficulties with the quality of the dialogue.

The truth is that the earliest “all-talking” movies had very bad dialogue. To resolve this, filmmakers turned to playwrights to write better dialogue, and they rushed to hire Broadway actors to speak it. This brings up another issue, which is portrayed in the opening scene of Singin’ in the Rain.

When Lina Lamont and Don Lockwood are arriving to the premiere of their movie, they are interviewed, but Don is doing all the talking. Beautiful and glamorous Lina stays mysteriously silent. With her first onscreen words, we find out why. In spite of her physical attractiveness, her voice is nothing like her beauty. In fact, she has very annoying high-pitched voice that sounds like the squeaking of a knife on an empty plate.

The problem of her voice is a main plot point in the movie. It was also one of the main problems of the film studios. Many stars became unusable in the era of speech. Foreign actors with heavy accents, the beautiful actress with the nasal rasp, the handsome Latin with the squeaky twang—they had no place in Hollywood during the sound era. Some American-born stars also had troubles with dialogue; their voices had to match their star images, and in some cases, they did not. Diction coaches opened offices in the studios to help with the problem. Old stars and old jobs died; new ones were born.

Singin’ in the Rain is a story about the bumpy transition to sound told in a funny, entertaining way. We could almost use the movie to document the era. The first time I saw Singin’ in the Rain I was about ten years old. It played often during holidays, so I was watching the movie this time with a little bit of nostalgia. I have really enjoyed watching the film again; it made me realize that the things that I take for granted in movies, such as sound, came with great effort from many artistic and creative people in the film industry.