MAMMY! Jolson sings to Eugenie
Besserer, and for the first time the world can listen
Oct. 6, 1927
The First Talking Picture
By Richard Corliss
"Wait a
minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!" cried Al Jolson
halfway through The Jazz Singer. Jolson's urgent, boastful
bray—an ad-libbed intro to his rendition of Toot Toot
Tootsie—cut through the opening-night audience at the Warner
Theatre near Times Square like an obstetrician's scissors severing the
umbilical cord to silent films, for 30 years the dominant screen
language. But the movies had to talk. Thomas Edison thought so. He and
his assistant W.K.L. Dickson had devised a talking-movie machine as
early as 1889. In the early '20s short sound films appeared featuring
vaudeville and opera stars. These were sensible, tentative steps; now
the maverick Warner brothers made a great leap of faith. Their Jazz
Singer wasn't a true "talkie''; it broke free from silent-screen
traditions only for brief dialogue and a few songs. Nor was the story,
about a cantor's son who goes into show business, at all modern. But
Jolson's hip-swiveling salesmanship (he was in many ways the Elvis of
his day) put over the novelty of talking pictures. The film, an
immediate sensation, cued a frantic rush to convert all studios and
movie theaters to sound, and signaled the end of a pristine, vigorous
silent-film art. By 1930 virtually every U.S. film was a talkie, and
movies haven't shut up since. Jolson's slangy cry was truly the shout
heard 'round the world.
TIME Cover
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