howardhawkshollywoodannex:

Looking at the American Film Institute’s Top 100 films of the past 100 years, the first sound film on the list, King Kong premiered Apr 7, 1933.  The Jazz Singer was the first feature film to incorporate sound in 1927, but by AFI’s standards, the first great American talkie was six years in the making.   It didn’t take Alfred Hitchcock nearly that long.

England’s Alfred Hitchcock made the first great sound feature, Blackmail, premiering in London on June 30, 1929.  Of course it cannot rank with Hitchcock’s later masterpieces, but Blackmail contains sequences that illustrate even then, Hitch was the master of suspense.  By 1930, three more great sound films were made in Europe:  Germany’s The Blue Angel (Joseph von Sternberg with Marlene Dietrich) and M (Fritz Lang), and France’s  L’Age D’Or (Luis Bunuel).

AFI’s list is limited to only 100 great films, but there are certainly great American films in the first 6 years of talkies.  The first great American sound film is Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause, premiering Oct 7, 1929, and coincidentally, the day after Hitchcock’s Blackmail premiered in America.  Rouben is very much America’s first sound innovator.  While many early American sound films feature an immovable camera and stilted acting, Rouben’s camera moved right along with the action, not only in the studio, but in numerous outdoor locations in and around New York City, all that with some of the chubbiest chorus girls ever to hit Broadway.

Two early sound westerns also feature outdoor photography.  The Virginian (1929), the first great sound western, was directed by Victor Fleming, starring Gary Cooper and Walter Huston.  Then in 1930, John Wayne starred in Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, filmed in an early widescreen process that proved to be a box office failure, leading to an absence of any big budget westerns until the late 30’s, and John Wayne’s big budget return in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939).

The first great sound comedy on AFI’s list is The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, released late in 1933, but the brothers started making great comedies with Animal Crackers (1930) and Horse Feathers (1932).  Ben Hecht wrote his first great comedy, The Front Page, in 1930, Laurel and Hardy’s first great feature was Pardon Us (1931), and Ernst Lubitsch made the sophisticated comedy Trouble in Paradise in 1932. 

Before King Kong, AFI could also have cited Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Most Dangerous Game (1932).  The great gangster trio, Little Caesar, Public Enemy and Scarface (1931-32) are all absent from AFI’s list.  Warner Brothers also made a series of social dramas in the early 30’s, the best being 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis 1932) and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Paul Muni 1932).  In addition to Scarface, Howard Hawks also made the first sound film to win an Oscar for its story, the unsentimental The Dawn Patrol (1930).

Many great films at the dawn of the sound era 1929-1932 have just been mentioned.  The AFI cites only one film for this time period, Charlie Chaplin’s silent City Lights (1931), claiming it is the 11th best American film of all time!  Even in 1936 Chaplin was still making silent films when everyone in Hollywood had moved on.  AFI also chooses to recognize his silent Modern Times at number 78.  Chaplin did not make his first sound film until 1940.

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