The Talkie Revolution and the Golden Age

Until now, we have walked through the golden age of silent film. On screens without words, Chaplin and Keaton made audiences around the world laugh and cry with gesture alone. But technology does not stand still. At the end of the 1920s, the screen at last acquired a voice. In that moment, cinema was lifted to a new stage as an art, and at the same time it entered a golden age as a vast industry. In this chapter, we trace—from both sides, light and shadow—the revolution that sound brought, the prosperity built by the dream factory called Hollywood, and the shadow of censorship that bound cinematic expression behind all that brilliance.

The Screen That Found a Voice — The Shock of the Talkie

Released by Warner Bros. in October 1927, ‘The Jazz Singer’ is a work told and retold as a turning point in film history. Using a system called Vitaphone, it synchronized sound to songs and some dialogue, but it was not sound throughout; many scenes remained silent film reliant on intertitles. Even so, the moment the leading actor Al Jolson sang and spoke to the audience from within the screen, viewers are said to have been gripped by an astonishment they had never felt before. The line in the film, ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,’ rang out almost like a prophecy of the era to come.

Prompted by this success, the film world turned toward the age of sound in an avalanche. Within just a few years, silent films were scarcely made anymore. Yet this transition was not a blessing for everyone. Expression that had been refined on screens without voice was, for a time, sent back to square one. Filming sets had camera movement constrained by the demands of recording equipment, and early talkies are said to have become, if anything, more awkward. Above all, the new condition of voice divided the fates of the leading figures of the previous era.

The grief over what was lost with the introduction of sound has been depicted again and again by cinema itself in later years. Works that take the transition from silent to talkie as their subject are still beloved today, telling us how great an event this turning point was for cinema.

The Dream Factory — The Studio System and the Star System

Having found its voice, Hollywood entered its golden age as an industry from the 1930s into the 1940s. What supported that prosperity was the arrangement called the studio system.

At the time, several major studios served as the center of film production. These companies held screenwriters, directors, actors, and technicians under long-term contracts, and produced one work after another at their own studios. Furthermore, they are said to have handled everything from distributing the films they made to screening them at theaters in their own chains. This structure, which gathered everything from production to exhibition into a single flow, had the power to send films into the world steadily and in great quantity. Audiences sought new releases nearly every week, and the studios kept answering that demand.

What shone in combination with this arrangement was the star system. Studios discovered appealing actors and carefully staged everything—their names, their backgrounds, and sometimes even how their private lives were shown—to build up a single ‘star.’ Audiences went to the theater seeking their favorite stars, and the very presence of a star became a guarantee of attendance. The brilliance beyond the silver screen was, for many, a dream that let them forget their daily lives. Especially in an era over which the shadow of the Great Depression stretched long, cinema—an inexpensive entertainment—was also a precious place that comforted people’s hearts.

What Could Not Be Depicted — The Shadow of the Censorship Code

Golden-age Hollywood had one more force that shaped films from outside the frame: the production code, the so-called Hays Code.

From the end of the 1920s, when the talkie spread, into the early 1930s, Hollywood films included no small number of works that handled crime, violence, and sexual depiction relatively boldly. This is the body of work from the period later called ‘pre-Code.’ Yet against such expression, strong criticism was directed from religious groups and local communities. Fearing legal regulation from outside, the industry chose the path of setting its own standards. A code of ethics was created in 1930, and in 1934 an administrative office to handle its enforcement was established, making it effectively mandatory to obtain approval before release.

Under this code, what could and could not be depicted was finely specified. Crime had to be portrayed as something that did not pay, and excessive violence, explicit sexual depiction, and particular kinds of language were avoided. Creators came to layer ingenuity upon ingenuity in telling stories within this frame. Conveying what could not be shown directly through suggestion, omission, and witty dialogue—the constraint is sometimes valued as having produced, if anything, more refined expression. But at the same time, the freedom to depict social reality and human complexity head-on was certainly narrowed. Opinions are divided, but the influence censorship had on expression is thought to have been far from small.

Here, the light and shadow of the golden age cross. Hollywood films, which captivated people as rich entertainment, built part of their splendor upon a selection of what not to tell. The dream that the dream factory offered was also a dream whose outline had been trimmed by someone’s hand. How cinema would face this frame in later eras and how it would overcome it—that becomes another story.

Having found its voice, Hollywood blossomed as a vast industry. Yet the art of cinema was not America’s alone. In the same era, across the sea in Europe, filmmakers carrying the history and thought of their own nations opened up the possibilities of the screen with entirely different sensibilities and theories. Next time, we visit the forms of cinematic art that blossomed independently across the world.