Singin' in the Rain and the End of the Silent Era
It’s 1922. Your friends have been raving about this new motion picture called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Since you’ve been meaning to give this film thing a try for a while and your birthday is coming up, you decide to treat yourself to the movie. You dress up for the cold March weather and set out for the theater. You flip a quarter to the guy in the box office and he slips a fresh ticket through the window slot. “Enjoy the show,” he says in a chipper tone. You head into the dim theater and find a seat in a row just behind the middle. At 6 o’clock on the dot, the orchestra begins and the movie fades up on the screen. For 74 minutes, you lose yourself in the acting of Werner Krauss and direction of Robert Wiene. “Now this is entertainment,” you think to yourself.
By this time, the motion picture had existed for a little over twenty years. It began with the inventions of the Phonograph, the Kinetograph, and the Kinetoscope by the great Thomas Edison in the late 1800s. Today, the movie has developed into one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the world. The history of film begins in a silent era, as Edison never figured out how to effectively synchronize sound to film. In this era, stories were told through visuals alone, allowing both the hearing and the deaf to enjoy the medium equally. In grandiose, exaggerated fashion, actors conveyed thought and emotion through action, with an occasional intertitle card thrown in to give context. The likes of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Clara Bow, and Raymond Griffith enjoyed great success during the silent era. Unbeknownst to them, a few inventors toiled away in a lab owned by Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories. They had created something that threatened every single one of their careers.
Introducing the Vitaphone! Literally translated as “the sound of life,” the Vitaphone featured small microphones to collect sound energy and amplifiers to increase the volume at which the sound was played back. Electricity was used to synchronize sound to a picture. The inventors shopped the new device around to all the major film studios, but only a small, budding company would bite: Warner Brothers Pictures. One of the four brothers, Sam Warner, loved the radio as much as he loved creating movies. He was naturally intrigued by the Vitaphone and urged his other brothers to adopt the device. And they did! But only for music. Believing that audiences didn’t want to hear actors speak, the Warner Brothers focused solely on recording music and sound effects for their movies. It saved money on hiring musicians to play in their theaters across the United States and allowed creative control on the music that the audiences heard. Instead of each musician choosing what to play at their theater, the Warner Brothers delivered the same musical experience to every moviegoer everywhere.
Warner Brothers released the first “Vitaphone movie,” as they were called, in 1926. With a full orchestral soundtrack and perfectly-synced sword clashes and ringing bells, Don Juan found great success. The next year, the Warner Brothers decided to test the waters of dialogue and produced The Jazz Singer, a drama about the famous singer Al Jolson. Featuring scenes with lip-synced speech, the movie marked the beginning of the end of the silent era.
Released in 1952, the film Singin’ in the Rain details this transition from silence to sound. Taking place in 1927, silent actors Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) are on set filming ‘The Dueling Cavalier’ for the fictional studio Monumental Pictures. The studio head, R.F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell), announces that the production sets will be converted for sound. The reason? The Jazz Singer was a smash hit and Simpson wanted a piece of the action. Singin’ in the Rain discusses many of the trials and tribulations that the film industry went through during this transition: silent actors without a place in the talkies, naive producers playing catch up, and all of the financial, technical, and artistic problems that the wave of sound brought on.
An early scene in the movie shows that many silent film producers thought that sound would be nothing more than a fad. At an afterparty following the premiere of a Lamont and Lockwood film, Simpson shows the guests a talking picture. They quickly dismiss it; even Simpson believes it won’t catch on. “They’ll lose their shirts,” Simpson remarks about the Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer. With so many failed attempts at syncing sound with film before (Phonorama, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, and Théâtroscope to name a few), all the major studios gave the Vitaphone little thought. The huge success of The Jazz Singer caused them to rethink their stance on the matter. In a haste, MGM, Paramount, RKO, all of the studios outfitted their stages for sound. All production ceased to allow the renovations.
This necessity is detailed in Singin’ in the Rain. When Simpson announces that the stages will be converted to sound, he tells the director to send everyone home until further notice. These renovations were incredibly costly, and not just for the studios. Sound equipment was expensive for the theaters showing the movies as well. They had to buy new projectors that could accommodate sound, speakers to project the sound to the farthest row in the theater, and wiring to link the two together. The projectionist’s workload was suddenly doubled, as they now needed to know how to operate the sound portion of the projector and keep it in sync with the film. The expenses didn’t end there. Studios had a backlog of silent films waiting to be released, but now, they had four options: release them knowing that they will flop, record dialogue separately and edit it in post, film the entire story again, or simply destroy the reel. None of these were easy on the studios’ wallets.
The technical problems of sound were amplification and synchronization. These two properties caused a lot of headaches for filmmakers. Since the microphones of the time were non-directional, actors had to stay still and speak in a specific direction to ensure that the microphone would record them. This drastically contrasted the big displays they put on in silent films. Clara Bow is quoted saying “[Talkies are] stiff and limiting. You lose a lot of your cuteness, because there’s no chance for action, and action is the most important thing to me,” (Faraci). Early microphones constrained the actors, forcing them to act more subtly and stiffly. A scene in Singin’ in the Rain depicts the difficulties involved in keeping actors on axis with the hidden microphones. Lina Lamont is recording a scene for ‘The Dueling Cavalier,’ acting in the only way she knows how: big and exaggerated. She says her lines as she swings her head from side to side. Every other line is lost to the microphone due to these movements, as it cannot move with Lamont. In addition, dialogue came through at the same levels as the rustling of a costume or, as shown in the preview screening of ‘The Dueling Cavalier,’ the tossing of a cane. These amplified, unwanted sound effects cluttered the airspace and made it difficult to follow the dialogue. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the picture falls out of sync with the sound halfway through. This causes Lamont to appear to speak with a male voice and vice versa with a male actor. These problems turned the screening into a comedic travesty. One patron even refers to the film as “the worst picture ever made.” Before sound could be used as an effective tool in visual storytelling, these kinks had to be ironed out first.
In the wise words of George Lucas, “sound is half the picture.” Directors could not simply shoehorn in some dialogue and call it a day. In the film, Simpson doesn’t appreciate the artistic value of sound. “What do you have to know? It’s a picture, you do what you always did. You just add talking to it!” This leads to atrocious dialogue in the form of Don Lockwood repeating “I love you” ten times over. To strengthen the audio portion of the story, directors hired playwrights to revise their scripts and Broadway actors to recite them. Thespians had experience with dialogue-heavy acting, so they soon replaced silent stars that didn’t have a voice for the New Hollywood. Jean Hagen’s Lina Lamont character represents these lost stars. At the beginning of the film, Don Lockwood talks to the press, delivering a monologue about his meteoric rise to celebrity status. Lina Lamont stands beside him, but she never says anything. Her first line of dialogue says all that needs to be said: her high-pitched, annoying, nasally voice is not fit for the public’s ears.
Silent-film actor Raymond Griffith had a similar dilemma to Lina Lamont. He was one of the greatest comedians of the time, but sound ruined his career. Due to a childhood throat injury, he could only talk at a hoarse whisper. After his last and only talkie appearance in the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front, Griffith retreated from the spotlight. He continued to work behind the scenes as a production supervisor and associate producer for Twentieth Century Fox. While careers like Griffith’s were on the downswing, sound helped launch the careers of people like the Marx Brothers, Ethel Merman, and others endowed with verbal and singing talent (Faraci). In Singin’ in the Rain, Lina Lamont’s career ends where Kathy Selden’s (Debbie Reynolds) begins. Selden, with her wonderful voice and plentiful experience in the theater, agrees to voice Lamont’s character in ‘The Dueling Cavalier,’ now turned into a musical and renamed ‘The Dancing Cavalier.’ She gives an outstanding performance and saves the movie, which closes to thunderous applause after its premiere; a stark contrast to the preview audience’s response. Lamont embarrasses herself in front of the audience by giving her speech and revealing her true voice to them. Lockwood announces that Selden is the voice that they had heard that night, giving her full credit and ensuring the future of her career. The movie ends with Lockwood and Selden standing in front of a billboard. It reads ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ featuring Lockwood and Selden as the leading actor and actress. Lockwood, an actor who makes a successful transition to the world of talkies; Selden, an actress whose career begins because of the addition of sound; and Lamont, an actress who shall forever be a silent film star, but nothing more.
Singin’ in the Rain tells the story of Hollywood’s transition from silence to sound using the most sound-reliant artform: music. One of the last great Hollywood musicals, Singin’ in the Rain is a classic. While it may romanticize the transition, it details many of the problems that the film industry experienced during this tumultuous time period: the money lost in converting everything to sound and the money gained in creating a new type of film, the technical troubles with recording sound using rudimentary microphones, and the artistic dilemmas over directing actors, writing poor dialogue, and casting for voice as well as acting ability. Sound shook Hollywood to its core, but as Singin’ in the Rain shows, it was for the better. It elevated the motion picture to another level. It enhances the story and speaks to the emotions of the viewer. Without it, who knows where movies would be today.
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