A Predestined Consequence

A Predestined Consequence | Tibbetts John C. Tibbetts University of Kansas RAR03.aol.com A Predestined Consequence Donald Crafton. The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (History ofthe American Cinema, 4). Charles Scribners Sons, 1998. ($75.00) Writing in 1931, the always acerbic drama critic, George Jean Nathan, greeted the talking picture revolution with a certain dubious scorn. "In the relatively brief reign of the silent pictures we were familiar with a wealth of such nonsense as the moving picture is the art form of the future. Having apparently learned their lesson, the movie people have gathered around the cold corpse of their previous 'art' and are now simply grabbing their pay envelopes from the talkies, keeping mum, and leaving talk about art to artists." Lest Nathan's pronouncement sounds antique and quaintly perverse to our ears, it is significant to note that author Donald Crafton—in his impressive new book, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 19261931 —seems to echo the opinion. His general thesis is that the first years of the talkie revolution constituted a disruption , a transitory cinematic experiment, whose "unexpected results" and artistic potentials were quickly domesticated, diluted, and contained in the Hollywood main stream. He contends that by 1931 American films had regained their "equilibrium" and, with few exceptions, resumed the same bland character and mass appeal to the "uneducated multitude "—that "great ninety percent, as the great unwashed movie-going public beyond the precincts of Broadway" was described. Crafton zeroes in on this always-fascinating six-year period in film history as one ofgreat turmoil and dashed hopes. Behind the book's 639 pages, scrupulous research, voluminous notes, and several appendices is an unmistakable note of disappointment over what he seems to regard as the tragic arc of yet another American industrial and artistic failure . This is not to say that Crafton finds the chronicle of these chaotic years dull or insignificant. Hardly. "These are tales," Crafton writes, "of brilliant but eccentric inventors, naked corporate avarice, stars ruined and restored, the race against competitors to wire theaters, violent labor strife, international cultural imperialism, the climax of the Crash, and the denouement of the Depression." The Talkies is Volume Number Four in the History of the American Cinema series from Scribners, under the general editorship of Charles Harpole. It is a book of our times, avowedly revisionist and scrupulously—nay, relentlessly —documented. More exhaustively than any previous scholar, Crafton proves that talking-picture technology was initially marketed and imaged as merely another development in "thermionics," or electrical science as a burgeoning age of communication (telephone, wireless radio, television, amplifiers, microphones and public-address systems), transportation (electric trains and elevators), and labor-saving and leisure-time appliances (the phonograph). "The idea of using electricity to work communication magic and improve life became an organizing motif of everyday life early in the twentieth century," Crafton writes. "By 1928 most of the popular press writers saw the perfected talkies as an inevitable outgrowth of modern science—a predestined consequence of other communication technologies." Other related subjects had been relatively unexplored until the appearance of this book. For example, this is the first time that the impact of sound technology on labor organization in Hollywood in the late 1920's has been examined in any extended detail. Whereas Hollywood had been relatively successful in resisting unionization in the silent period, Crafton demonstrates that sound weakened that resistance. Synchronized music scores to films, while placing more responsibilities on the work of theater projectionists, threatened to replace the pit musicians who had until now found work in movie theaters. Moreover, Actors Equity saw the new employment opportunities for stage-trained actors offered by talkies and launched a renewed effort to try to establish a closed shop in Hollywood. Sound was also a catalyst for a renewed call for censorship . Profane words and "saucy dialogue," as Crafton puts it, were deemed just as objectionable—in some cases, more so— than the "suggestive poses" of the actors. In the silent days, censorship had been an "invisible" activity, but now "with the addition of the sound track, its interruption of the flow of the story was jokingly apparent. Audiences and...