Natural Sound in the Early Talkie Western

This article outlines the historical conditions surrounding the reception of the first cycle of talkie Westerns produced by Hollywood studios from 1929 to 1931. While these films have largely been treated by contemporary scholarship as merely descendents of silent Westerns and crude forebears of the genre’s later sound-era classicism, this article removes them from that teleological trajectory to situate them within the historical debates surrounding the transition to sound. By highlighting the generic designation ‘outdoor film’ and linking it to the notion of ‘natural’ sound that formed a key point of the marketing for sound on film systems, this article provides a listening model for understanding the varied aesthetic strategies by which these films worked out an approach to sound within the ideological constraints of the classical Hollywood studio system.

To the critic viewing it retrospectively, 1929’s In Old Arizona, a film frequently identified as the first talkie western, appears self-evidently as a western according to widely understood contemporary definitions of the genre. Indeed, it is almost impossible to discuss this film and others such as The Virginian (1929), The Big Trail (1930), Billy the Kid (1930), and Cimarron (1931) without using this term, which is perhaps the most extensively studied of any such generic label in the field of film studies. As such, these films have been treated relatively unproblematically by contemporary scholarship as westerns. On one hand, through their use of semantic and syntactic elements (Altman 1984) that would have been familiar to audiences of the late 1920s, these films are part of a generic tradition spanning back to cinema’s first decade, linking them to existing sets of expectations about adherence to long-established formal and narrative conventions.¹ On the other hand, they must also be read within the discourse of the transition to sound, a period in which formal and narrative conventions for synchronised sound were, for the most part, beginning from scratch.² Adding another wrinkle to these seemingly opposed discourses is the role of technological development in mediating sound practices. Because of the genre’s reliance on outdoor settings, the first talkie western was not released until January of 1929, nearly 18 months after the release of The Jazz Singer (1927), following the development of sound-on-film technology that allowed for outdoor sound recording, a practice that was incompatible with the limitations of sound-on-disc.

In this essay, I argue for the reconciliation of these discourses through the term ‘natural’, a term that can be simultaneously used to describe the sounds of a genre and the sound ideology of an entire historical period. My analysis will focus on three of these films: In Old Arizona, The Virginian, and The Big Trail. By examining the overdetermined meanings of the term ‘natural’, I argue that the primary designation of these films as westerns is largely retrospective, and that they should instead be treated as outdoor films. By using the label ‘outdoor film’, which was widely circulated in studio advertising and trade press, I argue that these films are primarily defined not by a generic identity discreet from the films of other major early talkie genres (e.g. gangster films, musicals, melodramas), but as films that often self-consciously avoid generic identification in favour of advancing the project of natural film sound. Defining natural sound would become important not only for an industry attempting to integrate sound into existing norms of narrative storytelling, but also for converting a market for silent films into a market for sound films. As a genre that historically relied on outdoor settings, the western became a site of conflict through which competing ideologies about natural sound were experimented with during a period in which the sound aesthetic of synchronised sound films was characterised by competing ideologies. My analysis will rely primarily on the way these debates were manifested in trade press, fan magazines, and technical literature of the period to offer a framework for interpreting the sound aesthetics of these films in a way that accounts for how they would have been received by historical audiences.³

‘A Pleasing Illusion of Reality...