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  • DVD Chronicle
  • Jefferson Hunter (bio)
DVD Chronicle: M, directed by Fritz Lang (Criterion Collection, 2004)
Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Synergy Entertainment, 2009)
The Big Combo, directed by Joseph H. Lewis (Alpha Video, 2004, and Netflix instant play)
Padre Padrone, directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Fox Lorber, 1998)
Love Me Tonight, directed by Rouben Mamoulian (Kino Video, 2003)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, directed by Robert Altman (Warner Brothers, 2004)
Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman (101 Distribution, 2009)
The Conversation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola (Lions Gate, 2010)
Ran, directed by Akira Kurosawa (Lions Gate, 2010)

In 1927 a film actor on set ad-libbed the line “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothing yet.” Amazingly, audiences watching the completed film in theaters not only saw his lips move but actually heard the words he spoke. The actor was Al Jolson, the movie was The Jazz Singer, and the era of the talkies had begun. That is the story everyone knows, and if it oversimplifies the facts (there had been several earlier attempts to synchronize recordings with onscreen images), it at least gives the history of sound a nicely dramatic starting point. For eighty-five years we have all been privileged to hear things at the movies, beginning with some remarkably expressive effects dreamed up by pioneering sound record-ists and continuing on to the present day, when synchronized sound has become as complex and manipulatable an element of filmmaking as photography or editing. For all of us jaded listeners to soundtracks the trick is not just to savor the complexity but to recover some of the excitement those audiences must have felt in 1927, and which filmmakers themselves have often felt. “The most exciting moment . . . is when I add the sound,” Akira Kurosawa once said. “At this moment, I tremble.”

The Jazz Singer’s director Alan Crosland alternates old-fashioned silent sequences (and intertitles) with Vitaphone-recorded numbers by Jolson, and that hybrid construction, as well as the sentimentality spread like treacle over the plot, makes the film of historical rather than aesthetic interest. Luckily for the future of sound films, there were at least two directors in the late 1920s fully capable of turning sound to impressive aesthetic purpose: Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Lang’s early sound masterpiece is M. Released in 1931, only four years into the new era, the picture already shows an impressive mastery of the varieties of film sound: dialogue in person or on the telephone, the clamor of a mob, a single scream puncturing the night, steps echoing on lonely streets or [End Page 564] coming up tenement staircases, the eerie whistling of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by a child-murderer tormentedly following his prey—sometimes Lang reveals the murderer’s presence only by the whistling, without showing him. The story is of pursuit, identification (the letter M, for Mörder, “murderer,” is eventually chalked on the murderer’s back), capture, and summary justice, with Peter Lorre as the killer sought not just by the police but also by the criminal underworld, whose normal rackets have been disrupted by a city-wide manhunt. Lang’s film has many interests, including a Brechtian fascination with lowlife and a Brechtian determination to turn ordinary morality on its head; the murderer’s kangaroo-court trial by the underworld is a savage parody, and perhaps an indictment, of justice as usually practiced. But the film cares deeply about the victims and their families, too, furnishing us with two of the most heartrending images of the loss of a child ever photographed— an abandoned toy ball rolling to a stop in the grass, a helium-filled balloon first caught on telephone lines, then rising and disappearing into the sky. Lang shows a mother preparing the midday soup for her schoolgirl daughter, then anxiously waiting, going out to the landing to look, and calling out her name, Elsie. As the camera tracks outward to the scene of the crime, the calls grow fainter and fainter, more and more desolating. From the start, this director seems to have known that one way to make a sound register is to...

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