1920s - Part 2
Year
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Event and Significance
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1926
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In New York, Warner Brothers debuted Don Juan, the first Vitaphone film (developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1926) and the first publically-shown 'talkie' with synchronized sound effects and music (but no dialogue) - starring John Barrymore. It was the first mainstream film that replaced the traditional use of a live orchestra or organ for the soundtrack (a recorded musical score of the New York Philharmonic), and successfully coordinated audio sound on a recorded disc synchronized to play in conjunction with a projected motion picture.
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1926
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Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's classic landmark film Potemkin (1925) (aka Battleship Potemkin or Bronenosets Potyomkin) opened in the US (in New York City in December).
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1926
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The early death of 31 year-old silent screen star and idol Rudolph Valentino, noted for 14 films (including The Sheik (1921) and the sequel The Son of the Sheik (1926)) in a short seven-year career, caused a frenzy among his fans during his New York funeral.
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1926
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The oldest surviving feature-length animated film (with silhouette animation techniques and color tinting), The Adventures of Prince Achmed (aka Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed), was released in Germany.
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1926, 1928
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Flesh and the Devil marked the start of the famous (on and off-screen) romance of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert during Hollywood's Golden Age. The film reportedly had love scenes with the first-ever horizontal-position kiss in American film, and the first Hollywood film with an open-mouthed French kiss between the two stars - who were obviously in love in real-life.
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1926
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Actor-producer-star Douglas Fairbanks' ultimate pirate film (silent), The Black Pirate, was historically significant - the adventure swashbuckler was the first full-length blockbuster color film. (The two-color process was first introduced in The Toll of the Sea (1922) - see above, and in some sequences of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) - also, see above.) It boasted the use of an early experimental Technicolor (two-color) process, although it was also filmed in black and white.
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1926
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A newer and better recording system for putting synchronized sound-on-film called Movietone was developed by Theodore W. Case and Earl I. Sponable for William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation. In this system, the sound track was placed onto the actual film next to the picture frames, rather than on a separate synchronized disc as in the Vitaphone system.
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1927
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Fox released They're Coming to Get Me, a five-minute black and white short that was the first 'talkie' using the Movietone system. The first feature film released using the Fox Movietone system was Sunrise (1927), directed by F. W. Murnau -- the first professionally-produced feature film with an actual soundtrack.
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1927
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The effective end of the silent era of films came when Warner Brothers produced and debuted The Jazz Singer, the first widely-screened feature-length talkie or movie with dialogue. The musical, starring popular vaudevillian Al Jolson, had accompanying audio (with a sound-on-disc technology) which consisted of a few songs by Jolson and a few lines of synchronized dialogue. In his nightclub act in the film, Jolson presented the movie's first spoken ad-libbed words: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The film had about 350 spontaneously ad-libbed words.
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1927
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Fox's Movietone newsreel, the first sound news film, was produced. The first recording of a news event was the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh's plane from New York on May 20, 1927 on his historic flight across the Atlantic to Paris, the inspiration to create Movietone News.
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1927
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At the height of his career during the decade of the 20s, comedian Buster Keaton (who equally rivaled silent comic director/star Charlie Chaplin), known as "The Great Stone Face" made many short films and twelve feature films, including his timeless masterpiece The General. His distinctive films were noted for their trademark wit, satire, acrobatic agility and stunt-work, and fantasy. Other well-known works at this time included Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).
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1927
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Director Abel Gance's celebrated epic film Napoleon experimented with wide-screen and multi-screen effects, used rapid-fire editing (influenced by Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925)), free-wheeling camera movement (influenced by Murnau), and a unique multi-projector system. It was the precursor to the wide-screen Cinerama process that debuted in 1952.
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1927
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Director Fritz Lang's classic dystopian vision of the future, the expressionistic Metropolis exploited massive sets and lavish set design, clever special effects, stylistic shadowing, oblique camera angles and labryinths, and physical effects like realistic miniatures and hydraulically-produced flooding. It was considered a costly box-office disaster at the time and its notorious German producer, the UFA (Universumfilm Aktiengesellschaft) had to be bailed out by U.S. interests. Brigitte Helm served as the film's real Maria (an oppressed working girl) and as the evil robotic doppelganger of herself - cinematic history's first android or robot.
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1927
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was founded. Its president was Douglas Fairbanks, and its first awards ceremony was held in 1929, to honor films in 1927 and 1928.
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1927
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Motion picture film became standardized at 24 fps.
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1927
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The Hays Office issued a memorandum, "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," a code of decency telling the studios eleven taboos or things to avoid in the "Don'ts" section (and twenty-six items in the "Be Carefuls" section), including profanity, 'licentious or suggestive nudity,' illegal traffic in drugs, any inference of sex perversion, white slavery, miscegenation, sex hygiene and venereal diseases, scenes of actual childbirth, children's sex organs, ridicule of the clergy, and willful offense to any nation, race or creed.
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1927
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Grauman's Chinese Theater opened in Hollywood, California, famed for hand and footprints of various film stars and celebrities.
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1927
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All-American half-back football star Johnny Mack Brown, a future star of B-westerns for over two decades, signed a contract with MGM, thereby becoming the first sports star to sustain a career in motion pictures.
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1927
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Paramount's film titled It opened, with an early appearance by Gary Cooper and starlet Clara Bow as a lingerie salesgirl, who soon became known as the "It Girl". "IT" referred to sex appeal. She had already been dubbed "The Brooklyn Bonfire" and "The Hottest Jazz Baby in Films." The film was also noted as having the earliest known use of a zoom lens in a US feature film, in its opening shot.
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1928
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RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures, evolving originally from the Mutual Film Corporation (1912), was created in the merger of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the Film Booking Office (FBO) and Keith-Albee-Orpheum, a major Vaudeville corporation. It was established as a subsidiary of RCA and joined the ranks of the major Hollywood studios.
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1928
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The first Mickey Mouse film, Plane Crazy, was debuted on May 15, 1928. Walt Disney also introduced the first popular animated cartoons with synchronized sound later in this year: Steamboat Willie (on July 29, 1928, in limited release) and Galloping Gaucho (on August 2, 1928). Steamboat Willie - Mickey's first sound cartoon, was then re-released on November 18, 1928 with sound and premiered at the 79th Street Colony Theatre in New York - it was the first cartoon with post-produced synchronized soundtrack (of music, dialogue, and sound effects) and was considered Mickey Mouse's screen debut performance and birthdate. It was the first sound cartoon that was a major hit. The character of Mickey Mouse was modified from Disney's earlier character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
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1928
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The gangster melodrama The Lights of New York was released by Warner Brothers as the first 100% all-talking feature film. This first Warner Bros. gangster film was unexpectedly successful, grossing over $2 million.
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1928
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Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's startling and influential The Passion of Joan of Arc used minimal sets, extremely oblique and other unusual camera angles, and excruciatingly huge close-ups to create a virtually new visual language soulfully expressive of the martyr's (Maria Falconetti) suffering psychology.
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1928
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Paramount became the first studio to announce that it would only produce "talkies."
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1928
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Warners' follow-up film and melodramatic musical, The Singing Fool, was released in both sound and silent versions. It contained the first hit song from a talking movie, Al Jolson's performance of Sonny Boy.
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1928
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Director Germaine Dulac released the classic The Seashell and the Clergyman) (aka La Coquille et le clergyman, Fr.), the first surrealist film, although many have claimed Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Luis Bunuel (and Salvador Dali) a year later was the first. The latter film, filled with irrational and shocking images, opened with the infamous scene of the slashing of a woman's eyeball with a razor blade.
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1929
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The first Academy Awards were announced and awarded during a ceremony, with Paramount's Wings (1927) winning Best Picture (based on production). It was the only silent film to win an Oscar for Best Picture. A second 'Best Picture' category for artistic merit (a category dropped the next year), was awarded to Sunrise (1927). Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor were the first Best Actor and Best Actress winners - for multiple films.
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1929
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Actress Mary Pickford was the first performer to conduct a marketing campaign for an Academy Award, in the second year of its offering, by inviting all of the judges to her home for tea at her 22-room Pickfair mansion -- her ploy worked and she actually won the Best Actress honor (awarded in 1930) for her overly-emotive performance in her first talkie, the melodramatic Coquette (1928/29). Pickford and Fairbanks also starred together in the box-office flop The Taming of the Shrew - a misguided effort to bolster their stardom.
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1929
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Hollywood released its first original (backstage) musical. It was MGM's first all-talking picture The Broadway Melody - a Best Picture Academy Award winner and the first musical to spawn a series of Broadway Melody sequels that stretched out to 1940 (the final film starred Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell). The musical film genre was born with the coming of sound films.
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1929
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In Old Arizona was released -- the first full-length talkie film to be shot outdoors and not in a studio.
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1929
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Director Erich von Stroheim's last silent film Queen Kelly, starring Gloria Swanson, (partial footage seen in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), also starring Swanson and von Stroheim), was not finished due to its expensive and elaborate production, and disagreements between Swanson and the director. Producers also balked at the idea of completing it - when the demand was increasing for sound films.
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1929
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The 1925 musical Cocoanuts was made into a film with the Marx Brothers -- their first film, shot at Paramount's Astoria Studios on Long Island.
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1929
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The first full-length, modern sound ("First 100% Natural Color, Talking, Singing, Dancing Picture") motion picture produced entirely in color (two-strip Technicolor), director Alan Crosland's musical On With the Show, premiered in New York City on May 28, 1929. [Note: Previously, The Cavalier (1928), technically the first feature-length sound film completely in Technicolor, had only music and sound effects with silent title cards.] The second Technicolor 'talkie' film was Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), also from Warner Bros.
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1929
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The first important, feature-length sound documentary was the German film, Melodie der Welt (aka Melody of the World).
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1929
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George Eastman demonstrated his first movie in Technicolor in Rochester, NY.
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1929
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MGM's and director King Vidor's all-black musical Hallelujah!, shot on location, introduced post-synchronization to film-making. It was also the first sound-era film with an all-black cast to be produced by a major studio. The action was originally shot without sound, which was later added in the studio as a separately recorded sound track containing both naturalistic and impressionistic effects.
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1929
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The enthusiastic public demanded to see more movies with sound. Theaters rushed to install sound equipment. Movie attendance increased to 110 million, almost double the movie attendance in 1927. The independent studios couldn't compete as successfully with the four major studios (Fox, MGM, Paramount, and Warners) in the production of sound films.
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1929
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Walt Disney Productions was formed.
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1929
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Mickey Mouse's first words were spoken in his ninth cartoon short The Karnival Kid (1929) when he said the words: "Hot dogs!" [Walt's voice was used for Mickey.]
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1929
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Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail was his first sound film (and the UK's first full-length talking picture) -- and featured one of his earliest cameo appearances - a custom that would become a regular feature of his films (and the films of many others).
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1929
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Soviet director Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera - a quintessential experimental, avante-garde film and an excellent example of a "city symphony" documentary, was regarded as "pure" visual cinema. Its views of Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and of Soviet workers and machines contained radical hyper-editing techniques, special visual effects, wild juxtapositions of images, and double exposures.
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1929
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Rouben Mamoulian's musical drama Applause, one of the earliest Hollywood musicals during the first full year of sound pictures, was a liberating, innovative breakthrough film at a time of 'static' and stultified film-making with bulky immobile cameras on sound stages. He introduced revolutionary camera techniques (including rhythmically moving and inventive shots, and the use of two cameras at the same time) and experiments with sound (use of overlapping or interlacing soundtracks, sound cues, auditory montages, and background noise).
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1929
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Dorothy Arzner directed The Wild Party - it was 24 year-old star Clara Bow's ("Hollywood's Whoopie Girl") first talkie -- a tale about "Jazz Age" youth in a collegiate picture that was exceedingly popular at the time. In the film, she played the part of a wild and sexy student who became involved with one of her young professors (Fredric March) at Winston College for Women. Clara Bow's sound career as an actress was soon doomed.
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By the end of the decade
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The film careers of many silent film stars ended due to their voices being unsuitable for the new medium, or due to the fact that their voices didn't match their public image. Others, however, such as Greta Garbo, and the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy successfully adapted to sound.
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1930s - Part 1
Year
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Event and Significance
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1930s
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The most popular film genres of the time were musicals, gangster films, newspaper movies, westerns, comedies, melodramas and horror movies. Warner Bros. inaugurated the crime-gangster film, with its Little Caesar (1930) (starring Edward G. Robinson as a small-time hood) - the first talkie gangster film, and The Public Enemy (1931) (noted for James Cagney pushing a grapefruit into the face of moll girlfriend Mae Clarke).
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1930s-40s
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This was the era which has been predominantly referred to as "The Golden Age of Hollywood" by film critics and historians, and considered the apex of film history. (Some have extended the time period into the 50s). The "Golden Age" came to a close with the breakup of the studios and declining attendance from challenges brought by shopping centers and television.
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1930
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Public pressure (mainly from the Catholic Church) applied further censorship guidelines and clearly outlined what was acceptable (and unacceptable) in films within the industry. Pre-marital sex, alcoholism, immoral and criminal activity, among other subjects, led to the establishment and adoption of the Motion Picture Production Code. As head of the MPPDA, William Hays established this new code of decency, known in short as the Production Code or Hays Code.
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1930
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The Marx Brothers starred in Animal Crackers - it was the second of many classic Marx Brothers films (their first film was The Cocoanuts (1929), also for Paramount Studios). It was also the last of their films to be taken from one of their stage successes and the last to be filmed on the East Coast on Astoria sound stages before they transferred to Hollywood.
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1930
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Greta Garbo starred in her first talkie, Anna Christie, advertised with the tagline: GARBO TALKS!, and speaking her first line of dialogue with: "Give me a whisky, ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby."
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1930
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The first feature-length prison film was released, MGM's The Big House, starring Wallace Beery in a breakthrough role (following the death of Lon Chaney, Sr. who was scheduled to be the main lead actor).
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1930
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Two ex-Disney animators -- Hugh Harman (1903-1982) and Rudolf Ising (1903-1992), began to make the first cartoons for Warner Bros. They drew the 5-minute pilot film named Bosko The TalkInk Kid (1929) - the first synchronized talking animated short/cartoon (as opposed to a cartoon with a soundtrack), with a little black boy character named Bosko who actually spoke dialogue. The Bosko pilot film was the impetus for the birth of Warners Bros.' Looney Tunes. The black and white Sinkin' in the Bathtub, with Bosko in the starring role, was the earliest talking 'Looney Tune', released on May 30, 1930.
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1930
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The animation sequence (about a safari hunt in Africa by bandleader Paul Whiteman) created by Walter Lantz (the creator of Woody Woodpecker) in The King of Jazz (1930) was the first 2-strip Technicolor animation ever produced. It featured Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
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1930
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A prototype of the squeaky- and baby-voiced cartoon queen Betty Boop (voiced for most of the 30s by Mae Questel) was introduced in a Fleischer Brothers' Bimbo Talkartoon entitled Dizzy Dishes (1930) - with her appearing as a long-eared puppy dog!
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1930
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The movie industry began to dub in the dialogue of films exported to foreign markets.
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1930
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The first daily newspaper for the Hollywood film industry, The Hollywood Reporter, had its debut.
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1930
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British director Alfred Hitchcock's second all-talkie thriller Murder was the first film in which a character's (Sir John Menier, played by Herbert Marshall) thoughts were heard in voice-over.
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1930
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French director René Clair's musical romance Under the Roofs of Paris (aka Sous les toits de Paris, Fr.), was an unexpected musical hit with groundbreaking use of the new technology of sound. It was the director's first sound film.
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1931
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Double features emerged as a way for the unemployed and the middle-class to occupy their time.
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1931
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Howard Hawks' gangster film Scarface used an X motif throughout. The film was specifically targeted by the Production Code for its violence, sexual innuendo, and for its ending (that was re-edited to demonstrate that good ultimately triumphed over evil). The film was also forced to be re-named Scarface: The Shame of the Nation.
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1931
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The first of Universal's series of classic horror films was released: Dracula with Bela Lugosi, and Frankenstein with Boris Karloff.
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1931
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African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux's The Exile was the first feature-length sound film from a black director - it was advertised as the first Black American 'talkie'.
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1931
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The Best Picture-nominated Trader Horn, by director W.S. Van Dyke, was notable as the first non-documentary production to be filmed in Africa. Some of its jungle stock footage was later used for MGM's first Tarzan film with Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932).
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1931
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German director Fritz Lang's influential and suspenseful M was released (Lang's first sound film), starring Peter Lorre in a breakout role as a child serial killer. One of the earliest talkies that effectively used sound, it was also the first serious psychological crime film/melodrama about a serial killer. In the plot, Lang experimented with sound (and the striking pioneering use of leitmotif, to associate a sound with a film character) - a blind balloon salesman (Georg John) heard the killer's haunting, tell-tale whistling of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 before an off-screen killing.
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1931
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According to various sources, the pre-Code film A Free Soul (1931) starring Norma Shearer has a 14-minute, uninterrupted monologue scene played by Best Actor-winning Lionel Barrymore as a defense attorney in a courtroom - it was the longest take in a commercial film, accomplished by using two cameras simultaneously.
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1932
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Disney's short talking film Flowers and Trees was the first in the Silly Symphony series. It premiered in July of 1932 at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. It was also the first animation short to use 3-strip (or three-color) Technicolor (as was Disney's Three Little Pigs (1933)). It won the first Academy Award for Best Short Subject - Cartoon (animation).
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1932
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Rouben Mamoulian's pivotal musical Love Me Tonight shaped the technical language of movie musicals in the sound era, by smoothly integrating the songs into the film's plotline. It also featured the first zoom shot (into a window) and the first asynchronous sound, and also other dazzling special effects such as slow-motion, fast-motion, and split-screens.
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1932
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The film career of 4 year-old child star Shirley Temple (born in 1928), probably the most famous child actress in history, began when she appeared in various shorts (such as the 'Baby Burlesks' series with her first film War Babies (1932)) and in her feature film debut, The Red-Haired Alibi (1932). Fox signed five-year old Shirley to a contract in 1933. She would become one of the biggest box-office stars in the mid to late 1930s (1936-1938).
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1932
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Director Victor Halperin's independent, low-budget horror film White Zombie, was the first 'true' zombie film. It was the first feature-length zombie film - the archetype and model for all subsequent zombie films. It starred Bela Lugosi as hypnotic and sinister Haitian sugar mill owner "Murder" Legendre with zombie slaves, was deliberately made with minimal dialogue, and filmed to be visually atmospheric and expressionistic.
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1932
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Legendary French director Jean Renoir directed Boudu Saved From Drowning (aka Boudu sauvé des eaux, Fr.), a critique of the French bourgeoisie, in its tale of an urban bum (Michel Simon) who was rescued by a bourgeois bookselling gentleman and brought to his apartment. The story served as the basis for Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) with Nick Nolte.
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1932
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MGM's Tarzan, the Ape Man, was the first Tarzan talkie, and also MGM's first Tarzan film (it was the first of six MGM Tarzan films starring Johnny Weissmuller and co-star Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane, stretching from 1932-1942). It was also notable as the only MGM Tarzan film that was based upon the original "Lord of the Jungle" character in the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. This film introduced the chimpanzee Cheeta, and provided the Weissmuller yodel yell (produced by MGM's sound department), although the ape-call originated in a 1929 part-talkie serial (starring Frank Merrill). The star swimmer Weissmuller was chosen for the role, in part, because he was a gold medals winner in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics.
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1933-35
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Warners' producer Leon Schlesinger assembled the 'gods of animation', including Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob Clampett.
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1933
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Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, although minor players, made their debut and danced in their first joint movie together, RKO's Flying Down to Rio. With King Kong, this film saved RKO from bankruptcy. The couple appeared early on in a sensual, show-stopping dance number called "The Carioca" -- the dance required the dancers to touch foreheads while clapsing hands - and then execute a turn without losing forehead contact. Flying Down to Rio was most memorable for the title number, with airplane wing-dancing/walking, skimpily-attired chorus girls atop biplane wings (filmed in an airplane hangar with wind machines and a few planes hanging from the ceiling - enhanced with backdrops of Rio and Malibu Beach). The film was also notable in that the film's sexy star, Dolores Del Rio, was the first major star to wear a two-piece women's bathing suit ever seen onscreen. [Note: a brief scene showed a two-piece bathing "sun-suit" being modeled on a beach in Three on a Match (1932) a year earlier]
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1933
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The classic adventure-action film King Kong, a "Beauty and the Beast" tale, featured the "Scream Queen" Fay Wray, and astonishing stop-motion special effects animation from Willis O'Brien, and ending with the iconic image of Kong atop the Empire State Building. It was one of the first major films to have a life-like (stop-motion) animated central character, alongside live-action. It was the first film heavily promoted and marketed on the radio.
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1933
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One of the first feature-length musical scores written specifically for a US 'talkie' film was Max Steiner's score for RKO's King Kong. It was the first major Hollywood film to have a thematic score rather than background music, recorded using a 46-piece orchestra. After the score was completed, all of the film's sounds were recorded onto three separate tracks, one each for sound effects, dialogue and music. For the first time in film history, RKO's sound department head Murray Spivak made a groundbreaking sound design decision - he pitched the effects to match the score, so they wouldn't be overwhelming and so they would complement each other.
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1933
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The backstage drama/musical 42nd Street, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, revitalized the over-exposed musical and saved Warners from bankruptcy. The film established Berkeley as the most talented choreographer of musical production numbers.
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1933
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Two other Busby Berkeley productions made at the same time, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade, launched dance and musical extravaganzas with creative camera angles and innovative staging. From 1933-1937, Berkeley created musical numbers for almost every great musical produced by Warner Bros.
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1933
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The notorious Czechoslovakian film Ecstasy (1933) (aka Extase) with Hedwig Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr) contained nudity and sexual situations (intercourse and simulated orgasm). It was the first theatrically-released film (non-pornographic) in which the sex act was depicted (although off-screen). It was unusual at its time for depicting obvious female sexual pleasure (ecstasy) during orgasm (simulated) from the effects of oral sex. The film was, arguably, the first to depict female orgasm on-screen.
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1933
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Jean Vigo directed the influential social commentary film Zero For Conduct (aka Zéro de conduite, Fr.), about a full-scale rebellion in a French boys' boarding school against tyrannical authority, a film that was banned by censors until the late 1940s. The film closely resembles Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968).
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1933
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The Payne Fund study, Our Movie-Made Children, argued that films shaped children's behavior.
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1933
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Theaters began to open refreshment stands.
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1933
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The Screen Writers Guild was established.
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1933
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The first drive-in movie theater was opened on June 6th at the Camden Drive-In in Pennsauken, New Jersey with the showing of the second-run film Wives Beware (1932), starring Adolphe Menjou. It was known simply as "Drive-In Theater" although the actual name was the "Automobile Movie Theater." Admission was 25 cents for each car and an additional 25 cents for each person.
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1933
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The films of bawdy and buxom Mae West, such as She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel, raised the criticism of various groups over her racy, double-entendre-laden dialogue and her costumes, and hastened the move toward greater censorship the following year. The other sex goddess known as the "original blonde bombshell" -- the sensual Jean Harlow, also caused Hollywood to raise its eyebrows, especially after her appearances in Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930), Platinum Blonde (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Red Dust (1932), Red Headed Woman (1932), and Dinner at Eight (1933).
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1933
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Deluge was the first 'end of the world' big-budget disaster/science-fiction film (from RKO) in the sound era, featuring revolutionary visual effects to depict and simulate turbulent tidal waves hitting New York City.
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