The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution.

by Scott Eyman. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 413 pp. Hardcover: $30.00.

Any history of the early sound era in American cinema labors under the shadow of Singin' in the Rain (1952), the Hollywood on Hollywood musical that etched in granite the enduring cliches of the transition to talkies: actresses with voices that could curdle milk scurrying off to elocution lessons; microphones concealed in vases and bodices; and an entire industry in blind panic as the public, damn them, turned their back on the aura of a mature art for a squawking, juvenile novelty.

Scott Eyman works hard to avoid printing the legend, but in his informative study of the birth of the sound moving image he tells a backstory mainly in tune with the Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen shooting script - musicians cast aside, actors brought low, sound technicians brought high, and a dizzying, all-transforming esthetic-technical revolution that saw even Rin Tin Tin getting his walking papers (an interoffice memo at Warner Bros. explained that "the making of animal pictures" did not fit into the all-talking policy because "very obviously, of course, dogs don't talk.") An anecdotal and absorbing study, Eyman's book focuses on the four year span of time during which sound went from being a wondrous new sense of the cinema to full incorporation into the grammar of film. It is an oft-told but still poignant tale of a great medium rendered obsolete by technology in a matter, seemingly, of days.

Like all good cultural history, The Speed of Sound struggles to reconstruct the imaginative horizons of another time, another place. "With few exceptions, we see the early talkies as grotesque curios," observes Eyman, before calling to mind the historical-media moment "beginning in 1926, with the first Vitaphone films, [when] audiences saw them as miracles," the spectatorial equivalent of "what the Lumiere films had been for audiences of 1895."

That emotional payoff resulted from a massive industrial and scientific process that Eyman renders comprehensible to readers for whom Chronophone, Cameraphone, and Synchroscope are low-frequency nouns. He diligently surveys the complexities, technical and corporate, of the early experiments in sound and explains the relevant patent wars and research breakthroughs. He also conjures the sheer complexity of synchronizing film in production and, especially, in exhibition, where projectionists tangled with sound-on-disk machines like jugglers madly twirling plates in the air, with any miscue ruining synchronization. Fortunately, even when the slogging through Western Electric R&D memos gets thick, Eyman is a witty, lucid, and synoptic writer. Consider his thumbnail sketch of William Fox: "A driven man, with all the feral belligerence one might expect to find in a success who begins in lowly circumstances."

For the creators if not for their patrons, the magical gift of speech was one they were quite willing to throw back to the gods. Of course The Jazz Singer (1927) is the thunderclap that presaged the deluge, but Eyman knows that sound and film had been linked since the birth of the medium in one form or another. The reason the other studios were so unwilling to follow the sound pioneers at Warner Bros. and Fox into the breach wasn't that they were dumb ostriches oblivious to the tides of history, but that they had been badly burned in the past. Almost from the turn of the century, sound had been heard from the screen and found wanting. It was a superfluous additive, a gimmick whose grating screech disrupted a full immersion into the silent screen. The response of early moviegoers to the less-than-dulcet tones of the results is captured in Eyman's remark on the first Kinetophone recordings in 1913: "What finally makes the invention insupportable is the fact that [the performers are] all virtually screaming their lines. Initially funny, it's wearing after five minutes; an entire program of it would be maddening."

When sound finally did arrive, the consequences for the art of cinema were disastrous at first. For every sparkling innovation like Rouben Mamoulian's Applause (1929) or the "startling good" Gentlemen of the Press (1929), dozens of excruciatingly bad melodramas and musicals survive only as "landlocked, paralytic antiques." Making the critical sacrifice, Eyman has seen, heard, and endured an exhaustive range of Vitaphone shorts and early sound feature films, a catalogue of dreck and ephemera he describes with wit and humor. "Warners' stupefying Golden Dawn (1930)," is "the only extant musical about the slave trade in German East Africa," and Madame X (1929) is "a silent film partisan's worst nightmare," with "the hapless Lionel Barrymore directing yet again despite his lack of vocational ability." Bred in radio and temperamentally tactless, the sound men who rushed in to rewire the motion picture industry only made matters worse. They come off as the computer nerds of their generation, martinets who operated in an atmosphere of "medieval necromancy," as director William De Mille put it.

Ironically, the last days of silent cinema were especially rich in artistically daring and intellectually challenging works, notably F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), both of which the author interprets with felt appreciation. Curiously, however, Eyman says almost nothing about the impact of sound on the great silent downs and the shift in the art of screen comedy from physical agility to verbal dexterity.

For all its virtues, however, Eyman's work may be too anecdotal and opinionated to be embraced by scholars and too detailed and serious to score with the general reader. Film historians will be distressed by the lack of footnotes to trace the author's tracks. Moreover, given the present intensity of interest in the embryonic days of film in the academy, not least the early sound era, the author's assertion that "there is no aspect of film history that has been so slighted" overstates the case baldly. The remark that "you will look in vain for the names of Theodore Case and Earl Sponable" in film history texts will come as a surprise to historians of film sound such as John Belton and Rick Altman. Admittedly, too, some of the anecdotal material, such as the familiar tales of the decline of John Gilbert and the terror of the voice test ("Victor McLaglen has voice!"), will be familiar to anyone on intimate terms with a Brownlow and Gill documentary.

That some of the material has been trodden over before does not mean that another trip is without merit. Capturing both the buzz of the new and the poignancy of the old on the way out, Eyman tells the story straight and lucidly, avoiding the incipient nostalgia that seeps into so many recollections of the silent to sound era, the seductive "spellbound in darkness" lament for a bygone time. The singular virtue of The Speed of Sound is that it appreciates both the glory of the silent cinema working at the peak of its powers, with no need at all for an extension of its senses, and the excitement of a new technology being born and obliterating the old art, with no regrets and an eye - and now an ear - to the motion picture future.

Thomas Doherty

Thomas Doherty is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University