All Singing! All Talking! All British! Musical Moments in Early British Sound Cinema 1929 to 1932.

British silent cinema transformed to sound in June 1929, slightly ahead of Europe and a year or so behind Hollywood whose popular Al Jolson Musicals The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928) had taken British cinemas by storm. Alfred Hitchcock’s murder story (Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock, UK) was Britain’s first official talkie and like the majority of films that followed in its wake, contained a pivotal musical moment. This article analyses the use of song and music in early British talkies as they sought to forge a new ‘talkie film language’ by combining dialogue, music and plot. It argues that these early musical moments deployed the dramatic potential of synchronised music at pivotal moments in the plot as well as using them to delineate gender and sexuality and signalling differences in class and culture through the representation of musical tastes, styles and motifs. In some cases, music freed the performers from the tyranny of early spoken dialogue, stilted scripts and primitive microphone technology. Importantly, musical interludes also created commercial opportunities from sales of the ‘song-from-the-film’, exploiting links between early talkies and the lucrative domestic gramophone and sheet music markets.