Classical Hollywood cinema
The beginning of the sound era itself is ambiguously defined. To some, it began with "The Jazz Singer", which was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films, as sound was introduced to feature films. To others, the era began in 1929, when the silent age had definitively ended. Most Hollywood pictures from the late 1920s to 1960s adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, and biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films; Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years; Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount Pictures; and director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth Century Fox. Similarly, actors were mostly contract players. Film historians and critics note that it took about a decade for films to adapt to sound and return to the level of artistic quality of the silents, which it did in the late 1930s.
Sound film
On August 23, the modest-sized Austrian film industry came out with a talkie: "G'schichten aus der Steiermark" ("Stories from Styria"), an Eagle Film–Ottoton Film production. On September 30, the first entirely German-made feature-length dramatic talkie, "Das Land ohne Frauen" ("Land Without Women"), premiered. A Tobis Filmkunst production, about one-quarter of the movie contained dialogue, which was strictly segregated from the special effects and music. The response was underwhelming. Sweden's first talkie, "Konstgjorda Svensson" ("Artificial Svensson"), premiered on October 14. Eight days later, Aubert Franco-Film came out with "Le Collier de la reine" ("The Queen's Necklace"), shot at the Épinay studio near Paris. Conceived as a silent film, it was given a Tobis-recorded score and a single talking sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French feature. On October 31, "Les Trois masques" debuted; a Pathé-Natan film, it is generally regarded as the initial French feature talkie, though it was shot, like "Blackmail", at the Elstree studio, just outside London. The production company had contracted with RCA Photophone and Britain then had the nearest facility with the system. The Braunberger-Richebé talkie "La Route est belle", also shot at Elstree, followed a few weeks later.