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.
History of film
This awkward period was fairly short-lived. 1929 was a watershed year: William Wellman with "Chinatown Nights" and "The Man I Love", Rouben Mamoulian with "Applause", Alfred Hitchcock with "Blackmail" (Britain's first sound feature), were among the directors to bring greater fluidity to talkies and experiment with the expressive use of sound (Eyman, 1997). In this, they both benefited from, and pushed further, technical advances in microphones and cameras, and capabilities for editing and post-synchronizing sound (rather than recording all sound directly at the time of filming).
Sound films emphasized black history and benefited different genres more so than silents did. Most obviously, the musical film was born; the first classic-style Hollywood musical was "The Broadway Melody" (1929) and the form would find its first major creator in choreographer/director Busby Berkeley ("42nd Street", 1933, "Dames", 1934). In France, avant-garde director René Clair made surreal use of song and dance in comedies like "Under the Roofs of Paris" (1930) and "Le Million" (1931). Universal Pictures begin releasing gothic horror films like "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" (both 1931). In 1933, RKO Pictures released Merian C. Cooper's classic "giant monster" film "King Kong". The trend thrived best in India, where the influence of the country's traditional song-and-dance drama made the musical the basic form of most sound films (Cook, 1990); virtually unnoticed by the Western world for decades, this Indian popular cinema would nevertheless become the world's most prolific. ("See also Bollywood.")