Sound film
The primary steps in the commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid- to late 1920s. At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as "talking pictures", or "talkies", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was "The Jazz Singer", released in October 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone, which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures.
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.")