September

Returning from Hollywood in February, the producer-director Herbert Wilcox proclaimed that talkies were now the essential American entertainment. It was an example that British studios would ignore at their peril, and a rush to sound, rather than a persistence with silence, ensued with remarkable rapidity. The impact of Hollywood’s The Jazz Singer when shown in London and Glasgow in 1928 spurred domestic cinemas to install the American Western Electric System. By March 1929 the Elstree studios of British International Pictures (BIP) were made ready for the talking, and singing, and dancing, picture. The impact of sound was particularly relevant to musical film. Drama and comedy had managed well enough on screen without it, but the inability to incorporate sound had, understandably, somewhat limited the making of the musical film.

From the silent years of the 1920s through to their filmic decline in the 1950s, operetta and what might be called ‘classical’ music played their part in British pictures. Ivor Novello bookends the period, being the star of one of the very first musical films and the creator and composer of one of the last. The absurdity of attempting a silent film version of a nineteenth-century opera may not have occurred to those responsible for the 1922 The Bohemian Girl. It is likely that Novello was cast as the gypsy Thaddeus – a Polish officer in disguise – purely on his good looks; there is certainly an argument for Novello being the Welsh answer to Rudolph Valentino. On this occasion, the New York Tribune reported that ‘Ivor Novello seems bored with the whole thing, though there has never been such a gorgeous profile on the screen since Francis X. Bushman’s.’

With no distracting dialogue, audiences were at least free to feast on that profile. Patrons arriving late at showings, having no hints of what the story might be about, must have been even more puzzled than those who would later treat the talkies with equal disrespect, only leaving the cinema when they realised ‘This is where I came in’.