June 25, 2025: Sound in Film: Mid-Century Evolutions

[100 years ago this week, the brothers Harry and Sam Warner struck a deal with Bell Labs to use their innovative Vitaphone technology in the production of the first sound films for Warner Brothers. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for talking pictures!]

On two specific films and one genre that reflect the changing mid-century landscape of cinematic sounds.

1)      King Kong (1933): Just a half-dozen years after those first true “talkies” about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, pioneering percussionist and sound designer Murray Spivack was faced with a more significant challenge: producing the noises for the titular monster, along with his fellow prehistoric creatures, in King Kong. As that second hyperlinked article traces, Spivack went to great lengths to record various animal noises and other sound effects, and the results were truly groundbreaking; much of Kong looks and feels as dated as you’d expect nearly a century later, but the sound effects remain impressive to this day. And when we remember that Warner Brothers had purchased Vitaphone less than a decade before, Spivack’s successes become even more impressive still.

2)      World War II Newsreels: I’m not going to pretend I have a lot more to add to that excellent hyperlinked 2014 European Journal of Media Studies article from (then-) PhD candidate Masha Shpolberg. Nor do I want to suggest (no more than Shpolberg does) that we should emphasize a topic like film sounds when it comes to the era and the horrors of the Second World War. But the question of how the evolving cultural medium of film brought those horrors to audiences far from combat is a really interesting one, and Shpolberg makes a great case that newsreels did so through a particularly striking set of sound elements.

3)      Singing in the Rain (1952): I don’t know exactly when the first films that we could call truly nostalgic for the early days of Hollywood began to be released, but I like the symbolism of the very reflective and metatextual Singing in the Rain coming out exactly 25 years after the release of The Jazz Singer. But while Singing represented Hollywood’s earlier days in its content, I agree with this post from film studies student Gordon Taylor that this early 1950s film uses sound in “incredible” ways that reflect how far the industry had come in that quarter-century since Al Jolson’s famous line. Indeed, while of course there have been further evolutions in the 75 years since Singing, I would venture to argue that much of the modern age of cinematic sound can be found by the 1950s.  

Next film sound studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Examples of sound in film you’d highlight?