A part-talkie film is a film which was made during the early sound era (anywhere from 1927 to 1936), and is partly a silent film and partly a talkie. The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, was the first part-talkie film. It had no more than about fifteen minutes' worth of dialogue and songs, interspersed throughout the film, while the rest of it had no audio. Early sound films were sometimes made this way because silent ones were gradually being ph...
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A part-talkie film is a film which was made during the early sound era (anywhere from 1927 to 1936), and is partly a silent film and partly a talkie. The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, was the first part-talkie film. It had no more than about fifteen minutes' worth of dialogue and songs, interspersed throughout the film, while the rest of it had no audio. Early sound films were sometimes made this way because silent ones were gradually being phased out, and producers felt that sequences with sound would improve a silent movie's chances at the box office. For example, Douglas Fairbanks' last swashbuckler, The Iron Mask (1929) (based on Dumas's L'homme au masque de fer), was filmed with a sound prologue, in which Fairbanks' speaking voice was heard onscreen for the first time, but the rest of the film was silent.
The first film version of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, also released in 1929, had a few minutes of sound tacked onto what was basically a silent picture....
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