The Early Comedies of the Sound Era

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If the 1920s heralded and developed many new artistic currents in France, the 1930s were not a revolutionary period per se on a cinematic level, but rather a decade of transition confirming the advent of sound and its impact on mass audiences in France. The sudden venue of the talkies with The Jazz Singer in 1927 and the first French talkie a couple of years later created a disruption and ultimately a revolution in the world of music and its relation to the seventh art. In France, more than a year later, Aubert Franco-Film Gaumont produced Tony Lekain and Gaston Ravel’s Le collier de la reine (The Queen’s Neckless, 1929). Intended to be a silent movie, it included a recorded music soundtrack and a dialogue scene, which was the first scene with dialogue in a French long feature film. A few days later Andre Hugon’s Les trois masques (The Three Masks, 1929), produced by Pathe-Natan, was released and is to this date considered the first “talkie” in French film history (though shot near London due to the better equipment available at Elstree Studios). This newfound situation, emblematically represented by the end of an era giving birth to a new one, can be best epitomized by the popular song on Parisian nostalgia “Ou est-il donc?” rendered by national icon Frehel in Julien Duvivier’s Pepe le Moko (1936). The song evoked a certain melancholy about the popular district of Montmartre, which was already undergoing an identity transformation, starting in the famous “annees folles” (the Golden 1920s in English).