March 3, 1997
Eyman's history of the four-year transition from silent to sound film reads at times like two books expertly cut and fitted together: a solidly researched, always interesting narrative of the decline of the silent era intercut with the crazy, entertaining story of the rise of talkies. No doubt the madcap nature of the age he chronicles explains the jumps from art to ballyhoo, from individual genius to shameless profiteering. Eyman's style at times parallels his hybrid subject, oddly combining the authoritative tone of the film historian with that of a Hollywood press agent (Old San Francisco is a "story... with Yellow Peril, imperiled virgins, and a deus ex machina from deep left field..."). However, the stories of sound-pioneering moguls William Fox and the Warner brothers unify the narrative, as does Eyman's convincing claim that the myth of the overnight sensation of sound and its evolution from silents masks a longer, more complex coexistence. Perceptive discussions of classics such as F.W. Murnau's Sunrise and King Vidor's The Crowd give way in later chapters to a greater focus on such curiosities as "goat-gland" movies (silent films with sound scenes implanted in them for box-office rejuvenation) and poignant accounts of silent actors (especially John Gilbert) who were lost in the transition to sound. Eyman effectively recounts the sorrow of observers such as writer Robert E. Sherwood who shrewdly saw that the crude novelty of sound would initially regress a medium that had only recently laid claim to being an art form. The interpretive judgments are so good that the book's virtual omission of silent comedy (only two pages of Harold Lloyd) puzzles and disappoints. An analysis of the very different silent-to-sound careers of Chaplin and Keaton would have given further breadth and balance to an instructive book.
February 1, 1997
The transition from silent film to sound has been covered in many histories of Hollywood but nowhere so thoroughly and delightfully as here. The author of such biographies as Mary Pickford: America's Sweetheart (LJ 2/1/90), Eyman combines a historian's zeal for detail and context with a storyteller's talent for the perfect illustrative anecdote. The author deftly juggles a number of stories, including film-by-film accounts of key transition directors King Vidor and F.W. Murnau. He also manages to describe the technical aspects of his story without bogging down in the kind of jargon that would put a lay reader to sleep. A remarkable book that belongs in every film history collection.--Thomas Wiener, "Satellite DIRECT
February 15, 1997
Cinema's transition from silents to talkies has inspired many myths, but Eyman maintains that no aspect of film history has been so slighted. Al Jolson's explosive performance in "The Jazz Singer" (1927, and silent with a few sound sequences) is usually credited with ushering in sound, but it was the all-talking "Lights of New York" (1928)--"a dreadful little movie," Eyman says--that threw the industry into a tizzy (primitive synchronized sound devices date from as far back as 1905). Eyman captures the tenor and the terror of the times, as panicked studio executives and theater owners made the investment in sound, huge stars underwent humiliating voice auditions (fewer careers were shattered than legend claims), and technicians searched for ways to conceal microphones and otherwise adjust to the technology. The transformation was total, from the escalation in importance of writers to the appearance of food in theaters. A fascinating account of what Eyman terms "the destruction of one great art and the creation of another." ((Reviewed February 15, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)