In Hollywood, we get the on-screen debut of Humphrey Bogart, Mutual Film Corporation becomes RKO Pictures, one of the major Hollywood studios, and the first appearance of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse in Plane Crazy. Germaine Dulac directs the first surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, beating Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou by a year. And Carl Theodor Dreyer's influential The Passion of Joan of Arc is released.
The big story in movies however remains the sound revolution. If 1927 saw the pebble called The Jazz Singer thrown into the Tinseltown pond, 1928 is where we feel the ripples. Paramount announces in 1928 it will no longer produce silents. MGM released White Shadows in the South Seas, which (like The Jazz Singer) is part silent and part talkie, and we hear the studio's mascot Leo the Lion roar for the first time. The studios agreed on a technology both to produce movies and to retrofit studios for sound. Warner Brothers produces the first all-talking film. Th list goes on.
Perhaps the biggest impact of sound was the ascension of Walt Disney thanks to Mickey Mouse. After losing the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to Universal, Disney created Mickey. The mouse's second feature, Steamboat Willie was released in November 1928 as the first cartoon with synchronized sound. Audiences went crazy. Over the next ten years, Disney would build an empire on short films and merchandise, culminating in his blockbuster feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 (we will get there eventually).
Watch list for 1928? I'll be checking in with D.W. Griffith as he nears the end of his directing career with The Battle of the Sexes. I will definitely be rewatching Steamboat Willie. I also have The Passion of Joan of Arc, John Ford's Four Sons and Emil Jannings in The Last Command on tap. And of course Charlie Chaplin is back with The Circus. As always, if you have suggestions feel free to offer them in the comments below.
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