The Jazz Singer (1927)

Why it's here:
This is widely billed as the first talkie and we included it on our list for that reason. Also, the film is extremely iconic and is spoken of almost any time movies are spoken of, especially the musical number with Al Jolson singing "Mammy" at the end. It had to be included.

Specs:
About an hour and a half long, black and white. And, I'm sorry, but this really is not a talkie. It is somewhere in the middle between silent and talkie.

For more info about the transition from Silents to Sound, check out the page devoted to that topic.

Our family's average rating (on a scale of 1-10):

3.5

More about the movie and our reaction to it:
Finally! Woo hoo! And no I'm not excited about a talkie, but rather about the first film that we get to pan! We hated this movie. I suppose it would be fairer to say that most of us hated it. I probably would have tolerated it better, maybe even enjoyed it a bit, if everyone else in my family hadn't been complaining the whole time.

The movie had two major strikes against it: first, though billed as the first "talkie," there was precious little spoken dialog in the film. The film is primarily a silent (with title cards) all the way through. Just a few key scenes were wired for sound, though all the song numbers were. My kids were seriously disappointed that after all these silents and just when they were ready to dive into "real" movies with spoken dialog, that experience was withheld from them.

The second drawback is that the movie just isn't that good -- as a silent or as a sound. It highlights one of the major problems of this transition era: When the whole point of your endeavor is the fact of having "sound!", rather than the telling of a story, the audience gets treated to second rate stories. We've seen such great silents in our festival. The story here couldn't hold a candle to most of them. It was dull and plodding and overly dramatic. My family didn't care much what happened to any of the characters, and by the time Al Jolson sang "Mammy" they had little charity left to spare for that iconic moment in cinema.

If you watch, just make sure you explain to your family first that this isn't a full talkie; then, at least yours won't have to suffer the disappointed expectations that mine did.

Iconic shot: