talking picture

Crawford survived the transition to talking pictures—one of the few silent stars to do so—and proved herself as a star and an actress amid the all-star scrum of 1932’s “Grand Hotel.”

The first talking picture, “The Jazz Singer,” starred Al Jolson as a cantor’s son who wanted to go pop.

His father, a singer and dancer, and his mother, a former Ziegfeld Girl, had moved from New York to work in talking pictures but returned to Broadway as the Great Depression settled in.

When I was small, and spent as much time as allowable in front of a TV set, the history of talking pictures was only four or five decades old; you could take it in whole.

Godard responded: "This is what happens when silent movies meet talking pictures."