Question: Was 1929's The Jazz Singer really the first movie with sound? Answer: "First" is always a dangerous word: It needs a lot of qualifiers. By consensus, The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length "talkie," though only about a quarter of the film had dialogue or musical sequences that were integral to the plot (as opposed to a musical score that accompanies the action). It was not the first feature film with synchronized sound; that's generally acknowledged to have been the John Barrymore picture Don Juan (1926), which had both a synchronized score and sound effects, but no dialogue. And The Jazz Singer certainly wasn't the first film with dialogue throughout — that credit generally goes to the gangster movie Lights of
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