A little-known Scottish film may have beaten Hollywood to the first feature-length talking picture by a full year. Till the Bells Ring, written and made by Glasgow playwright Graham Moffat, premiered in Edinburgh in October 1926, 12 months before Hollywood's The Jazz Singer.
A pioneering sound film
Unlike many early sound films, Till the Bells Ring did not feature a short musical performance or novelty act. Instead, it was a 45-minute comedy, written and performed in Scots, with synchronised speech and sound throughout.
Moffat, who ran his own touring company, decided in 1925 to turn his debut play into a film. He approached De Forest Phonofilm, a London-based company that had developed a system for recording sound directly onto film. The technology was still new and had mostly been used for short recordings of music hall.
Ambitious production
Moffat had something much more ambitious in mind for the technology. He wanted to put his entire company on film and have the characters actually speak throughout the story.
The film featured six cast members, including his wife Margaret, an actress and one of the first suffragettes arrested in Scotland, and their daughter Winifred. Even the family dog had a role in the film.
Premiere and press reaction
Till the Bells Ring premiered at Poole's Synod Hall in Edinburgh on October 11, 1926, and audiences were treated to something that was a complete novelty. They watched and heard characters on a screen speaking in broad Scots, while their voices synchronised with their movements - a first for film.
The Scottish press reacted enthusiastically. The Scotsman wrote: "The movement and sound are perfectly synchronised and after the listener becomes accustomed to the phenomenon of screen figures appearing to talk and the ear attunes itself to the sounds there is no difficulty in catching the spoken words."
The Edinburgh Evening News dubbed the "broad Scots dialogue" so convincing that it resembled a stage performance, noting: "Even America has never attempted such a work."
Rediscovery and legacy
Yet Till the Bells Ring was largely forgotten over the years. For decades, The Jazz Singer, released in New York in 1927, was celebrated as the first feature-length film with synchronised dialogue. The Scottish film had effectively disappeared from that part of cinema history, partly because a cataloguing error dated it to 1933.
The film was rediscovered by historian and film enthusiast Marc David Jacobs while he was researching the people behind Britain's early sound films. He found documentary evidence showing that Moffat's film had actually been made and screened in 1926.
Today, the only known nitrate print of Till the Bells Ring is held by the British Film Institute National Archive. While Hollywood's The Jazz Singer may be the film everyone remembers, the story of the talking picture could have started somewhere much closer to home: in Scotland.
