Scotland’s rival to The Jazz Singer: the story behind a groundbreaking British sound film

In 1893, a 27-year-old Glaswegian clerk named Graham Moffat published his first and only novel, a precocious venture into early science fiction. He set What’s the World Coming To? in the far future of April 2003, with its third chapter playing out in what is unmistakably a repertory cinema: the Scenophonographic Theatre, where audiences at a Shakespeare retrospective watch and listen to long-dead actors in Macbeth. What makes the prediction particularly impressive is that Moffat not only foresaw an era where talking films would be commonplace, but did so at a point when even the first silent films had yet to be projected.

Three decades later, he would make his vision a reality, thanks to De Forest Phonofilms, an American company that had branched out to a poky Clapham studio in July 1923. By now one of Scotland’s most popular playwrights, Moffat was also among the company’s earliest investors. But despite their pioneering work in sound-on-film technology, De Forest were far from certain that their future lay in features: in-house production was concentrated on one-reel shorts, while their biggest financial score would come from selling exclusive Phonofilm rights to make the forerunners of party political broadcasts. 

It was Moffat alone who guessed the new medium’s potential for long-form dramatic work, and set about to prove it, hiring the sound studio in December 1925 to make his 44-minute directorial debut, Till the Bells Ring, based on one of his first plays. When the finished film was given its public premiere on the afternoon of 11 October 1926 at Poole’s Synod Hall, in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, it would be a milestone in cultural history: the first time anywhere in the world that a cinema was screening a programme with a main feature that had synchronised dialogue and sound throughout. A full year before The Jazz Singer (1927) usurped its title, the Synod Hall proclaimed Till the Bells Ring to be “The Last Word in Talking Pictures”.

In every technical respect, Moffat’s film was a recognisable template for the thousands of talking pictures that would follow it in the coming decade – and, indeed, century. Not only was it what would soon be referred to as an ‘all-talking’ film (a distinction The Jazz Singer fell far short of) but, crucially, it was feature-length, currently defined as over 40 minutes by both the BFI and AFI, and for that matter the Academy Awards. The only important difference in its presentation was that the supporting picture which accompanied it, Flaming Waters (1925), was silent; no other sound feature existed to double-bill it with.

Despite its historical significance – and the survival of three of its four reels in the BFI National Archive – the film has been variously forgotten or dismissed ever since its first and, so far, only cinema screenings, and unseen since an abortive (and unauthorised) 1933 reissue. Its original reception explains why. When it was first shown privately at London’s Holborn Empire music hall, it met with resounding indifference, partly attributable to a technical fault that rendered a section of the film unintelligible. 

But no less importantly, the capital’s film intelligentsia were as unconvinced about talking features as De Forest themselves, and deemed sound films in general to be little more than an interesting sideshow – ironically, not unlike how some regarded silent cinema a generation earlier. The only truly enthusiastic London review predictably came from an outsider source: a writers’ union in-house publication called The Author, which breathlessly referred to Till the Bells Ring as “really epoch-making”. When that review found its way to The Bioscope, an early British film journal, their film industry insiders merely sneered over the piece’s supposedly incompetent phrasing.

Only the Edinburgh press would celebrate Till the Bells Ring’s true importance as “the first of its kind ever produced”, and something “even America has never attempted”. Tellingly, it was the film’s “broad Scots dialogue” that would prove the new technology’s viability, with the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch describing how a single line had lifted the veil of its initial novelty:

“There is a point where one begins really to appreciate the lines of the piece, and forget the invention which makes them verbal, and that is perhaps where a certain reverend Scots pharisee raises a laugh with his native wit: ‘What wid the Kirk o’ Scotland dae withoot peppermints?’ After this incident one has succumbed to the comedy itself, and no more substantial proof than that could be found for the success of the phonofilms.”

Alas, it was no harder then than it is a century later to ignore a handful of effusive ‘provincial’ reviews. Had he continued his youthful forays into speculative fiction, Moffat may well have envisioned a Britain in which his farsighted effort had been embraced, with Phonofilm recording equipment eagerly installed in every film studio by Hogmanay 1926. The first wave of British talkies would have been rolling off production lines for domestic and international distribution throughout 1927, well before America finally got round to what must now be regarded as the world’s second all-talking feature, Lights of New York (1928), itself only perhaps a dozen minutes longer than Till the Bells Ring.

In reality, it wouldn’t be until 1929, long after the detonation of Hollywood’s talkie bombshell, that Britain’s know-alls would realise they’d been caught short. Producers scurried to American studios to hastily record films like Black Waters, while directors scrabbled to convert their final silent efforts into semi-sound hybrids like Kitty or Blackmail – and all to catch up with where we once quietly led. It could be argued we’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

• The film’s runtime of 44 minutes is based on the film’s physical length, officially recorded in March 1933 as 3,927ft, if projected at 24 frames per second (fps). However, it’s possible the film was intended to be shown at a slightly slower speed, such as 22fps; this would result in a longer runtime of around 48 minutes.

Bryony Dixon, BFI Curator of Silent Film: This 35m nitrate print was made in 1926 at the Clapham studios of the De Forest Phonofilm Company. The system developed by inventor and entrepreneur Lee De Forest in the USA was licensed to theatre owner Isadore Schlesinger (who acquired UK rights and released short films of British music hall acts from September 1926 to May 1929). The company was later known as British Talking Pictures, Limited, then British Sound Film Productions, Limited in September 1928. The system was an early sound-on-film technology – arguably an advance on the sound on disc systems, such as the Vitaphone system used for The Jazz Singer, which required precise synchronisation in projection.

Acquired in 1975 in a collection under the name Mr Holmes, which came via some intervention by archivist Kevin Brownlow, the film was missing reel 2 and labelled Unidentified No. 468. It was identified by a cataloguer, presumably at that time. The 35mm nitrate combined print was in poor condition, which is why it wasn’t duplicated. In analogue days it would be difficult to get such a damaged film through the sprockets of a printing machine. This process would be easier to transfer nowadays with digital scanners. The existing nitrate reels of 2,450ft (approx. 27min) are preserved in the BFI’s master film store.

The issue of duplicating the film for access came up during the five-year project British Silent Film: The Transition to Sound 1927 – 1933, which ran from 2014 to 2018 in a partnership between the BFI and de Monfort University. Budget restraints made this impossible at the time, but it was discussed at the conference and written about by researcher Geoff Brown in the book Silent to Sound – British Cinema in Transition (John Libbey, 2024), which was a major output of that project. The 2015 edition of the British Silent Film Festival, programmed by myself as the BFI’s silent film curator, featured other films from De Forest Phonofilm.

Regarding Till the Bells Ring’s primacy as the first sound feature film, it depends on your definition of what a feature film is. As far as we know, this is a filmed play, rather than a multi-location, multi-scene edited drama, but it does have synchronised dialogue and possibly some music. My understanding of the De Forest Phonofilm system is that the dialogue was recorded as the picture was being shot, which is possibly why the system didn’t succeed in the end (neither did the system used for The Jazz Singer), as it didn’t allow for much movement of the camera or mixing of dialogue and sound effects or music, once that technique became common in 1931.

The first person to point out that the film was earlier than The Jazz Singer, which was by then already known as the first commercial ‘talkie’ feature film, was John Poole, owner of the Synod Hall, in an article in 1931 in The Scotsman. In 1936, the same author wrote in Fife News repeating this claim in an article on the history of cinema. 

Having inspected the film in 2024 and reported on its condition, curators at the BFI National Archive will assess it for its cultural content and recommend any necessary preservation work, which may result in research viewing material.

Drawing on the collections of the BFI National Archive, the BFI is currently planning a major project at BFI Southbank for 2027 looking at the role sound has played in cinema, tracing its development from early experiments to bring sound to film in the silent era, through major milestones and technical and creative advances that have shaped and impacted on cinema.