In October 1927, a heavily pregnant Lois beside him, he witnesses The Jazz Singer.
Al Jolson is no screen actor—Photoplay has that correct—and those critics who declare it to be little more than an extended Vitaphone disc with pictures are not far off the mark, but the response of the Audience is unlike any he has encountered before. The Audience cheers not only the songs but also the dialogue. The Audience applauds the miracle of speech and movement. What is said, or how it is said, is unimportant. All that is of consequence is that it is said, and the Audience can both see and hear it being said.
Afterward, Lois can’t stop talking about the picture over coffee and pie, as though a Vitaphone needle has injected her also.
But he is ruminating. He is brooding on his craft.
Already this year he and Babe have made some of their most ambitious and successful pictures yet:
Do Detectives Think?
Putting Pants on Philip.
The Battle of the Century.
Call of the Cuckoo.
The Second Hundred Years.
And Hats Off.
It is to Hats Off in particular that he now turns. The new lightweight cameras make the picture possible. They allow Babe and him to be filmed carrying a washing machine up a flight of steps at Vendome Street in Silver Lake, all in the misguided hope of selling it to Anita Garvin. But with sound, that picture could not have been made. He can discern this flaw in The Jazz Singer. The Jazz Singer is fixed to stages. It is filmed theater.
Safety Last! could not have been made in the era of sound.
The General could not have been made in the era of sound.
Sunrise could not have been made in the era of sound.
The Crowd could not have been made in the era of sound.
If talking pictures are to be the new reality—and, once unbound, the genie cannot be returned to the bottle—it means that ambition will be constrained by this technology, at least for a period.
Hal Roach, faced with the prospect of spending money, does what Hal Roach always does under these circumstances. Hal Roach rails. Hal Roach wails. Hal Roach tries to bury his head in the sand, like the ostrich that gave Billie Ritchie cancer.
But even Hal Roach knows.
Hal Roach will spend the money in the end, all for sound.
He speaks to Babe of it. Babe, too, has witnessed The Jazz Singer. Babe understands.
The problem—if problem it is, if problem it is to be—is that finally, after many years, each has found a character. For him, it is idiocy without harm, stupidity without malice, love without deceit. For Babe, it is a combination of the myth of his father and a version of himself unmoored from self-doubt and liberated from a surfeit of intelligence. Yet each character alone would not be enough: only together, bound by the inability of one to survive without the other, shackled by a desire to escape this interdependence while secretly acknowledging its impossibility, do they come to life.
So this is to be his identity, shared with, and defined by, another. He feels his features settle into the mask. He breathes. There is no sense of constriction or loss.
This is as it should be.
This is right.
Meanwhile, away from the cameras, he and Babe prepare for the day when they may be permitted—or forced—to speak.