The Jazz Singer

The Jazz Singer is the film that ended the silent era. It was the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized music and lip-synchronous speech, and its release in 1927 announced that sound had arrived. Al Jolson plays a young man torn between his father's wish that he become a cantor and his own dream of singing on the Broadway stage. Most of the film is silent, with intertitles, but Jolson's songs and a few spoken lines stop the show. The moment he ad-libs, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet," is one of the most famous in cinema history. The film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.