Source: Chicago Sunday Tribune, 29 July 1928, pt. 6, pg. 5.
My Dear Madam: Your paragraph in the July 1 edition of THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, requesting written comments about this new style of portraying movie productions (namely the "talkies") bids me to remak, that I consider it a colossal step—with the direction of travel towards reverse.
The movies as I see them were designed to furnish amusement. How well they have succeeded is evidenced by computing the seating capacity of our American "show palaces." Their enormous success is due to two distinctive factors. One is because of their ability to eliminate oral expression; the other, is the graceful method by which they lead one on the silent wings of imagination.
Their magnet-like power to attract and hold the multitudes' interest, is born of the multitudes' desire to escape a world of mechanical din and a babble of turbulent tongues. Folks in all walks of life, through the medium of the voiceless drama, have found rest and contentment. They have found, too, what all humankind wants to find in their pleasure—relaxation and a something that is different.
With the coming of the "talkies," the patrons are certain to lose that sense of peacefulness and diversion they have come to cherish so highly. The aspect of the movie theater will bear a strong resemblance to the clatter of the street, and a moment's reflection gives us to know that it was from the likes of this that we wished to escape. Surely no one in this tumultuous age cares for a repetition of the day's "lingo" when in quest of entertainment.
It is a well known fact that many of our best screen stars have in their speech a distinct foreign accent. While, there are soem of course, who are able to follow the speakers' dialect, many of them, including me, will be of the impression they ahve been transferred to a South Sea isle. What is to become of a patron who understands none but his own tongue? Isn't he apt to be disconverted as he fruitlessly endeavors to follow the words, as given in a language foreign to his own?
In view of these things I think the introduction of the "talkies" will, in one bold stroke, take from the movie industry what as been accomplished through years of painstaking effort.
