The Jazz Singer (1927)

The first feature length film with both recorded synchronized music and some synchronized dialog. Most of the synchronized sound was singing and some of that wasn't synchronized very well.

I watched the Criterion restored version and it wasn't that bad. It was fast-moving anyway.

The songs and the singing were truly awful. I imagine the songs were 1920's popular music but it wasn't recognizable as jazz.

It was mostly a regular silent movie with intertitles. It was Al Jolson's recorded banter with his mother in one scene that made it interesting to audiences. There had been sound films before, but this was the first where you felt you were listening in on something.

Jolson kept kissing his mother on the lips which may have been normal back then.

Al Jolson performing in blackface came as he was talking about the music of his race---his character was  Jewish, trained to be a cantor, and he was still torn between that and singing what he thought was jazz. It symbolized that conflict and might not have been completely mindless racism. In Moe Howard's memoir, he mentioned performing in blackface on stage at the same time he was outraged by racism he saw in the South.

Some of the documentary-like footage of the Jewish ghetto in New York was interesting.

Other examples of early sound cinema:

The Japanese combined film and Kabuki theatre. In the 1890s, they would perform the indoor scenes on stage and the outdoor scenes on film with the actors standing behind the screen saying their lines as the film played, dubbing their own dialog.

In Syria, when they had only heard of talking pictures, they showed a movie with actors in the projection booth speaking into microphones loosely dubbing their lines.