Till the Bells Ring is a Scottish early sound film, possibly the first feature-length talkie, which screened a year before the film commonly recognised as the first full-length talkie, The Jazz Singer.
The film was based on a play by Scottish playwright Graham Moffat, and starred himself alongside his wife, suffragette Margaret Moffat, and their daughter, Winifred.
Cast Graham Moffatt as John Snodgrass Margaret Moffatt as Jenny Struthers Winifred Moffatt as Aggie Turnbull Bell Russell as beggar woman David Clyde as Samuel Dowie
Plot The play was described as a domestic comedy, and was in 'braid Scots'. The first words spoken in the film are uttered by the heroine Aggie, played by Winifred Moffat: "Still anither mornin' and never a word or a sign o' him. Eh, me! The sun's gettin' through, so we'll be wearin' oor braws to the kirk the day." According to the BFI synopsis, the plot involves a widower courting a poor woman, mistakenly believing her to be wealthy.
Reception The 45-minute long film was shown privately on 28 January 1926 at the Holborn Empire in London, before receiving a week-long public run at C. W. Poole's Synod Hall in Edinburgh, beginning on 11 October 1926. It used Lee de Forest's Phonofilm system, employing sound-on-film technology. A review in The Scotsman commented that "the movement and sound are perfectly synchronised and after the listener becomes accustomed to the phenomenon of screen figures appearing to talk and the ear attunes itself to the sounds there is no difficulty in catching the spoken words." Moffat is reported at the time as saying that he hoped Till the Bells Ring would help break the American monopoly on film, due to countries wanting “talking films” in their own languages or accents.
Despite reviews in The Scotsman and the Edinburgh Evening News, the film does not appear to have been screened again, except when it was rereleased in 1933 as a brand-new film by another distributor. Graham Moffat sued the distributor, winning his case in 1935, after which the film fell into obscurity.
The British Film Institute National Archives acquired two of the three reels of the film but as of 2026 had never screened them. The reels were incorrectly catalogued as having been made in 1933. The location of the third reel is unknown. Film researcher Marc David Jacobs, who identified the film as having been shown in 1926, attributes its obscurity to a lack of interest in early British film, its only screening having been in Scotland, and the mislabelling of the reels.
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