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, as well as the family sheep dog, Laddie.
Plot
According to the British Film Institute synopsis, the plot involves a widower courting a poor woman, mistakenly believing her to be wealthy.
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.
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 John R. Poole's Synod Hall in Edinburgh, beginning on 11 October 1926. Poole's Synod Hall were pioneers of cinema in Edinburgh, and had experimented with adding sound to the cinema experience, including showing a short Phonofilm to an audience of invited newspapermen the month before.
Till the Bells Ring 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.
1933 onwards
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 if it were a new film by a Mr A. L. Bayley. Reviews of it at that time were not favourable, noting the amateurish presentation and poor quality of the recording, although also commenting on the appeal of the characters and amusing dialogue. Graham Moffat sued Mr Bayley, alongside three other parties, for copyright infringement. Moffat won the case in 1935, upon which the judge, Fairfax Luxmoore, ordered the return to him of all negatives and copies of the film. After this, Till the Bell Rings fell into obscurity.
The BFI National Archives acquired three of the four 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 missing second 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. Film historian Pamela Hutchinson said that determination of the film as the first feature-length sound film would depend on whether 45 minutes was regarded as feature-length, and whether it felt more like a film or a filmed stage play.
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