**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland, Cantor Joseff Rosenblatt
screenplay by Alfred A. Cohn, based on the play by Samson Raphaelson
directed by Alan Crosland
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I'm going to dispense with standard practice for this review, because the enormity of The Jazz Singer's Three-Disc Deluxe Edition demands it. Not in terms of size (although one movie, one feature-length documentary, and about five hours of short films make for a pretty large package), but because the issues it raises are more than the main attraction itself can contain. What this DVD proposes is a glimpse into the shining moment when talkies were a novelty rather than a foregone conclusion and a whole range of culture teemed around them, unaware of its imminent demise. The Jazz Singer is no great shakes on its own; by all accounts, it's an antique of limited cinematic range and blindingly crude melodrama. Yet in placing it against the vast array of shorts that both preceded and led directly from it, one gets a sense of how truly seismic the coming of sound was. Watching the parade of performers adapt their bits to some very functional filmmaking is devastating–not only because the traditions that nourished them were wiped out, but also because a relationship with culture, with the accessibility of the performer and the non-suppression of the audience, was snuffed out for a piece of technology that liberated our dreams but left us alone in the dark.
Three things are obliquely referred to throughout the set. One is the star of Al Jolson, now known solely as the guy in The Jazz Singer thanks to the death of his theatrical tradition; his signature stage line ("Folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet!") has been wrenched from its context as dialogue in a movie, and not many people know much about the man's career, either. Two are the enormous machinations surrounding the inception of talking pictures: a documentary shows how the technology of sound-on-film was far from a done deal, while a series of shorts demonstrates that as time wore on, the novelty wore off and we accepted sound pictures as the air that we breathe. Finally, there is the popular culture that existed prior to sound's triumph, which proves to challenge many assumptions–such as the alleged sophistication of our own ironic pop, the conservative uniformity of pre-boomer culture, and the idea that the world has gone about its business without missing something that was destroyed once the movies learned to speak.
To see the amazing performers in action on Disc 3's sampler is to catch a glimpse of what we re-discovered–inaccurate to say "invented"–in the post-modern age: the rebel cred we hipsters all crave was so taken for granted by vaudevillians that they didn't even have to mention it at all. As none of this material is annotated, newbies like me have to fill in our own blanks; but the mere fact of their existence shatters assumptions we've spent lifetimes building thanks to the centring of our culture around mass-produced sound films.
The Jazz Singer is indeed a museum piece, though some of us do like museums: if there's a reason director Alan Crosland is not known as a master, we take what we can get. The story–based on a Samson Raphaelson play with an ending softened for the movie–deals with the eponymous Jakie Rabinowitz (guess who?), who forsakes the synagogue for the music hall and thus finds himself on the opposite side of his cantor father (Warner Oland, gearing up for a certain other ethnic transvestite role). Dad turfed his son upon getting wind that the boy was planning a life in show biz, leaving the field wide open for Jakie to change his name to Jack Robin and move up the vaudeville ladder. His rise as a performer is mirrored in the ultimate ill health and fall of his father, who beckons Jakie to his deathbed on the eve of Jakie's theatrical triumph. J. Hoberman reported that the original stage production involved chucking the Gentile theatre in favour of Jakie's ethnic origins–but that could never happen in a movie because, as "one Jolson biographer" pointed out, nobody would ever buy the superstar giving up the theatre for any reason.
Hoberman deals with the subtleties of the Jewish assimilationist narrative in his excellent review of Neil Diamond's silly remake. I heartily recommend it on those grounds, but I'd like to discuss the other side of the equation: the fact that Jolson's show business ambitions would prove so corrosive to his heritage speaks to the immense power of popular culture. The issue is not just that it is the "dominant culture"; its immense machinery of theatres, publicists, and employees create a legitimacy with which no ethnic group or community can compete. Jakie's defense of his music and vocation–"My songs mean as much to my audience as yours do to your congregation"–may be entirely valid, yet the truth is that the persuasiveness of one over the other has nothing to do with the veracity of what's being sung. Mass culture wins not because it's true but because it's there, omnipresent, impossible to avoid–more pervasive than anyone without capital can possibly tolerate. The scene where a Jewish friend of the family confronts Jakie in blackface and declares him deracinated is disturbing for more than questions of Jewish identity (or racist overtones): it suggests that mass culture takes as much as it gives, handing you an identity to suit its purposes instead of letting you make your own choices.
The irony of this is that the mass culture depicted in the movie was about to be supplanted by the one used to produce it. Sound films would decimate the vaudeville universe that nourished Jolson on his way to the top–giving the star his bizarre half-life as an icon without a context. The Jazz Singer, then, induces a kind of cultural vertigo. It makes a case for mass entertainment while preparing to cut ties with the milieu it depicts. One gets a weird feeling during this movie–its insincerity extends not just to the story being told (though that resonates in its simplicity and symptomatic gravity) but to the idea that show business actually gives a damn about the people who make it money as well. When the gimmick changes, the old one is dropped like a hot potato–and everyone who put their eggs in the obsolete basket is suddenly displaced. To watch The Jazz Singer now is to witness a spectacular lie about the inevitable value of mass culture. Whoever might be artistically inserting themselves into the form, the machinery itself has no illusions about the audience and its ability to extract its money. No matter the human cost.
This is a matter dealt with in The Dawn of Sound: How the Movies Learned to Talk (87 mins.), a potted history of the mechanical and business challenges in creating and implementing sound-on-film. At once a welcome introduction to the far-from-inevitable technological shift and a refusal to play hardball with the implications of its data, the piece is clear-eyed in dealing with the humiliating origins of sound film. Initial efforts (such as an introduction to a D.W. Griffith flop) received a cool reception, and the Warner brothers' infinite faith in perfecting the imperfect process is revealed to be far from the sure thing it might seem now. The early portions of the doc are fascinating as they reveal the politics behind the movement, with the wing-and-a-prayer Warners competing with Lee DeForest and his "employee" Theodore Case; the lesser-known inventors technically get there first only to run aground on capitalization and in-fighting with the engineers. For the most part, the doc refrains from giving Warner (who are after all putting out this disc) the lion's share of the praise, painstakingly recounting the slow trudge to first experimenting with shorts, then adding sound effects to features, until finally the hybrid sound/silent The Jazz Singer started the gold rush and changed the nature of Hollywood.
When the shift happens, however, the technology makes its own rules. It's noted that after the runaway success of the first full talkie (by all accounts an inferior piece of goods), the public would rather see a terrible sound film than a good silent one. The medium is the message; the technological magic of a seamless reality that talks trumps the greater artistic sophistication of a silent movie that lives. The current brouhaha over digital–in which practical artistry is shunted aside for the too-easy power of moving mountains–immediately springs to mind, and we realize that mechanical sophistry trumps artistic considerations very often indeed. As Guy Maddin pointed out, the artistic development of mechanical forms is forever getting interrupted by whatever advance changes the rules of the game–and unlike other forms, where you can switch from current methods to outmoded ones, the new technology absolutely supplants whatever techniques were developed in the interim. One is likewise confronted with the fact that the moving image itself is a needless frill made for no reason but to generate revenue.
Of course, you have to read between the lines to get on that brainwave. The problem with the aforementioned doc (and the box set as a whole) is that it offers a wealth of fascinating information with only a limited amount of context. You grasp the huge changes that talkies ushered in, but the details are lost; the film ultimately has to take the position that sound was inevitable and the Warners were heroes after all. Concluding on the fatuous note of a dinner for Sam Warner (the driving force behind talkies, he ironically died days before The Jazz Singer opened), the film decides that the process "liberated" the movies to new expressiveness. Not quite: it merely forced everybody to drop the equal but obsolete expressiveness of silent film and awkwardly start from scratch. And despite the demurrals and equivocations of the rest of the film (which notes the Warner resolve as opposed to the Warner omniscience), by the end the studio is showered with as much glory as the process. This is what happens when big studios undertake historical projects: in the interests of simplifying history and paying themselves compliments, they wind up concealing as much as they reveal, and not simply for the obvious reasons of propaganda.
We are left with over four hours of Vitaphone shorts on Disc 3. There are no dates listed for these things, making context once again a dicey proposition, but they are mostly vaudeville, generally pre-Code, and all devastating in their evocation of a cultural landscape buried under the dawn of sound. While there're no signposts to guide us (though the documentary fills in a few sequential gaps), we get the idea: a bunch of people ran around with a piano or a couple of instruments and did jokes or tricks; they're easily reproduced and spare as hell even with the trumped-up backgrounds Warner/Vitaphone has provided for them. Limited means to the contrary, their nuance is awesome, using bodies and wit to fill the stage and flow over whatever audience they'd be charming if the camera wasn't rolling. Some include their call-and-response audience bits or break the fourth wall long before Ferris Bueller got the idea. In acquainting ourselves with these things, we're confronted with the fact that we didn't just lose a cultural form–we lost an organic way of relating to culture, too.
As it turns out, the sound era (coupled with the triumph of the Hays Code) created a break with what was being talked about in these shorts. We're used to thinking of the past in such goody-goody terms–as if we suddenly discovered our bodies and our irreverence in the post-modern era and established that as "sophistication." These people were operating long before the reclamation of pop as an academic subject, and they were plenty sophisticated in their attacks on propriety: the pariah status of vaudeville is built into the form itself, and short after short sticks it to the guardians of taste and intellect with brazen vulgarity and total commitment. In The Filth and the Fury, John Lydon praised Britain's "tradition of comedy"–the remnants of the vaudeville form–as a source for the Sex Pistols, and these shorts prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same. These films have a plausible threat that most recent movies can't approach; they take for granted what punk had to self-consciously rediscover. Next to the casual fuck-you of these things, Sid Vicious starts to look like Guy Lombardo.
Mass culture had to be mass controlled: the small-scale anarchic fronting of vaudeville couldn't possibly survive the standardization of pop into a gargantuan force that needed taming before it could play in Peoria. As a result, the genuinely subversive stuff–in addition to the casual bigotry celebrated as "honest" in things like Ghost World–was papered over, the edges smoothed, and the contradictions erased for a vision of the past completely unified. One sees appalling hatred in these things and a naked expression of the times' most corrupt values, but one also sees a few women determined to throw down for themselves, implicit class issues with real bite, and wink-nudge sexual expression you never expected from your great-great-grandparents. This material smacks you in the face with the realization that everything you know about the period is completely wrong, stupid, bowdlerized–and we have the exigencies of a mass medium creating the clean break with that past that would redefine that history into something we can all see with the family. This collection doesn't go far enough in defining the full extent of sound's tyranny (or cinema's, for that matter), but the very fact of the third disc's existence makes it an essential addition to your library before the damn thing goes out of print and drives these priceless records back into the vault.
THE DVD
As for The Jazz Singer proper, the digitally restored full-frame image is remarkably clean and practically shimmers beyond what you'd expect from the first sort-of talkie and its assumed battering by time. Mastered in DD 1.0, the audio is also very good, free of pops and hisses and surprisingly full for the fledgling soundtrack that changed the world.
Did I mention there were extras? I did? Folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet…
DISC 1
JOLSON SHORTS
Anyone hoping to gain a better understanding of Jolson through these shorts is going to come up close to empty. With the exception of one pre-Jazz Singer Vitaphone subject–which indicates how much Jolson was dependent upon blackface–these are mostly clips that allude to the star rather than involve him. They break down as follows:
Al Jolson in "A Plantation Act" (10 mins.)
Those who decry blackface (and you should be one of them) will wince long and hard during this exercise in supposedly-typical Jolsonry. That said, it offers the single longest Jolson performance on the disc–and showcases the charisma and pleasure with which he sings songs (three, to be exact, near a field backdrop and a run-down "Negro" shack–ecch). Admittedly more than just symptomatically interesting.
An Intimate Dinner in Celebration of Warner Bros. Silver Jubilee (11 mins.)
"Mr. Warner Bros." is the master of ceremonies with Mrs. Warner Bros. at his side; he then turns the floor over to "Little Miss Vitaphone," who rhymes off the name of the stars in the stable, including Jolson. A few songs play over the mention of composers like Lorenz and Hart, with one tune sung on camera at the end–but the highlight comes when John Barrymore and Richard Barthelmess send their regards (i.e., their excuse for not wasting their time with this crap) via telegram.
I Love to Singa (8 mins.)
A Tex Avery cartoon with only a tenuous connection to the feature and its star: a vaguely Jazz Singer-esque tale of a crooner owl who is cast out of the family for not singing classical and wins a talent contest under the stage name "Owl Jolson." The radio host is one Jack Bunny. (See also: our review of Happy Feet.)
Hollywood Handicap (10 mins.)
Jolson is in this Buster Keaton-directed subject for all of two seconds–he's one of "a galaxy of stars" at the climactic horse race–but those who remember him best as a racist artifact will find more to connect him. "The Original Sing Band" is a group of black musicians who are sadly forced to "do black" as stablehands raising the money to race a winning horse. Not badly done for what it is, though the humiliation of watching these talented men play while a bunch of white people toss coins at them is pretty hard to take.
A Day at Santa Anita (18 mins.)
An excruciating Technicolor short in which a little girl with a Louise Brooks bob loses her horse trainer father and soldiers on to enter his horse in a race. Jolson is once again on screen for a split second (and once again enjoying a race), but aside from him and a couple of crudely stereotyped blacks there's not much linking it to him. The grotesque sentimentality of the enterprise (and the use of one of the most annoying precocious children in film history) make this pretty hard to endure and completely impossible to enjoy.
6/2/1947 LUX RADIO THEATRE BROADCAST (58 mins.)
A 20th-anniversary adaptation of The Jazz Singer, with Jolson sounding raspy and too old for the part; it lacks any of the melodramatic resonance of the movie itself.
JOLSON TRAILER GALLERY
Incls. The Jazz Singer, The Singing Fool, Mammy, Wonder Bar, Go to Your Dance, and The Singing Kid.
DISC 2
SHORTS ON THE VALUE OF SOUND
The Voice from the Screen (15 mins.)
A lone speaker in a tuxedo explains the process by which the Vitaphone process is possible, going from the shooting to the presentation of a vaudeville musician duo. It would be pretty boring were it not for the tension in the air surrounding the unveiling of the technology, whose impact nobody could yet predict. The film work here is about as crude as it comes, something that only befits the presentation of a new technology: nobody knows what it will be used for, only that it will be used.
Finding His Voice (11 mins.)
Max Fleischer animates this educational short, featuring a roll of film with a bowtie horrified over another roll with a gag who can only speak in text. They go to a professor, who rather laboriously demonstrates the sound-on-film process, giving the gagged roll his voice and leading to a witty climax. The educational portion is awfully flat, but the assumption that all film is waiting to talk and must be shown the way is a rather shrewd bit of industrial propaganda.
The Voice that Thrilled the World (18 mins.)
This Jean Neguilesco film comes circa 1942: one could take sound as common but not quite take it for granted. The history of sound spans 100 years, apparently, and stretches from Edison to some "great" films that are barely remembered now (with the exception of then-recent Yankee Doodle Dandy and Sergeant York). It's not sophisticated and sometimes risible–as when they lay a wreath at the grave of forward-thinking Sam Warner. But as a popular history, it does all right, becoming interesting when it segues into its power as wartime propaganda (while becoming propaganda itself).
Okay for Sound (19 mins.)
Made on "The 20th Anniversary of Sound", this is less reverent than the last short and far less informative. Part of this is due to the lack of wartime feeling, but it's also kind of lazy as we find the innovation totally credited to the Warner Bros. and used to whisk us through their recent greatest hits. It's a foregone conclusion by now, and it's mainly to emphasize the Warner glory.
When Talkies Were Young (19 mins.)
It's 1955–sound pictures are second nature. Now it's just the talking pictures of yesteryear, clips of movies like Five Star Final, Svengali, and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing and actors like Cagney, Gable, and Barrymore. It's no longer an exercise in history, merely one of nostalgia. Shrug. Cagney's awesome, move on.
GOLD DIGGERS OF BROADWAY EXCERPTS
Two fragments from a lost 1929 musical–if we're lucky, they'll unearth the rest of the footage, since the fragments are not half bad. "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" (10 mins.) begins with a dressing-room exchange between a woman dancer and a top-hatted man then segues into a musical number with more top hats, colourful dresses, and clever formations; its faded early colour experiment should put to rest the costume designer's myth that the '20s and '30s dressed sepia in real life. "Finale" (5 mins.) is a camped-up Swan Lake ballet riff that ends with a dissolve as hilarious as it is apt–a collision of high culture and kitsch straight out of Kenneth Anger's fever dreams.
DISC 3
SHORTS
Elsie Janis in a Vaudeville Act: "Behind the Lines"
Janis starts off this disc with a slap in the face to everyone who associates pre-1960s culture with pre-1960s cinema: her act, one song each for French, American, and English soldiers (who join the singer as they gather around her place on a flatbed truck) is ribald, uncouth, and electric. Janis lets everybody know they don't have to be polite and is unapologetic about her inelegance and vulgarity–though the American song "In the Army" jars with its reference to "Jews and wops and husky Irish cops."
Bernado de Pace: Wizard of the Mandolin (10 mins.)
A lone man dressed as Pierrot plays the mandolin–all the while smiling a self-satisfied smile and terrorizing his instrument. Again, there is a conspiratorial air to the proceedings as he burlesques the notion of "cultural" performance and winks to an audience that knows it's as bullshit as he does.
Van and Schenck: The Pennant-Winning Battery of Songland (8 mins.)
No idea which one is Van and which one is Schenck: one is a slightly heavyset guy who does accents (including a blackface-without-blackface bit) and one is a smaller dude who sings straight and plays piano. Either way, they do four songs, two of which are sexist and one of which is racist and sexist, but the bigger one has zesty talent and the other provides an excellent counterpoint.
Blossom Seeley and Bennie Fields with the Music Boxes (10 mins.)
The "music boxes" are two pianos draped with tablecloths in a manner that makes them look like one; the main event, however, is Seeley and Fields, who crack jokes and sing, mostly sing. They really look like they're enjoying themselves, even when they tell the one about the French coon song.
Hazel Green and Company (10 mins.)
The bit about performers "enjoying themselves" is gonna be a theme here: I can't remember the last time someone in a movie or on television was so blatantly and enthusiastically ingratiating while actually seeming to mean it. Here, zaftig Green enjoys herself singing a few songs and inviting a tall, thin man in satin overalls to tap-dance. She's a lot of fun.
The Night Court (9 mins.)
A cheap, studio-bound effort in which various risqué female performers are tried for being risqué, deny being risqué, and then proceed to sing or dance something risqué. Not a barnburner, but a bit where a lawyer handles a murder as a suicide has some snap.
The Police Quartette (9 mins.)
A barbershop quartet with policemen. There's an intro where one of the cops gets a call to appear for a bunch of orphans; it kind of takes the zip out of the performative aspect when you know there's a faked story. Doesn't have the jolt of the straight-performance shorts.
Ray Mayer and Edith Evans in When East Meets West
Floppy-haired cowboy Mayer does the talking, sings, and plays the piano, telling slightly-tired cynical jokes about his partner Evans's spending habits; she sings a few songs, such as "Side by Side." Not quite a revelation, and the snob/good ol' boy dichotomy goes nowhere, but it's welcome enough, especially a bit where Mayer plans to donate money to replace a church's hymnals with Eleanor Glyn's Three Weeks.
Adele Rowland: Stories in Song (9 mins.)
The very proud and upbeat Rowland enters as a satin Amelia Earhart and sings a buoyant song about flying; she then removes her jacket and sings more forcefully happy tunes. She's a powerhouse without being a bully; her alarmingly fringe-laden dress seals the deal.
Stoll, Evans and Company: The 'Jazzmania Quintette' (9 mins.)
A comic jazz quintet, which plays a few wild tunes and then invites a female singer on the stage. The antics of the musicians shred the notion of musical dignity; the violinist playing his instrument through his bow instead of underneath it predates Pete Townshend smashing his guitar by a good forty years.
The Ingenues: The Band Beautiful (9 mins.)
An all-girl orchestra with matching ruffled dresses. Predictably patronizing as these things go, this still has the spectacle of a phalanx of frilly women, all playing accordions. Though it loses its novelty by the end, it's certainly something you never see anymore.
The Foy Family in Chips of the Old Block (7 mins.)
The most flagrantly bizarre of these shorts, this finds a family of vaudevillians in a series of nutty gestures and nonsensical non-sequiturs. Totally uninterested in good taste or gentility, it's one of the jewels of the collection.
Dick Rich and his Melodious Monarchs (9 mins.)
Large, moustachioed bandleader Rich gets his band to tear through a few numbers, and does a good (if implicitly demeaning) ventriloquist routine with a female singer. Goes nowhere, but choice moments remain.
Gus Arnheim and His Ambassadors (9 mins.)
Gus and his orchestra play us a few tunes. It's pretty straightforward and unremarkable, except as a record of a great musical performance.
Shaw and Lee: The Beau Brummels
Two guys in bowlers and bowties do some sensational absurdist deadpan in a manner highly reminiscent of Steven Wright ("20 people under one umbrella and nobody got wet." "How?" "It wasn't raining"). They never crack a smile, unlike us.
Roof Garden Revue Directed by Larry Cebalos (9 mins.)
Some cute musical numbers with a tropical-island theme; mostly fun, with a nifty "caterpillar" effect achieved by a chorus line.
Trixie Friganza in My Bag of Tricks (9 mins.)
A matronly woman spells her naughty deeds so that her son won't understand, then whips out a bass and talks about the two dullard husbands she felt compelled to kill. Pre-Code with a vengeance; Trixie could go drinking with Mae West any day and maybe be the only one not face down on the floor.
Green's Twentieth Century Faydetts (7 mins.)
A less humiliating all-girl band scenario last one. The outfits are somewhat less ridiculous, and the musicians seem hired to do something other than play accordions in formation–a mannish woman who introduces the songs leads them. Wish it was longer.
Sol Violinsky: The Eccentric Entertainer (7 mins.)
Some piano playing here is okay; some comedic piano playing imitating a silent-movie pianist is not so much; some other jokes fall flat. Sol knows that nothing says entertainment like strapping a bow to your leg and playing piano and violin simultaneously. Duly noted.
Ethel Sinclair and Marge LaMarr: At the Seashore
Two jazz-age girls lie around at the beach and make withering remarks about men–most of which remain fresh and funny today. Between these two, Trixie Friganza, and Adele Rowland, I'd say women's studies academics have found new subjects for research.
Paul Tremaine and His Aristocrats (9 mins.)
Another good band, another good performance, but that's it: no revelations beyond the music and its sappy playfulness.
Baby Rose Marie: The Child Wonder (9 mins.)
Precocious kid acts are usually intolerable, particularly when the kid is creepily made to sing saucy love songs. Still, Baby Rose got pipes, and they'll grab you and shake you until you relent.
Burns and Allen in "Lambchops" (9 mins.)
The titular duo do their sparkling best, with him asking the questions and her answering in a manner of surreal dizziness. Probably arriving at the tail end of the period, it's the best-written and most polished of the bunch, though it doesn't have the shock of these other blasts from the past.
Joe Frisco in "The Happy Hottentots" (10 mins.)
Two vaudevillians board at a theatre where they're the only other act and have to perform endlessly and inconveniently. Sounds very Beckett, but it plays tired; it's heavily edited and composed in a way that suggests a late film and the death of the form celebrated in the others.
Rounding out the proceedings is an array of looseleaf case inserts: ten Jolson postcard/stills (one is the star's condolence telegram on the death of Sam Warner); two promotional pamphlets on The Jazz Singer and Vitaphone in general; what appears to be an exhibitor's handout; and production notes including the disc programs, the daily production reports, deletions from the script, and more promo-type stuff.
89 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 1.0; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; 3 DVD-9s; Region One; Warner
