Jazz Singer, The (DVD)

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"Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nuthin' yet." --Al Jolson

Movies have been with us for well over a century, yet it continues to amaze me how good film photography has always been and how the accompanying sound, when there was sound, always struggled to keep up. The fact is, good, restored black-and-white photography from a hundred years ago doesn't look too much different from good black-and-white photography today. About the only improvements in film photography over the years have been in terms of wider screens and color. Ah, but what a difference there has been in sound.

For the first three or four decades of moviemaking, there was virtually no sound in films. Instead, there were sporadic attempts to match live voices, live musical instruments, and gramophone recordings with movements on screen from as early as the 1890s. But it wasn't until 1926 with the movie "Don Juan" that the Warner Bros. Vitaphone process synchronized recorded music with pictures and then 1927 with "The Jazz Singer" that WB added speech to the process.

Perhaps it seems odd to us today that the movie industry initially had reservations about adding sound to movies at all, yet that's the case. Film studios weren't sure viewers who had grown up with silent films would accept "talkies." They weren't sure the costs involved in buying and developing new equipment would be worth the trouble. They weren't sure theater owners would spend the money to convert their movie houses to sound. They weren't sure they wanted to dub their films for foreign audiences when silent films could reach everybody, regardless of language. And actors weren't sure their voices would be up to the task of entertaining filmgoers.

Then, when sound did finally arrive, it remained in a single channel for many years, with studios dabbling in stereo and multichannel in the 1940s and beyond but not fully embracing surround sound until the 1990s. Then, too, there were the problems of background noise, hum, and hiss, and the difficulties of reproducing strong dynamics and a wide frequency range, things we take for granted today. And yet it all came, and most people nowadays credit "The Jazz Singer" as more-or-less the start of the sound era.

"The Jazz Singer" cost Warners a whopping half million dollars to produce, an enormous sum in those days and quite a gamble for the studio. But it paid off. "The Jazz Singer" took in over three million dollars at the box office, and within a few years every major studio in Hollywood had changed over to talkies, using one sound technology or another. Warner Bros. themselves would continue using their original Vitaphone synch process (using recorded discs with film) for a short while, but by the early 1930s they would switch to the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system, while still retaining the Vitaphone designation for a dozen or more years.

Anyway, "The Jazz Singer" is a landmark film, and it's good to have it in so good a restored digital print and with so good a restored soundtrack. Warners chose Alan Crosland to direct the film because he had directed their earlier "Don Juan" sound effort, and, I suppose, they trusted him. Next, they found a suitable vehicle for sound in the Samson Raphaelson play "The Jazz Singer"; and for the lead they tried to get the stage show's original star, George Jessel, but he wanted too much money, and then Eddie Cantor, who declined. So the role went to Al Jolson, the biggest name on the New York musical scene and an actor just acquiring a Hollywood name. The movie was a sensational hit.

Today, I daresay many people don't even recognize the name Jolson, or if they do, they probably think of him as that guy who sang in blackface, now in racist disrepute. Yet in Jolson's time, blackface was an accepted show-business practice, a conventional entertainment that came up through the ranks of minstrel shows and was performed by entertainers both black and white. Anyway, in "The Jazz Singer" you'll see Jolson singing some of his most popular songs, and, yes, in several of them he is in blackface.

But enough of why the film is historically important. Does it remain watchable--and listenable? Fortunately, and perhaps surprisingly, yes. Of course, the movie is remarkably sentimental and mushy, the story line may seem hopelessly maudlin to modern audiences, and there is the business of the blackface; yet the underlining feeling and, naturally, the music retain their appeal. They got to viewers in 1927, and I daresay they continue to get to viewers today.

The movie begins with about four minutes of overture (and ends with another couple of minutes of exit music), so you know right away it's a big production. The setting is New York City, and Jolson plays Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor, a Jewish religious official who conducts the musical part of the services. The father (Warner Oland) wants his son to continue the tradition of five generations of Rabinowitz cantors, but young Jakie wants to sing jazz. The words "jazz singer" fall from the father's lips like something evil or corrupt, as the father disowns the boy. The mother (Eugenie Besserer), meanwhile, has little to say in the matter. The son and his parents part ways, and a number of years go by, Jakie now assuming the stage name of Jack Robin and struggling to make a name for himself in show business.