The Jazz Singer
Dir: Alan Crosland
Scr: Alfred A. Cohn
Pho: Hal Mohr
Ed: Harold McCord
Premiere: Oct. 6,
1927
89 min.
There are a few
American films that are landmarks, but that are also fatally flawed. Such is
the case with D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which peddled
animistic views of African-Americans, portrayed by white men in blackface. Such
is the case with The Jazz Singer, whose more casual and unspoken racism is
almost more disturbing.
It’s the central
character’s use of blackface twice in the film that sinks it for us today. We
can handle the idea of guy wanting to grow up and become a great jazz singer. What
we are no longer capable of understanding is how making oneself up as a
caricature of a Black person and singing sentimental ballads was ever a big and
ever-present thing, the height of the entertainment experience.
It was and continued
to be a thing. The minstrel show began in the 1840s, and remained popular for decades among white audiences. Blackface can be found in Babes in Arms (1939) and Holiday Inn (1942).
Jolson would go on to appear in blackface on film nine more times. Only the
post-World War II generation began to think of such antics as distasteful.
It’s The Jazz
Singer’s prestige as the first sound film that preserves it in our
memories, although it’s sound sequences are brief, a half-dozen strung along
the course of the narrative, mostly musical numbers.
Despite the
ridiculous level of background racism, oddly the film isn’t about that. It’s
about GUILT, Jewish guilt specifically. Young Jakie Rabinowitz is the son of a Jewish
cantor (a singer of sacred songs), one of generations of the same. His father
wants Jakie to follow in his footsteps, but Jakie likes to hang out in beer
parlors and sing that low-down jazz. His father forbids him to sing jazz, and
Jakie runs away, breaking his very understanding mother’s heart in the process.
We fast-forward to an
adult Jakie, now the Americanized “Jack Robin,” played by the inimitable Al
Jolson. There was something extraordinary about Jolson’s manner. He was the
last of the great pre-microphone era singers, someone who could project and
make himself felt all the way to the back row of the theater. He had big,
expressive eyes and a ready grin.
Above all, he had
energy. His live-wire, shuffling, gesticulating attack of a song transmitted
his nervous enthusiasm to the crowd, who responded with adulation. This
technique adapted itself well to film. Jolson was as one time termed “the
world’s greatest entertainer,” and it is arguable that it was so. He certainly impresses
with his renditions of “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” and “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” early
on in the film. (Look close, you’ll see William Demarest; Roscoe Karns and
Myrna Loy have small parts, too.)
Jack Robin finally
gets his big break on Broadway, and he returns home to kiss and hug his mother,
give her presents, and sing a few songs for her. His father, who has disowned
him, comes home unexpectedly while Jack is riffing on “Blue Skies.” “Stop!” he
shouts, the last time a line of dialogue is heard in the movie. The
sanctimoniousness of the cantor ironically squelches sound.
Opening night of the
big show approaches – but so does Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest
day in the Jewish calendar, a day of fasting and repentance. Jack is ready to
take the stage, but then his mother shows up at the theater – his father is
dying, and there is no one to sing the Kol Nidre, the unique, beloved, and
ancient song that opens the Yom Kippur ceremonies. Can Jakie do it? What about
his career? What’s he going to do, ruin his future or break his mother’s heart?
Suffice it to say
Jack gets his cake and eats it too. The audience is given a solemn,
tear-jerking ending to Jack’s story, then gives him one more number in the
spotlight, all blacked up and singing “Mammy” for an adoring crowd that
includes his mother, who always believed in him and told him that God made him
an entertainer. The levels of mother love in this film are near toxic.
So, to our modern
minds, in order to understand the film you have to take everything with a huge
grain of salt. When Jakie becomes Jack, he suppresses his Jewishness to be more
acceptable. When he dons blackface, he assumes the privilege of the white
entertainer to mock his supposed inferiors. When he turns around and stakes
claim to his Jewish identity, he restores his integrity and reconnects himself
to his past. And then it’s back in blackface again for the big finish.
It’s a story about
assimilation, about fathers and sons. It’s the pioneer of a new technology. Thanks
to the evolution of society, what we mostly have now though is a problematic
milestone in cinema history.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood
Extra.