Product Description
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Jazz Singer, The: Deluxe Edition (DVD)
When The Jazz Singer was released in theaters, the future of
Hollywood changed. For the first time in a feature film, an actor
spoke on-screen, stunning audiences and leaving the silent era
behind. Al Jolson was the history-making actor, playing the son
of a Jewish cantor who must defy his rabbi her in order to
pursue his dream of being in show business.
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It's one of the most famous titles in film history, and
everybody knows why: in a handful of sequences in The Jazz
Singer, sound and image are excitingly synchronized. By 1927,
some short subjects had already been "talkies," and a few
features had synchronized music, but The Jazz Singer gets the
prize as the breakthrough. Because the film is largely without
dialogue, you can--even watching the film today--almost palpably
sense the shift in movie epochs, as cinema takes an evolutionary
leap from one form to the next. The movie itself, based on a
successful Broadway show by Samson Raphaelson, is strictly
melodrama of an ancient kind. Young Jakie Rabinowitz is expected
to follow in the long line of family Cantors, but his heart
yearns to sing "Toot Toot, Tootsie" instead of "Kol Nidre." Al
Jolson plays Jakie (later Jack Robin of footlights fame), and you
get a taste of why he was widely considered the greatest
entertainer of his time; watch him with a tearjerker such as
"Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" and you'll see the skillful, completely
irony-free manipulations of a master storyteller. Equally fun is
Jolson's non-singing patter--in fact, this is where you get the
thrill of talking pictures, more so than the songs. "You ain't
heard nuthin' yet," he burbles, and it's hard not to catch the
excitement.
Jolson's numbers include his blackface act, a longstanding
tradition of minstrel shows and music halls, and an unavoidable
source of awkwardness for later viewers (see The Savages for an
amusing account of the embarrassment this can cause). Blackface
is a bizarre show business reality, and it's part of the movie,
so some historical context is required.
Warner Bros. rightly considers The Jazz Singer a key moment in
the studio's history, and this three-disc DVD package gives the
deluxe . The film itself is beautifully restored, and
reproductions of original supporting materials (souvenir program,
stills, ads) are fun. A booklet on early Vitaphone shorts clearly
predates The Jazz Singer, for Jolson is mentioned only as a star
of Vitaphone shorts, and George Jessel is tabbed as the future
star of The Jazz Singer (he'd played Jakie on Broadway). A
90-minute documentary gives a fine account of how the Vitaphone
system worked, and how other systems actually became the industry
standard.
Supplemental short films are a true treasure trove. A ation
Act is more Jolson blackface, Hollywood Handicap a studio short
comedy directed by Buster Keaton, and I Love to Singa a hilarious
1936 Tex Avery cartoon--a spoof of The Jazz Singer starring a
bird named Owl Jolson. A flabberting collection of Vitagraph
shorts--over four hours' worth--makes up disc 3 of this set:
utterly weird and wonderful performances by some of the strangest
acts ever to kill vaudeville. There are a few names here: George
Burns and Gracie Allen in a short called Lambchops, the Foy
Family doing wacky stage business. But the cornball timed jokes
of Shaw & Lee, the saucy songs of Trixie Friganza, not to mention
"The Wizard of the Mandolin," Bernardo De Pace--these are gems,
folks. Anyone with a taste for showbiz past will love them.
--Robert Horton