The Jazz Singer (1927)

The most popular movie of 1927 was The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronized sound to the movies at last. Audiences were thrilled not just to see Al Jolson singing but to hear him singing — and I can't say I blame them.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute, I tell you — you ain't heard nothing yet!" He wasn't kidding.



Even though "Toot Toot Tootsie" had been a hit for Al Jolson a couple of years before, its appearance in The Jazz Singer was a pivotal moment in the history of motion pictures. As co-star May McAvoy put it "In that moment just before 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie,' a miracle occurred. Moving pictures really came alive. To see the expressions on their faces, when Joley spoke to them ... you'd have thought they were listening to the voice of God."

Great moment.

Do you know the movie's story? Jolson plays Jakie Rabinowitz, who defies his father to become a vaudeville performer. While Jolson, now performing as Jack Robin, becomes a huge Broadway success, his father disowns him for defying his insistence that that his son succeed him as cantor at the local synagogue. There's lots of good singing and a tearful reconciliation at the end.

Audiences ate it up.

No doubt modern audiences will squirm as Jolson performs many of his numbers in blackface. This is one instance where I'd recommend you power through it. As film historian Corin Willis wrote:

"Of the more than seventy examples of blackface in early sound film 1927–53 that I have viewed (including the nine blackface appearances Jolson subsequently made), The Jazz Singer is unique in that it is the only film where blackface is central to the narrative development and thematic expression."

Blackface here plays as a metaphor for the mask Jack Robin wears to hide his Jewish heritage. Ironically, by putting on the makeup, Jolson can assimilate into a white Anglo-Saxon society that would otherwise reject him.

Only at the end, however, when he strips off the mask to sing "Kol Nidre" in the synagogue for his father does Jolson again become a complete man — the Jewish son and the jazz singer.

Well, at least that's the theory. Blackface may have been a staple of vaudeville and early Hollywood but it tends to take me out of a movie even as I understand the historical context.

Your mileage may vary.

Some notes of historical interest:

● Vitaphone, Warner Brothers' system for pressing sound onto 16-inch discs, was not the first technique for synchronizing sound and film but it was the first practical technology to do so, generating a sound loud enough for an audience to hear and with a higher fidelity than sound-on-film technologies could produce.

● Contrary to popular belief, the first feature-length film using the Vitaphone process was not The Jazz Singer but a John Barrymore movie, Don Juan, released on August 6, 1926. Don Juan, however, included only a recorded score and sound effects and the film was not enough of a hit to make back the costs of using the Vitaphone process. Only the persistence of producer Adolph Zukor convinced the Warner brothers — Harry and Sam — to make another feature-length sound film.

● The technology used to record The Jazz Singer was so primitive, no sound editing was possible. Al Jolson's songs were recorded and mixed as he performed them and what you saw was what you got. Except for a couple of spontaneous ad-libs — including the immortal line "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" spoken by Al Jolson as a bridge between "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" and "Toot Toot Tootsie" — there's no spoken dialogue in the movie. Technician George Groves is credited with recording the sound.

In his career, Groves received eight Oscar nominations, winning twice, an incredible track record considering he only worked on twenty movies.

● Ironically, despite the enormous success of The Jazz Singer, the Vitaphone disc technology itself proved to be too uneconomical for large-scale use. The studio had to distribute a separate disc with each copy of the movie and each theater needed an operator skilled enough to synch the recording with the film, driving up costs. In addition, because assembling and editing a Vitaphone picture was not just a simple matter of cutting and splicing film, but also of mixing and pressing new recordings, directors and film editors found the technology difficult to use. In 1932, Warner Brothers gave up on the Vitaphone process and instead opted to add sound recordings to optical tracks that were laid over the edge of the film negative.

● Left to the voters, The Jazz Singer probably would have cleaned up at the first Oscars ceremony. But in a smoke-filled backroom, the powers that be figured that handing a bunch of awards to the most popular movie of the year wasn't going to help sell extra tickets — to The Jazz Singer or anything else — so they arbitrarily declared it ineligible and handed its producers an honorary Oscar instead. (Read the story here.)

And last but certainly not least, a bit of personal history involving Al Jolson and my wife Katherine's great-grandmother.

In 1912, on a whim, Katherine's great-grandmother decided she, her daughter and her chauffeur should take the Packard on a cross-country drive from New Jersey to California — a nutty idea, actually.

As recently as 1908, the United States only had some 600 miles of paved road. Conditions weren't much better in 1912.

Perhaps they could find a traveling companion to go with them, someone suggested. The New York Automobile Club hooked them up with a guy named Al Jolson.

Yeah, that Al Jolson.

Katherine's great-grandmother sent her chauffeur to meet this Jolson character who had recently headlined the Winter Garden in Manhattan, New York.

The daughter (Katherine's great-aunt) tells the story:

"Fred went to Jolson's suite where Jolson and a couple of pals were entertaining or being entertained by some girls.

"The next morning, Jolson left before we did. Fred's brief encounters were the only near contact we had with Jolson. He reached Chicago a couple of days ahead of us and reached San Francisco in two weeks while it took us a month!"

The story has a happy ending though — the daughter married the chauffeur!