The Jazz Singer

Cinefest 28’s patrons who are worth their salt probably already own a
copy of Warner Home Video’s three-DVD “deluxe edition” salute to the
Roaring ’20s talkie triumph, perhaps the best box-set release of 2007.
Warner’s 80th anniversary edition cues the movie’s terrific
restoration, with crisp visuals of deep blacks and lustrous grays to
accompany a remastered soundtrack that employs the original
sound-on-disc elements for increased sonic clarity. The packaging is a
class act, too, with reproductions of 10 original stills, the souvenir
playbill and the Vitaphone program; even the DVDs are marked in the
same manner as the Vitaphone sound-on-discs, the aural system that
would forever change Tinseltown—even though that particular format
would soon be replaced by the now-standard sound-on-film.

Talkie triumph: Al Jolson (right) sings “Blue Skies” to Eugenie Besserer in The Jazz Singer, part of a lavish three-DVD box set.

 

This classic deserves the spiffy
treatment, too, despite a maudlin plot that nevertheless sucks you in.
Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) defies the wishes of his cantor-dad
(Warner Oland in his pre-Charlie Chan days) and runs away to become a
Broadway star named Jack Robin, but Jakie’s show-biz assimilation must
take a back seat to tradition in time for the final reel. Will Jakie
skip the Great White Way to perform “Kol Nidre” during the Day of
Atonement?

The first disc has the 89-minute
feature, with its time boosted to 96 minutes when seven minutes of
intro and exit music are factored in. The audio commentary is by Ron
Hutchinson, a co-founder of the Vitaphone Project, dedicated to the
preservation of the early Warner talkies that maintained the
sound-on-disc system, and Nighthawks musician Vince Giordano, who has
worked on the oldies-drenched soundtracks of several Woody Allen
flicks. The duo impart lots of trivia and technical details along the
way: The DVD’s improved aural majesty replaces the old sound transfer
from an early 1930s print; director Alan Crosland is given his due for
eliciting the warm earnestness of Jolson’s performance; only two
theaters in the country could play the Vitaphone setup when The Jazz Singer
premiered, although the bijous quickly converted to sound over the next
year; reviewers of the era, immune to the effects of cornball cinema
even back then, drubbed the movie’s plot as sentimental and hackneyed;
George Jessel, who played the role on Broadway and was initially signed
for the movie (Hutchinson has pre-release posters attesting to this),
was dropped when he unwisely asked for more money; and that the drama’s
occasional lapse into stereotypes may be connected to the ethnic
shticks of vaudeville acts—although some modern-day politically correct
viewers will never get past the moments when Jolson dons blackface to
sing “Mammy.” 

Still, Warner Home Video acutely understands the historical aspects of The Jazz Singer. The second disc offers the 85-minute documentary The Dawn of Sound,
a lively chronicle of the events leading to the Jolson talkie, which is
actually a silent movie during much of its running time, until the star
bursts into song. Acclaimed genius Thomas Edison got the ball rolling
(an 1894 short features a violinist playing next to a recording horn,
while two men are dancing), followed by the rocky alliance of two
inventors, Dr. Lee DeForest and Auburn’s Thomas Case, with the latter
pushing for his sound-on-film creation. Warner’s sound-on-disc
Vitaphone technique was the initial winner, even though its cumbersome
operation (basically a record player interlocked with a film projector)
would soon be replaced by Case’s movie method. 

Melodrama miss: Norma Talmadge (right, with Johnny Fox) as The Lady (1925), unspooling in a 35mm print at the Palace on Saturday. 

Weighing in are various historians (film
archivist Rudy Behlmer, Cinefest regular Leonard Maltin, Eileen McHugh
of the Case Research Lab Museum) and current Hollywood talents (sound
designer Ben Burtt). Among the documentary’s many tidbits: Jolson’s
1928 follow-up The Singing Fool, which is running at Cinefest 28, was Hollywood’s biggest box-office hit until 1939’s Gone With the Wind; Sam Warner, who shepherded the talkie production, dropped dead a day before The Jazz Singer’s Manhattan premiere; and there are clips of Buster Keaton speaking in a phonetic dialect in order for his 1930 comedy Free and Easy to be released in foreign markets.

A wealth of supplementary material is spread throughout the box set. Returning to the first disc, the 1926 sound short A Plantation Act,
with Jolson in blackface for 10 minutes, is a solid representation of
his vaudeville style, especially his seemingly intimate connection with
his audience; his tag line “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” is uttered
for the first time. An Intimate Dinner in Celebration of Warner Brothers’ Silver Jubilee
(1930; 11 minutes) is a vintage short of self-promotion, as Little Miss
Vitaphone (Betty Jane Graham) introduces forgotten contract stars
aplenty (Jolson’s MIA, however), although there are glimpses of
tunesmiths such as Jerome Kern and Rodgers and Hart. 

A pair of gotta-win-the-big-race shorts include Hollywood Handicap (1938; 10 minutes),

directed by Keaton and featuring snippets of
Bing Crosby, Oliver Hardy and Edgar Bergen at the Santa Anita Park race
track (Jolson and then-wife Ruby Keeler show up at the six-minute
mark), and the Technicolor A Day at Santa Anita (1937; 18
minutes) tethers a lame plot involving child star Sybil Jason with
cameos from Jolson (who tells a joke about his system for picking
horses), Edward G. Robinson (his gag involves pulling out a cigar
instead of a gat) and comic-relief veterans Frank McHugh and Allen
Jenkins. 

But wait, the first disc has more: Jolson in the June 2, 1947, adaptation of The Jazz Singer for the Lux Radio Theatre broadcast; the Merrie Melodies color cartoon I Love to Singa
(1936; eight minutes), director Tex Avery’s clever parody in which
young Owl Jolson is at odds with his music-professor dad; and 21
minutes of trailers for Jolson’s other Warner movies, with a
seven-minute spot for The Jazz Singer (including scenes from the movie’s New York City debut) and a five-minute ad for 1930’s Mammy, Irving Berlin’s minstrel musical. 

The second disc’s extras include 16 minutes of surviving footage from the 1929 lost musical Gold Diggers of Broadway, filmed in two-strip Technicolor; The Voice from the Screen
(16 minutes), a 1926 antique created for the New York Electrical
Society that details the laborious process of creating a Vitaphone
short subject involving two vaudeville musicians named Witt and Berg
(yet the finished product turns out to be a different song than the one
they warbled during the alleged filmmaking!); Finding His Voice (1929; 11 minutes), an educational cartoon co-directed by Popeye’s Max Fleischer; The Voice That Thrilled the World (1943; 18 minutes), a mix of clips and stock footage narrated by Art Gilmore; Okay for Sound (1946; 20 minutes), another thumbnail history lesson in celebration of sound’s 20th anniversary and 1926’s Don Juan
(which has music and sound effects, but no dialogue), but it’s mostly
an excuse for scenes from Warner’s 1946 output, including The Big Sleep and Night and Day; and When the Talkies Were Young (1955; 20 minutes), a Robert Youngson compilation with entire scenes lifted from 1930s Warner product like Night Nurse and Svengali.

The third disc holds close to four
hours’ worth of 24 Vitaphone short subjects, mostly from the late 1920s
and early 1930s. Each short runs anywhere from seven to 10 minutes and
features then-popular vaudeville acts reprising their routines for the
silver screen. The musicians and comedians didn’t know at the time that
they were committing career suicide, as these talkies would soon
squelch the vaudeville tradition, which means these movie relics boast
a tinge of sadness to go with their entertainment value. Lambchops has George Burns and Gracie Allen going through their classic paces, while Baby Rose Marie, The Child Wonder offers the brassy moppet some 30 years before her scene-stealing role on TV’s The Dick Van Dyke Show. Yet other pleasures come from the Shaw and Lee comic team in The Beau Brummels, Trixie Friganza’s spelling bee in My Bag O’Tricks, and The Night Court’s William Demarest (who plays Jolson’s dining partner in Jazz Singer) takes one of the most spectacular pratfalls you’ll ever see.

—Bill DeLapp