At the end of the
day it's nice to fee
grounded by the
finer things in life.
Jack Robin (Al Jolson) sings to Mama (Eugenie Besserer) in The Jazz Singer.
Jessel. Warner Brothers snapped up
the rights; and because "The Day
of Atonement" had been based on
Jolson anyway, casting him was a no-
brainer.
The studio decided to shoot his
six songs with sound, including
"Mammy" and Irving Berlin's big
new hit, "Blue Skies," plus Kol Nidre.
But in the musical sequences, the
irrepressible star also interpolated
some spoken words of his own.
His confident promise, "You ain't
heard nothin' yet!" first uttered at
a U. S. Army benefit in 1918, when
Jolson was billed after the great
Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, proved
to be a disarmingly apt inauguration
of the sound era.
Opening in New York on Oct. 6,
1927, one night before the eve of
Yom Kippur, The Jazz Singer cre-
ated a sensation. The purists among
film historians still consider that
milestone a silent film, in which the
songs and the few lines of dialogue
are recorded on disc. Not until the
following year, with the Warner
Brothers' The Lights of New York,
was a truly complete sound film
released.
But by then, The Jazz Singer was
already being lifted into the elevated
realm of myth. The pop iconography
of the blackface balladeer down on
one knee crying for his Mammy
quickly Ted to parody. Even as late as
the bar mitzvah of Woody Allen, the
future filmmaker did a Jolson imita-
tion at the party after the ceremony.
Such is the enduring power of
The Jazz Singer that it led to half a
dozen subsequent versions, includ-
ing a 1952 remake starring the
Lebanese-American Danny Thomas,
a 1959 NBC telecast with Jerry Lewis
playing the cantor's son and, finally,
a 1980 film starring Neil Diamond.
Slumming it as Diamond's father was
Sir Laurence Olivier. About these
later versions, the less said, the bet-
ter.
Admittedly the 1927 original is far
from a masterpiece either, judged
solely in aesthetic terms. The fasci-
nation with what Warner Brothers
wrought remains ethnographic.
For no other American movie quite
matches the immediacy of The Jazz
Singer in considering the implica-
tions of assimilation.
No other film shows quite so
piercingly the ferocious impulses
that drove so many Jews into the
inviting society that was America, or
calibrates so lucidly the cost that was
exacted upon the family and upon
the hope that the lines of religious
continuity would not snap.
The Jazz Singer still has the
power to sting, not only in trac-
ing the intensity of the yearning to
escape from the restrictions of the
past, but also in showing the hurt
that is felt even as the validity of
the desire for personal success is
affirmed. ❑
Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max
Richter Chair in American Civilization at
Brandeis University and is the author of
In Search of American Jewish Culture
(University Press of New England).
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