The Jazz Singer

Plot

Cantor Rabinowitz wants his 13-year-old son, Jacob "Jakie" Rabinowitz, to carry on the generations-old family tradition and become a cantor at the synagogue in the Jewish ghetto of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Jakie has instead taken a liking to singing jazz at the local beer garden. Moisha Yudelson spots the boy and tells Jakie's father, who drags him home. Jakie clings to his mother, Sara, as his father declares, "I'll teach him better than to debase the voice God gave him!" Jakie threatens: "If you whip me again, I'll run away—and never come back!" After the whipping, Jakie kisses his mother goodbye and, true to his word, runs away. At the Yom Kippur service, Rabinowitz mournfully tells a fellow celebrant, "My son was to stand at my side and sing tonight—but now I have no son." As the sacred Kol Nidre is sung, Jakie sneaks back home to retrieve a picture of his loving mother.

About ten years later, Jakie has anglicized his name to Jack Robin. Jack is called up from his table at a cabaret to perform on stage ("Dirty Hands, Dirty Face").

Jack wows the crowd with his energized rendition of "Toot, Toot, Tootsie". Afterward, he is introduced to the beautiful Mary Dale, a musical theater dancer. "There are lots of jazz singers, but you have a tear in your voice", she says, offering to help with his budding career. With her help, Jack eventually gets his big break: a leading part in the new musical April Follies.

Back at the family home Jack left long ago, the elder Rabinowitz is instructing a young student in the traditional cantorial art. Jack appears, attempting to explain his perspective and his love for modern music, but the appalled cantor dismisses him, saying, "I never want to see you again—you jazz singer!" As Jack leaves, he makes a prediction: "I came home with a heart full of love, but you don't want to understand. Someday you'll understand, just as Mama does."

Two weeks after Jack's expulsion from the family home and 24 hours before the opening night of April Follies on Broadway, Jack's father falls gravely ill. Jack is asked to choose between the show and duty to his family and faith: in order to sing the Kol Nidre for Yom Kippur in his father's place, he will have to miss the big premiere.

That evening, the eve of Yom Kippur, Yudelson tells the Jewish elders, "For the first time, we have no Cantor on the Day of Atonement." Lying in his bed, weak and gaunt, Cantor Rabinowitz tells Sara that he cannot perform on the most sacred of holy days: "My son came to me in my dreams—he sang Kol Nidre so beautifully. If he would only sing like that tonight—surely he would be forgiven."

Cast

Al Jolson as Jacob "Jakie" Rabinowitz (Jack Robin)

Bobby Gordon as Jakie Rabinowitz (age 13)

Warner Oland as Cantor Rabinowitz, Jakie Rabinowitz's (Jack Robin's) father

Eugenie Besserer as Sara Rabinowitz, Jakie Rabinowitz's (Jack Robin's) mother

May McAvoy as Mary Dale

Otto Lederer as Moisha Yudelson

Richard Tucker as Harry Lee

Yossele Rosenblatt as himself

Songs

"My Gal Sal" (music and lyrics by Paul Dresser; dubbed by unknown singer with Bobby Gordon onscreen)

"Waiting for the Robert E. Lee" (music by Lewis F. Muir and lyrics by L. Wolfe Gilbert; dubbed by unknown singer with Bobby Gordon onscreen)

"Yussel, Yussel" (music by Samuel Steinberg and lyrics by Nellie Casman, 1923); heard as background music as Jolson walks through his ghetto neighborhood.

"Kol Nidre" (traditional; dubbed by Joseph Diskay with Warner Oland onscreen; sung also by Al Jolson)

"Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" (music by James V. Monaco and lyrics by Edgar Leslie and Grant Clarke; sung by Al Jolson)

"Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye)" (music and lyrics by Gus Kahn, Ernie Erdman, and Dan Russo [title orthography and songwriting credits per original sheet music cover; some other sources do not mention Russo and some also name either or both Ted Fio Rito and Robert A. King]; sung by Al Jolson)

"Kaddish" (traditional; sung by Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt)

"Yahrzeit Licht"; sung by Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt

"Blue Skies" (music and lyrics by Irving Berlin; sung by Al Jolson)

"Mother of Mine, I Still Have You" (music by Louis Silvers and lyrics by Grant Clarke [Jolson also credited by some sources]; sung by Al Jolson)

"My Mammy" (music by Walter Donaldson and lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young; sung by Al Jolson)

Production

Concept and development

On April 25, 1917, Samson Raphaelson, a native of New York City's Lower East Side and a University of Illinois undergraduate, attended a performance of the musical Robinson Crusoe, Jr. in Champaign, Illinois. The star of the show was a thirty-year-old singer, Al Jolson, a Lithuanian-born Jew who performed in blackface. In a 1927 interview, Raphaelson described the experience: "I shall never forget the first five minutes of Jolson—his velocity, the amazing fluidity with which he shifted from a tremendous absorption in his audience to a tremendous absorption in his song." He explained that he had seen emotional intensity like Jolson's only among synagogue cantors.

A few years later, pursuing a professional literary career, Raphaelson wrote "The Day of Atonement", a short story about a young Jew named Jakie Rabinowitz, based on Jolson's real life. The story was published in January 1922 in Everybody's Magazine. Raphaelson later adapted the story into a stage play, The Jazz Singer. A straight drama, all the singing in Raphaelson's version takes place offstage. With George Jessel in the lead role, the show premiered at the Warner Theatre in Times Square in September 1925 and became a hit. Warner Bros. acquired the movie rights to the play on June 4, 1926, and signed Jessel to a contract. The Moving Picture World published a story in February 1927 announcing that production on the film would begin with Jessel on May 1.

But the plans to make the film with Jessel would fall through, for multiple reasons. Jessel's contract with Warner Bros. had not anticipated that the movie they had particularly signed him for would be made with sound (he'd made a modestly budgeted, silent comedy in the interim). When Warner had hits with two Vitaphone, though dialogue-less, features in late 1926, The Jazz Singer production had been reconceived. Jessel asked for a bonus or a new contract, but was rebuffed. According to Jessel's description in his autobiography, Harry Warner "was having a tough time with the financing of the company... He talked about taking care of me if the picture was a success. I did not feel that was enough." In fact, around the beginning of 1927, Harry Warner—the eldest of the brothers who ran the eponymous studio—had sold $4 million of his personal stock to keep the studio solvent. Then came another major issue. According to Jessel, a first read of screenwriter Alfred A. Cohn's adaptation "threw me into a fit. Instead of the boy's leaving the theatre and following the traditions of his father by singing in the synagogue, as in the play, the picture scenario had him return to the Winter Garden as a blackface comedian, with his mother wildly applauding in the box. I raised hell. Money or no money, I would not do this."

Introduction of sound

While many earlier sound films had dialogue, all were short subjects. D. W. Griffith's feature Dream Street (1921) was shown in New York with a single singing sequence and crowd noises, using the sound-on-disc system Photokinema. The film was preceded by a program of sound shorts, including a sequence with Griffith speaking directly to the audience, but the feature itself had no talking scenes. On April 15, 1923, Lee De Forest introduced the sound-on-film system Phonofilm, which had synchronized sound and dialogue, but the sound quality was poor, and the films produced in this process were short films only.

The first Warner Bros. Vitaphone features, Don Juan (premiered August 1926) and The Better 'Ole (premiered October 1926), like three more that followed in early 1927 (When a Man Loves, Old San Francisco, and The First Auto), had only a synchronized instrumental score and sound effects. The Jazz Singer contains those, as well as numerous synchronized singing sequences and some synchronized speech: Two popular tunes are performed by the young Jakie Rabinowitz, the future Jazz Singer; his father, a cantor, performs the devotional Kol Nidre; the famous cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, appearing as himself, sings an excerpt of another religious melody, Kaddish, and the song "Yahrzeit Licht". As the adult Jack Robin, Jolson performs six songs: five popular "jazz" tunes and the Kol Nidre. The sound for the film was recorded by British-born George Groves, who had also worked on Don Juan. To direct, the studio chose Alan Crosland, who already had two Vitaphone films to his credit: Don Juan and Old San Francisco, which opened while The Jazz Singer was in production.

Jolson's first vocal performance, about fifteen minutes into the picture, is of "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face", with music by James V. Monaco and lyrics by Edgar Leslie and Grant Clarke. The first synchronized speech, uttered by Jack to a cabaret crowd and to the piano player in the band that accompanies him, occurs directly after that performance, beginning at the 17:25 mark of the film. Jack's first spoken words—"Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet"—were well-established stage patter of Jolson's. He had even spoken very similar lines in an earlier short, A Plantation Act (1926). The line had become virtually an in-joke. In November 1918, during a gala concert celebrating the end of World War I, Jolson ran onstage amid the applause for the preceding performer, the great operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, and exclaimed, "Folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The following year, he recorded the song "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet". In a later scene, Jack talks with his mother, played by Eugenie Besserer, in the family parlor; his father enters and pronounces one very conclusive word, "Stop!", the final line of dialogue in the film.

Premiere and reception

The premiere occurred on October 6, 1927, at Warner Bros.' flagship theater in New York City. In keeping with the film's theme of a conflict within a Jewish family, the film premiered after sunset on the eve of the Yom Kippur holiday. The buildup to the premiere was tense. Besides Warner Bros.' precarious financial position, the physical presentation of the film itself was remarkably complex:Each of Jolson's musical numbers was mounted on a separate reel with a separate accompanying sound disc. Even though the film was only eighty-nine minutes long ... there were fifteen reels and fifteen discs to manage, and the projectionist had to be able to thread the film and cue up the Vitaphone records very quickly. The least stumble, hesitation, or human error would result in public and financial humiliation for the company. None of the four Warner brothers were able to attend: Sam Warner—among them the strongest advocate for Vitaphone—had died the previous day of pneumonia, and the surviving brothers had returned to California for his funeral.

According to Doris Warner, who was in attendance, about halfway through the film she began to feel that something exceptional was taking place. Suddenly, Jolson's face appeared in big close-up, and said "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet!" Jolson's "Wait a minute" line prompted a loud, positive response from the audience, who were dumbfounded by seeing and hearing someone speak on a film for the first time, so much so that the double-entendre was missed at first. Applause followed each of his songs. Excitement built, and when Jolson and Eugenie Besserer began their dialogue scene, "the audience became hysterical." After the show, the audience turned into a "milling, battling, mob", in one journalist's description, chanting "Jolson, Jolson, Jolson!" Among those who reviewed the film, the critic who foresaw most clearly what it presaged for the future of cinema was Life magazine's Robert E. Sherwood. He described the spoken dialogue scene between Jolson and Besserer as "fraught with tremendous significance... I for one suddenly realized that the end of the silent drama is in sight".

Critical reaction was generally, though far from universally, positive. The New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall, reviewing the film's premiere, declared that

not since the first presentation of Vitaphone features, more than a year ago (i.e. Don Juan), has anything like the ovation been heard in a motion-picture theatre... The Vitaphoned songs and some dialogue have been introduced most adroitly. This in itself is an ambitious move, for in the expression of song the Vitaphone vitalizes the production enormously. The dialogue is not so effective, for it does not always catch the nuances of speech or inflections of the voice so that one is not aware of the mechanical features.

Commercial impact and industrial influence

The film developed into a major hit, demonstrating the profit potential of feature-length "talkies", but Donald Crafton has shown that the reputation the film later acquired for being one of Hollywood's most enormous successes to date was inflated. The movie did well, but not astonishingly so, in the major cities where it was first released, garnering much of its impressive profits with long, steady runs in population centers large and small all around the country. As conversion of movie theaters to sound was still in its early stages, the film actually arrived at many of those secondary venues in a silent version. On the other hand, Crafton's statement that The Jazz Singer "was in a distinct second or third tier of attractions compared to the most popular films of the day and even other Vitaphone talkies" is also incorrect. In fact, the film was easily the biggest earner in Warner Bros. history, and would remain so until it was surpassed a year later by The Singing Fool, another Jolson feature. In the larger scope of Hollywood, among films originally released in 1927, available evidence suggests that The Jazz Singer was among the three biggest box office hits, trailing only Wings and, perhaps, The King of Kings.

According to Warner Bros. records, the film earned revenues of $1,974,000 in the United States and Canada, and $651,000 elsewhere, for a worldwide theatrical gross rental of approximately $2.6 million (the studio's share of the box office gross) and a profit of $1,196,750.

One of the keys to the film's success was an innovative marketing scheme conceived by Sam Morris, Warner Bros.' sales manager. In Crafton's description:

[A] special clause in Warners' Vitaphone exhibition contract virtually guaranteed long runs. Theaters had to book The Jazz Singer for full rather than split weeks. Instead of the traditional flat rental fee, Warners took a percentage of the gate. A sliding scale meant that the exhibitor's take increased the longer the film was held over. The signing of this contract by the greater New York Fox Theatres circuit was regarded as a headline-making precedent.

Similar arrangements, based on a percentage of the gross rather than flat rental fees, would soon become standard for the U.S. film industry's high-end or "A" product.

Critical analysis

Jack Robin's use of blackface in his Broadway stage act—a common practice at the time, which is now widely condemned as racist—is the primary focus of many Jazz Singer studies. Its crucial and unusual role is described by scholar Corin Willis:

In contrast to the racial jokes and innuendo brought out in its subsequent persistence in early sound film, blackface imagery in The Jazz Singer is at the core of the film's central theme, an expressive and artistic exploration of the notion of duplicity and ethnic hybridity within American identity. 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.

The function and meaning of blackface in the film is intimately involved with Jack's own Jewish heritage and his desire to make his mark in mass American culture—much as the ethnically Jewish Jolson and the Warner brothers were doing themselves. Jack Robin "compounds both tradition and stardom. The Warner Brothers thesis is that, really to succeed, a man must first acknowledge his ethnic self," argues W. T. Lhamon. "[T]he whole film builds toward the blacking-up scene at the dress rehearsal. Jack Robin needs the blackface mask as the agency of his compounded identity. Blackface will hold all the identities together without freezing them in a singular relationship or replacing their parts."

Seymour Stark's view is less sanguine. In describing Jolson's extensive experience performing in blackface in stage musicals, he asserts, "The immigrant Jew as Broadway star ... works within a blackface minstrel tradition that obscures his Jewish pedigree, but proclaims his white identity. Jolson's slight Yiddish accent was hidden by a Southern veneer." Arguing that The Jazz Singer actually avoids honestly dealing with the tension between American assimilation and Jewish identity, he claims that its "covert message ... is that the symbol of blackface provides the Jewish immigrant with the same rights and privileges accorded to earlier generations of European immigrants initiated into the rituals of the minstrel show."

Lisa Silberman Brenner contradicts this view. She returns to the intentions expressed by Samson Raphaelson, on whose play the film's script was closely based: "For Raphaelson, jazz is prayer, American style, and the blackface minstrel the new Jewish cantor. Based on the author's own words, the play is about blackface as a means for Jews to express a new kind of Jewishness, that of the modern American Jew." She observes that during the same period, the Jewish press was noting with pride that Jewish performers were adopting aspects of African American music.

Legacy

Three subsequent screen versions of The Jazz Singer have been produced: a 1952 remake, starring Danny Thomas and Peggy Lee; a 1959 television remake, starring Jerry Lewis; and a 1980 remake starring Neil Diamond, Lucie Arnaz, and Laurence Olivier. The Jazz Singer was adapted as a one-hour radio play on two broadcasts of Lux Radio Theatre, both starring Al Jolson, reprising his screen role. The first aired August 10, 1936; the second, also starring Gail Patrick, on June 2, 1947.

Disney made reference to the film, and its follow-up The Singing Fool, in the title of the 1929 Mickey Mouse short, The Jazz Fool.

The Jazz Singer was parodied in the 1936 Warner Bros. cartoon I Love to Singa, directed by Tex Avery. Its hero is "Owl Jolson", a young owl who croons popular ditties, such as the title song, against the wishes of his father, a classical music teacher. Among the many references to The Jazz Singer in popular culture, perhaps the most significant is that of the MGM musical Singin' in the Rain (1952). The story, set in 1927, revolves around efforts to change a silent film production, The Dueling Cavalier, into a talking picture in response to The Jazz Singer's success. At one point Donald O'Connor's character suggests a new name for the now-musical, "I've got it! 'The Dueling Mammy'." The plot of The Simpsons episode "Like Father, Like Clown" (1991) parallels the tale of Jakie Rabinowitz/Jack Robin. Krusty the Clown's rabbi father disapproves of his son's choice to be a comedian, telling him, "You have brought shame on our family! Oh, if you were a musician or a jazz singer, this I could forgive."

According to film historian Krin Gabbard, The Jazz Singer "provides the basic narrative for the lives of jazz and popular musicians in the movies. If this argument means that sometime after 1959 the narrative must belong to pop rockers, it only proves the power of the original 1927 film to determine how Hollywood tells the stories of popular musicians." More broadly, he also suggests that this "seemingly unique film" has "become a paradigm for American success stories." More specifically, he examines a cycle of biopics of white jazz musicians stretching from Birth of the Blues (1941) to The Five Pennies (1959) that trace their roots to The Jazz Singer.

In 1996, The Jazz Singer was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" motion pictures. In 1998, the film was chosen in voting conducted by the American Film Institute as one of the best American films of all time, ranking at number ninety. In 2007, a three-disc deluxe DVD edition of the film was released. The supplemental material includes Jolson's Vitaphone short, A Plantation Act (1926).