Changing the Face of America
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“My flesh crept as the loud speaker poured out the sodden words, the greasy sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed.”
So wrote Aldous Huxley, in 1929, after seeing “The Jazz Singer.” Half a century later, David Thompson was no less censorious: “It is as if printing had been invented to fill labels on ketchup bottles: That sound on film … should have been born on the lips of a Lithuanian Jew blackface minstrel encouraging his mother to love him.”
At least Huxley and Mr. Thompson reserved most of their derision for the film’s monstrous sentimentality, a fair point — though some of us would suggest, ever so gently, that Jolson made an art of monstrous sentimentality: a cunning, pandering, madly riveting art. Those who disdain the film as racist are skating on thinner ice. “The Jazz Singer” is a middlebrow but serious inquiry into ethnic identity. Given the status of race as the no. 1 theme in American life and culture, we could hardly ask for a more fitting choice to inaugurate sound on film than a Lithuanian Jew blackface minstrel — except maybe Bert Williams, a Bahamian Negro blackface minstrel, but he was dead.
Warner Bros. has now released, on the occasion of its 80th anniversary, a three-disc DVD edition of “The Jazz Singer,” which doubles as a tribute to the Vitaphone Corporation and its efforts to synchronize sound on film. The elaborate package, with its many hours of extras and printed inserts, offers no comments on race or any other idea beyond the wonders and perfidies of technology. That, too, is fitting — it’s far easier to trace historical facts than the historicist factors that define social mores. Make of this indispensable survey what you will: It’s a veritable four-credit course on one brief, indelible stage in the development of American popular culture.
Directed by Alan Crosland, “The Jazz Singer” (1927) made its bones as the first feature film with synchronized dialog (about two minutes worth). There had been short films with dialog and long ones with synchronized music and sound effects, but nothing like this. “The Jazz Singer” turned the industry on its ear, and Jolson’s contribution can hardly be overstated.
Jolson’s vitality, inseparable from his ego, was tuned to a vocal, terpsichorean, and comedic pitch that nullified the need for microphones, scripts, or other actors. He was the holy roller of popular entertainment. Wound up in song — windmill arms, rolling eyes, swaying hips — Jolson was relentless, like someone grabbing you by the lapels and shaking you up and down until you cry uncle. Many people found this easy to resist. Luckily for the four Warner brothers, especially Sam, who dedicated himself to putting sound on film, the American public couldn’t get enough.
This was astonishing on several levels. In a time of endemic anti-Semitism, the most famous American showman — rivaled in celebrity by Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth — was a Jew who wore his Jewishness on his sleeve and a strangely empathetic blackness on his face. (If Jolson’s black alter ego, Gus, was a sentimental caricature, he was also the smartest, wisest man in the room.) In one of the ironies surrounding “The Jazz Singer,” Jolson got the role of Jakie Rabinowitz/Jack Robin after George Jessel, who originated it on stage, out-priced himself and Eddie Cantor turned it down. Samson Raphaelson had based the play on Jolson’s life: the son of a rabbi who left home as a boy to work as a burlesque stooge and minstrel. That’s damn near the plot.
As a drama of assimilation, “The Jazz Singer” is one of the oldest stories since the advent of civilization: How to make the leap from immigrant to citizen? How to balance old traditions and new? Raphaelson’s uniquely American twist stemmed from his recognition of minstrelsy — in its eighth decade when his play made its debut — as a kind of ethnic tunnel. Jolson himself recalled entering the tunnel as an insecure Jew, finding a performance style through the invincible anonymity of blackface, and exiting as a fully assimilated American entertainer.
“The Jazz Singer” scrupulously avoids using blackface for comic relief or nostalgia. When Rabinowitz finally “blacks up” in his dressing room, the effect has a metaphorical purity; he doesn’t know who he is, and putting on the wig and cork provides temporary comfort: He smiles at his gentile lover as he puts on the mask that will make him a star even as it renders him invisible. In the end, he is no more himself filling in for his dying father on Kol Nidre than he is in minstrel drag. “Mama, we have our son again,” the cantor says with his dying breath. Cut to the Winter Garden: Jack Robin, in blackface and on bended knee, sings of another “Mammy” in another way.
The DVD set is much more than this film. It offers an original, well researched and edited 85-minute documentary, “The Dawn of Sound,” marred by the annoying de rigueur present-tense narrative style and a total neglect of advances in sound film going on in Europe at the same time. There is good commentary, relevant short subjects (highlights: Jolson’s “Plantation Act” and a vehicle for the black Original Sing Band, directed by Buster Keaton, though you’d never guess), a radio broadcast, facsimile booklets, and Jolson trailers, including misleading previews for his best film, “Mammy,” and his most surreal, “Wonder Bar” — forthcoming, I hope.
But the real prize here, an excavator’s paradise, is a selection of 24 Vitaphone shorts from 1926–29, an extraordinary quarry of remote entertainment styles. Note that they do not include the 1926 musical numbers that introduced Vitaphone’s system (as a prologue to “Don Juan”) or the elaborately directed short films of the 1930s and ’40s. Instead, these are mostly obscurities, some long available, others thought lost or deteriorated beyond repair. Though the performers are exclusively white (unlike the later Vitaphones), they cover a lot of territory, and though they are often referred to as vaudevillians, most of them were not — no more than Jolson, who never even played the Palace.
In addition to several true vaudeville luminaries — Elsie Janis, Burns and Allen, Van and Schenk, Blossom Seeley and Bennie Fields, the Foys, Trixie Friganza, etc. — there are performers and bands from New York night clubs and revues, otherwise lost to history. Standouts include Shaw and Lee, (dour comedians in bowler hats who do double takes after every line), and a sketch with William Demarest, who does two Keatonesque pratfalls. The songs are consistently among the very worst of the period, possibly reflecting a rights issue, but music buffs will enjoy seeing 20-year-old Russ Columbo sing falsetto with Gus Arnheim’s band, and arranger George Stoll leading a quintet and doing a fair Joe Venuti imitation on violin. Warner Bros. should have included commentary or at least dates and personnel listings for these films.
One short is a major discovery, “The Happy Hottentots,” starring the legendary dancer and stuttering comedian Joe Frisco, who does not stutter here. This is the only short among these early Vitaphones with multiple stage sets and a plot, and is so little remembered that even Frisco’s biographers omit it. Tying several inside-showbiz gags to a memorable finish, it features a small unbilled cast including vaudevillian Billy Callahan, who wears gloves because of severe psoriasis, and the great Billy Gilbert. Frisco is remembered today for still-repeated witticisms and unlikely walk-ons in a book (“The Great Gatsby”) and movie (“The Sweet Smell of Success”). It is a joy to finally seem him work for more than a few seconds.
Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”