1927 musical, dir. Alan Crosland, Al Jolson, May McAvoy;
IMDb /
allmovie. Will the good
Jewish boy have a dazzling entertainment career or stay true to his
roots? Both!
This is the film that has been enshrined as the "first talkie",
but really it's only part of the way through the transition; if one
wants to be formal, it's "the first feature-length motion picture with
both synchronised recorded music and lip-synchronous singing and
speech" — though there are only two short speaking scenes. Nothing
that was done here was a major technical advance: short speaking
scenes had been done before, as early as 1921 with Griffith's Dream
Street, but this was the first time they'd been patched into a
full-length film.
Of the two major sound-film technologies, this was using the one that
would eventually lose, the sound-on-disc approach (specifically
Vitaphone; there were dozens of the things, differing only in the
tiniest details, which generated a huge amount of money for patent
lawyers and delayed innovation for years). There were three major
problems with sound on disc in the early days: the disc had to be
synchronised with the film (and as I know from audio editing, even a
tiny error in run rate rapidly produces noticeable desychronisation),
the volume of a disc player couldn't fill more than the smallest
cinema, and disc quality wasn't all that great considering that the
competition was live musicians.
Those problems were largely solved, with increasingly baroque
mechanical synchronisers, electrical amplification, and better
pressing techniques; but a disc still had to be recorded all in one take
since it couldn't be edited, discs had to be shipped to cinemas in
addition to film reels, and after twenty showings or so they'd worn
down to the point of uselessness.
Hollywood was as always very reluctant to engage with the new
technology, not so much for fear of picking the wrong option as simply
feeling that what they'd been doing was good enough, and film critics
largely agreed; but rural audiences, who'd never had a chance to hear
the full orchestra that a big production might have been scored for,
loved even the poor quality of early sound. And where this film can
legitimately claim to have been pioneering, while not so much on the
technical front, is that it was the first sound picture to be a huge
financial success.
Not that the studio was hedging its bets. The script was derived from
a successful play by Samuel Raphaelson, inspired by the early life of
Al Jolson. They didn't immediately reach for Jolson in the lead,
though they certainly wanted a big star with whom audiences were
already familiar; the first choice was George Jessel, who'd been the
Broadway lead, but he fell out with the company on the basis of the
changes they'd made to the script. (Also he wasn't happy with a
contract amounting to "don't worry, kid, we'll take care of you".)
Eddie Cantor turned it down too. So Jolson it was.
This is a silent film at heart, with musical interludes and really one
spoken scene (very much ad-libbed, these are the days before scripts
after all) plus one spoken line. Sound film needed a new shooting
style, and it hadn't yet been developed.
Meanwhile on a technical level this 90-odd-minute film was supplied on
fifteen reels and fifteen discs: each of the musical numbers had its
own set of media, and the projectionist had to swap them over rather
more often than usual.
After all that, I confess I found the story itself rather dull. There
is a central dilemma, fair enough: should you give up the budding
career you love to do what your unbending father wants for you? You
can't have both things. Fair enough, dilemma. In the play, Jakie does
give up his career to go back to his family. But then the film cheats,
and says, eh, you let down the audience on the big opening night, but
you can have the career back anyway, because (waves hands vaguely) and
we want a happy ending. This is what Jessel and Cantor objected to: it
takes all the point out of the story.
The singing isn't much to my taste; it's very much in a style to show
off the lead's voice, often accompanied only by a piano, while the
jazz I prefer is from a slightly later era, music from a band (only
sometimes with vocals) that you can get up and dance to.
And of course there's the blackface. I know that "of its time" is
overused, but I think that's genuinely the case here; if anything,
blackface music and minstrel songs were going out of fashion by the
1920s. In an era when a black entertainer playing to a white audience
would have been actually illegal in many states, it's an ignorant and
unthinking parody; but nobody here seems to think it's a good thing,
simply that it's what you have to do to please the punters, just like
dressing the girl up in feathers and sparkles. Honestly I was more
offended by the repeated references to Jakie's "race", as if his
Jewishness were the most important and only significant thing about
him.
So for me, much more interesting because of the transition to talkie
than for anything intrinsic to the film itself. Hey ho.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.