Celluloid Heroes

You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

Economists have a term known as creative destruction. That’s when a new innovation appears on the market and the established order of an industry has the proverbial rug pulled out from under its feet. The introduction of synchronized sound, especially dialog, had that sort of effect on the film industry. Not only were careers ended for performers who couldn’t adapt to the new demands, but silent films already in production were either shelved or reshot with sound. Within a couple of years, silent films had gone from being state of the art to yesterday’s relics. They were the 1920’s equivalent of last year’s iPod.

The Jazz Singer’s role in bringing around this change is probably somewhat overstated. It was certainly not the first sound film. Thomas Edison had experimented with the idea thirty years earlier. Short films utilizing the same Vitaphone recording process used for The Jazz Singer had been in theaters for a couple of years. A year earlier, Don Juan had used the process for sound effects and music, but not dialog. Fox used a rival process for its Movietone newsreels to bring audiences both sight and sound from Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris. It isn’t even really a sound film in the way we think of it, since most of the story is told in the traditional form of a silent movie, with synchronized Vitaphone sound used only for three or four key musical scenes featuring star Al Jolson.

It was, however, the first commercially successful feature length film to use synchronized sound in any significant way, helped tremendously by both the fame of its star and advances in sound playback technology. After years of expensive failures that had caused them write sound films off as a dead-end gimmick, the movie industry realized overnight that silent films had just been handed a death sentence and the governor would not be calling. It was also the movie that helped turn Warner Bros. from a minor player into the major studio it is today.

The film’s simple story of a Jewish cantor’s son who disobeys his father to have a career as a jazz singer is nothing to write home about. If this film had not been technologically groundbreaking and changed movies forever as a result, I doubt either it or the play it was based upon would be remembered today. The Warner brothers were also fortunate that the play’s original star, George Jessel, demanded too much money for their tastes. Apparently, in George’s mind, talking on film should cost extra. This freed the filmmakers to sign the talent they really wanted, the most popular entertainer of the era, Al Jolson. Had he not starred in the film it’s possible that The Jazz Singer would not have had the commercial impact that it did.

Now, one aspect of The Jazz Singer that makes modern audiences cringe is the appearance of Jolson on stage in blackface makeup. While certainly out of step with current sensibilities, it’s also true that Jolson never used blackface to indulge in any egregiously hateful negative racial stereotypes. Also, blackface was a common theatrical motif in 1927. That doesn’t excuse it but it’s such a minor part of this film and so relatively benign here that the controversy seems somewhat blown out of proportion. This isn’t The Birth of a Nation by any stretch of the imagination. As an aside, the fact that both of the aforementioned films can be released on DVD in today’s politicized climate begs the question of why Disney can’t see fit to release the comparatively harmless Song of the South. If we’re smart enough to appreciate those other two films in their proper context, certainly we can survive a DVD of one of Disney’s animated classics.

Warner Brothers has seen fit to put out a new, three-disc DVD set of The Jazz Singer for the 80th anniversary of its original release. The main disc features sound restored from one of the original Vitaphone recordings, which actually used long-playing vinyl records playing in synch with the filmed image. Most copies of the movie in circulation before this time used a sound-on-film dub of the soundtrack made back in the thirties and of very poor quality, so if you have this DVD, you’ll be hearing the soundtrack better than anyone has in more than 75 years. The second disc features a first-class documentary on how sound came to the movies, which in invaluable to film history buffs. The third disc features a collection of early Vitaphone shorts. As a neat touch, the disc art on the DVD replicates the labels from the records used to play back the soundtracks on movies like The Jazz Singer.

Whatever its failings as pure story and regardless of its politically incorrect imagery in parts, The Jazz Singer still represents one of the most significant sea changes in movie history. Not even the introduction of color was this earthshaking. Not only was it far more gradual, but if you could act in black and white, you could probably act in Technicolor, too. This new DVD set certainly does justice to the film’s importance.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 3:57 am and is filed under Movie Reviews. Tags: 1927, AFI Top 100, Based on a Play, Black and White, Essential Movies, Musical, National Film Registry, Not Rated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Paul's cat has violent mood swings between ennui and apathy.