[Dixielandjazz] "Mammy" reviewed

Robert Ringwald rsr at ringwald.com
Thu Apr 22 11:10:39 PDT 2010


"Mammy" reviewed

Lessons in 20th-Century History
by Dave Kehr
New York Times, April 18, 2010
Simultaneously one of the most significant and most embarrassing show business figures
of the 20th century, Al Jolson was a ferociously charismatic entertainer, among the
first to realize that creating an intimate, emotional bond with his public was more
important to his success than his considerable technical abilities as a singer.
Brazenly sentimental and shamelessly self-dramatizing, with a complementary gift
for taking his audience into his confidence with seemingly spontaneous comic asides,
Jolson helped to invent pop stardom as we know it today. But if he is less widely
remembered than later "personality singers" like Bing Crosby, it's in large part
because of Jolson's strong association with the minstrel tradition, the 19th-century
theatrical form that allowed white performers to escape the oppressive decorum of
the concert stage by painting themselves in blackface. What once seemed progressive
-- a way of introducing African-American music to a wider public -- now seems anything
but.
Minstrelsy is central to "Mammy," a 1930 Jolson vehicle that has recently been released
in a handsome new edition through the burn-on-demand Warner Archive Collection. Playing,
as usual, a barely fictionalized version of himself, Jolson stars as Al Fuller, the
irrepressible "end man" (the lead solo singer or comic) of Meadow's Merry Minstrels.
This down-at-the-heels outfit is first presented as an anachronism, playing to half-empty
houses in tank towns. By the second act, though, the company has inexplicably returned
to Broadway glory, at which point the film bursts into eye-popping two-color Technicolor
for a series of elaborate production numbers.
The Technicolor sequences, discovered in the Netherlands Filmmuseum and now digitally
reintegrated with a black-and-white print restored by the University of California,
Los Angeles, have a bright, busy, carnavalesque look appropriate for numbers like
"Yes, We Have No Bananas" and the ribald "Night Boat to Albany."
But the film tactfully returns to monochrome for more dramatic moments, like Jolson's
performance of the title song -- "I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles"
-- for his character's white-haired mother (Louise Dresser). The director, Michael
Curtiz, even manages a lovely little camera movement to underline the emotion of
the scene, no mean feat at a time when film technique was still severely circumscribed
by the encumbrances of early sound recording. (Warner Archive Collection, warnerarchive.com,
$19.95, not rated)


--Bob Ringwald
Amateur (ham) Radio call sign K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
916/806-9551

Doesn't "expecting the unexpected" make the unexpected expected?




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