[Dixielandjazz] "The Jazz Singer" reviewed - San Francisco Chronicle

[Robert Ringwald]

The Jazz Singer (1927, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment)
by Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 2013
It's a strange thing to attach the highest rating to this 1927 film -- part silent
and part talkie -- because everyone who'll buy it knows going in that the movie isn't
great. The set is great. The remastering for Blu-ray is great. But the movie is what
it always has been: weird, with its weirdness accentuated by the passing of years.
As the harbinger of the talkie revolution, this film is familiar, often seen and
yet rarely watched from start to finish. Excerpts of it have turned up in documentaries
for decades, and if you know the film, chances are you will go immediately to certain
scenes. Historically, the most important scene in the film is the one in which Al
Jolson, as a cantor's son turned secular entertainer, ad libs dialogue as he plays
the piano and sings for his mother. The naturalness of that interchange followed
by the stiffness of the silent sequence that followed was said to have doomed silent
films. Astute critics were able to predict as much on opening night. Jolson is a
strange figure -- self-pitying, needy, bug-eyed and overbearing, he beats you with
a stick to make you like him, and then, strangely, you do. Yet it's safe to say that
few films, sound or silent, seem as much a part of some unfathomable past, some lost
and unexplainable conception of entertainment and human behavior, as this one. The
set comes with two DVDs, one containing a documentary about the coming of sound,
the other full of Vitaphone shorts, early sound films of the day's vaudeville entertainers.
-30-


-Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Amateur (ham) Radio Operator K6YBV
916/ 806-9551

"My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.” 
Harry S. Truman, 33rd President B: 5/8/1884 – d: 12/26/1972.