Thirteen year old Jackie Rabinowitz has been trained by his father to one day become a cantor at the local synagogue. But Jackie is more interested in singing jazzy tunes than Jewish prayer. When his father catches Jackie performing at a local beer garden, he whips the boy as punishment. In heartbroken rage, Jackie runs away and pledges to never return. Ten years later, Jackie (now ‘Jack Robin’) is performing at a cabaret and catches the ear of musical theater dancer Mary Dale. She gets him a job in a traveling musical review, which eventually leads him back to New York, on Broadway. Jack tries to visit his family but his father still rejects him for bringing modern music into the house. With father and son more entrenched than ever, Cantor Rabinowitz falls ill. Jackie is faced with the choice of a lifetime: fulfill a dream to open on Broadway or return to his home and his synagogue and fulfill his dying father’s dream.
I came to “The Jazz Singer” out of some weird obligation to finally watch, what I understood to be, the “first talkie”. It’s true that this is the first film with synchronized dialogue, but calling this film the “first talkie” is sort of like saying that the Apollo 8 astronauts were actually the first to go to the moon. It’s true—they were the first to orbit around the moon as a part of the incremental steps towards the moon landing—but both claims feel somewhat exaggerated to me. To me, “The Jazz Singer” was a fascinating hybrid film: half silent film, half talkie. The synchronized audio primarily stuck to recorded songs. Some songs had a spoken verse in the middle, while other songs had genuine dialogue before or after the performance. But in most scenes, dialogue is conveyed in silence or through title-cards. The transition to spoken word was generally seamless, like how a film might change aspect ratio. By saying this, I don’t mean to take the innovation away from the film. It was a big step for film and the audio definitely ‘plusses’ the story.
In fact, I can’t imagine telling this story without music. Stories about father-and-son generational conflict are as old as time and told through all forms of film medium—from Star Wars to Ratatouille. But for this conflict to be anchored in music was a beautiful and heartbreaking wrinkle. Some of the film’s best performances, by both Al Jolsen and Yossele Rosenblatt, were in song. They each had a “tear in their voice” and it carried through. I thought it was really unique and beautiful how steadfastly Jewish this film was, with Jewish tradition contrasting with Broadway and show biz. The story was about old and new, tradition and assimilation, true identity and projected-identity.
Which brings us to blackface. If you didn’t already know, the film’s lead Al Jolsen was a vaudevillian entertainer famous for appropriating black music and often doing so in blackface performance. And while this film is a fictionalized biography of Jolsen’s own life, it goes so long without indulging in the racist practice that I forgot it was an element of the story. But sure enough, with ~20 minutes of runtime left, Jolsen gets out his tin and starts applying blackface. It’s racist, and cringy, and a stain on the film and its legacy. But I do not believe it was incidental to the story or included merely because it was Jolsen’s schtick. On the contrary, the film’s blackface was a literal manifestation how modern performance has turned Jackie into someone he’s not. The fact that the film states its metaphor so earnestly and yet without any self-awareness of its racism (they way, say, “Tropic Thunder” does) is uncomfortable. It’s not ok. But that’s historic art for you.