The Jazz Singer 1927

The story

Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) is the son of a cantor, a singer of the liturgy, on New York's Lower East Side. His father expects him to follow in the post. Jakie is caught singing popular songs in a beer garden, is punished, and runs away.

Years later he is Jack Robin, a rising jazz singer who performs in blackface. He is about to open on Broadway when his father falls gravely ill on the eve of Yom Kippur. Jack must choose between the opening and singing Kol Nidre in his father's place. He sings it. The film ends with him back on stage, singing to his mother in the audience.

Where it came from

The source is Samson Raphaelson, who grew up on the Lower East Side. He wrote a short story, "The Day of Atonement", published in 1922, after seeing Jolson perform in 1917. In 1925 it became a stage play, The Jazz Singer, with George Jessel in the lead. Warner Bros. bought the film rights in 1926.

Warner Bros. at first announced Jessel for the film. Why he lost it is told differently. One account has a row over his pay and the script. The Library of Congress essay notes that Jolson had electrified an audience in a Vitaphone short in 1926, and Jessel's short had not. The studio, the essay says, decided that the film needed Jolson, "not only for the film but for Vitaphone itself".

What it actually is

It wasn't the first talking picture. Or even the thousandth.

Ron Hutchinson, "The Jazz Singer", Library of Congress National Film Registry essay

Most of the film is a silent film. The story is told in intertitles, with a recorded orchestral score. The Vitaphone sequences are the songs, and two short passages of talk. Hutchinson puts the real dialogue at about two minutes.

Vitaphone was a sound-on-disc system developed by Western Electric and Bell Laboratories. One motor drove both the projector and a turntable carrying a 16-inch disc, and the sound was played through newly developed loudspeakers. Sam Warner, the Warner brother most taken with it, had seen a Bell Labs demonstration in 1925. The studio launched it in August 1926 with Don Juan, a silent film with a recorded score, and a programme of sound shorts. It was audience response to those shorts, Hutchinson says, that turned Warner Bros. towards speech and song.

Jolson sang his songs during nine days of filming from 17 August 1927. His first words come in the club scene: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet." It was stage patter he had used for years. Later, at the piano, he talks to his mother, played by Eugenie Besserer. Hutchinson says the banter was ad-libbed, and that the lines about moving to the Bronx were not in the script. The studio knew the scene did not advance the plot and could be cut. It stayed.

The premiere, and "first"

The film opened on 6 October 1927 at Warners' Theatre in New York. Sam Warner had died the day before, of pneumonia after weeks of illness. None of his brothers was at the premiere. Reviews were mixed.

Careful sources choose their words. The Library of Congress calls it "the first successful synchronized feature with talking". Duke's list of 1927 films calls it "the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue". Neither says it was the first sound film, or the first to be all talking. That was Lights of New York, in 1928, which cost Warner Bros. about $23,000 and grossed over a million dollars, according to Hutchinson.

The money, and the next two years

The film cost about $422,000. By March 1928 it was showing in 235 theatres, and by 1931 it had earned about $2 million. Jolson's next film, The Singing Fool (1928), had much more dialogue and grossed $4 million.

The success drove Warner Bros. to expand, buying theatres and the First National studio, and its share price rose from $21 to $132, Hutchinson reports. The studio announced that all its future features would carry Vitaphone sound. By the end of 1929, he writes, the silent picture was dead. The first Academy Awards, held in 1929, gave Warner Bros. a special award for "the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry". The film joined the National Film Registry in 1996.

The blackface

Blackface was a stage tradition in which performers, usually white, used burnt cork or make-up to portray Black people as caricatures. It grew from the minstrel shows of the 1830s and 1840s, whose stock figures were lazy, cowardly and foolish, and spoke a mangled English. These stereotypes were invented by white performers for white audiences, and they fed the racism of the time. Blackface is now widely condemned as racist.

In the film Jack Robin blacks up with burnt cork for his stage act, and Jolson performs songs, including "Mammy", in it. The film treats this as glamorous and as the route to Jack's success.

Historians read it in more than one way. Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise (1996) argues that for Jewish immigrants and their children blackface was a means of becoming American, by separating themselves from the Black Americans whose music they borrowed. Other scholars read Jack's mask as a picture of a divided identity: a man caught between his father's synagogue and Broadway. Neither reading makes the caricature less of one.

Why it matters

It made sound pay. Sound films had been tried, and had failed at the box office, for decades. This one showed that audiences would pay for them.

It is easy to misdescribe. It was a silent film with some songs and two minutes of talk, not the first sound film, and not the first all-talkie. The accurate claim is the one the Library of Congress makes: the first successful synchronized feature with talking.

It is a document of American entertainment, painful parts included. It records how ordinary blackface still was on the American stage and screen in 1927, which is one reason it is studied. It was remade in 1952 and 1980.