Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer still comes alive when Al Jolson sings. The family melodrama is stiff, and the blackface demands scrutiny; this is worth seeing chiefly for those curious about early sound cinema.
Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer is worth seeing for its singing and its awkward, absorbing changes between silent-film storytelling and recorded voices. As a family drama, it is much harder to recommend. Al Jolson brings an immediacy to the sung passages that the rest of the film struggles to sustain. Alfred A. Cohn’s screenplay establishes a painful disagreement, then spends too much time having the characters repeat their positions.
Jakie Rabinowitz wants to sing popular music; Cantor Rabinowitz expects him to sing in the synagogue. There is enough here for a substantial drama, because their shared devotion to music gives both men a reason to feel betrayed by the other. Warner Oland gives the father’s disapproval weight, although the repeated declarations leave him too predictable. Eugenie Besserer is a gentler presence as Sara Rabinowitz, but she has little room to do anything beyond suffer through the estrangement.
We were stirred when Al Jolson’s singing broke into the silent-film storytelling. His voice makes the performance feel close in a way the written exchanges cannot manage, and his eagerness to hold an audience’s attention is hard to resist. The appeal is not subtle, but subtlety would scarcely suit the job. These brief passages give a clear sense of why the arrival of recorded voices could excite an audience, without requiring much knowledge of film history.
Hal Mohr’s cinematography keeps the performers legible, giving Al Jolson’s expansive delivery space without adding distracting flourishes from the camera. Harold McCord’s editing is most effective at the changes between silent passages and recorded performance, where the altered pace becomes part of the attraction. The dramatic passages settle into a more dutiful rhythm, and the wait for another song can feel longer than it should. Louis Silvers’s music helps those stretches along, though its emphasis adds to the melodrama’s habit of insisting on each emotion. The accompaniment rarely gives the actors much relief from that pressure.
The blackface is a more serious obstacle, and it cannot be set aside as a detail of the period. Al Jolson performs in blackface, drawing on the racist caricatures of Black people used in stage entertainment. In a story asking us to understand a singer’s wish to belong, that caricature deserves sustained attention rather than a hurried apology before the next song. We found the spectacle repellent. His vocal skill does not make the image harmless.
Judged as a musical melodrama, the film is limited by how neatly it sorts the people around its star. May McAvoy’s Mary Dale offers encouragement, but the part has little force or complication of its own, so another potentially interesting relationship becomes largely a matter of support. The family scenes have recognisable pain in them, and the actors occasionally make that pain register despite the blunt writing. Too often, however, the next scene brings another statement of the same grievance, and we begin waiting for the drama to stop and the singing to resume.
For anyone exploring early sound, the unevenness is part of what makes the film worth examining. Allow the singing to make its immediate impression, then look as closely at the kind of entertainment being offered. A casual evening’s musical diversion is a different request. We would choose something else for that.
