What made The Jazz Singer a hit?: The talking, of course. For more than three decades, moviegoers could travel to the other side of the world or even back in time, but they couldn’t hear the people onscreen actually talking. But in the late 1920s, various studios began to experiment with synchronized sound. While several short films, including Disney’s Steamboat Willie, had been already released with spoken dialogue, The Jazz Singer was the first widely-seen sound feature. Because of the sound equipment, the cost of the film was roughly twice that of a normal Hollywood production, but the movie proved so popular that its success demonstrated the commercial viability of “talkies.” According to Oscar legend, Hollywood’s executives were so bowled over by the success of The Jazz Singer that it was declared ineligible for the first-ever Best Picture Oscar, so afraid were they that it would run away with the award.
What happened?: When The Jazz Singer was first released, audiences couldn’t get enough of “a movie that talked.” But within a few years, talkies became fairly commonplace, to the point where the majority of big-budget releases had spoken dialogue throughout. As a result, the occasional sound scenes in The Jazz Singer no longer held any magic. Unfortunately for The Jazz Singer, this gave viewers ample opportunity to pore over the more rudimentary aspects of the film- the acting, the directing, the storytelling, and so on. And in these respects, The Jazz Singer was even less sophisticated than it was technologically.
Al Jolson, the star of The Jazz Singer remained a popular singer and performer in the decades that followed, and the film itself experienced a resurgence in popularity with the release of the twin biopics The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again in the late 1940s. But with the increasing consciousness of race in the United States, the scenes in which Jolson performs in blackface caused the film to fall out of favor with audiences and critics, turning it into little more than a footnote in the history of 
cinema.
Does The Jazz Singer still work?: Nope, and not just for the obvious reason. I hadn’t seen The Jazz Singer prior to watching it for this review, and its reputation led me to expect a movie that was chock full of minstrelsy. Actually, it contains roughly ten minutes of blackface- two musical numbers and a dramatic scene. But even those scenes left a bad taste in my mouth, less for their offensiveness than for their sheer ridiculousness. While I realize that blackface was considered a legitimate form of entertainment in the 1920s- instead of a reason to be kicked offstage at a Friars’ Club roast- it doesn’t make it any less laughable today.
What’s more, it feels completely gratuitous to the story that the film is telling. Jack Robin (Jolson) works his way to the top as a straight jazz singer, and once he hits Broadway he suddenly begins blacking up for performances, and the film treats this sudden change like it’s perfectly natural. What’s more, in the backstage scene involving Jack and his mother, the presence of blackface subverts the dramatic intent of the scene. When Jack’s mother cries out that her son has to come home to be reconciled with his dying dad, it’s supposed to be heartbreaking, but all I could pay attention to was Jolson’s blackened face and curly wig. Surely that couldn’t have been the film’s intention, could it?
But even out of blackface, Jolson’s performance hasn’t aged well at all. Jolson was primarily a theatrical performer, which is reflected by his overly emphatic acting 
style- an arsenal of broad facial expressions, shoulder shrugs, eye rolls, and head tilts. But while these gestures might play well on the stage, they’re unsuited to the cinematic medium, and even in intimate moments it feels like Jolson is playing to the cheap seats. What also becomes apparent in close-ups is the strange glint in Jolson’s eyes, which is interpreted by the other characters as pep but looked more to my eyes like mischief, almost malevolence. This gives The Jazz Singer a creepy vibe that couldn’t have been the filmmakers’ intention.
Rare and special is the film that actually holds up to eight decades’ worth of hindsight, and The Jazz Singer isn’t remotely that rare or special. Setting aside its technological advances, it was the kind of broad, simplistic melodrama of the sort that gives silent movies a bad name among non-cinephiles. That it was made at a time when silents were reaching their artistic apex just demonstrates how forgettable it really is. If not for its status as Hollywood’s first sound feature and the subsequent uproar over its racial insensitivity, it’s pretty safe to say The Jazz Singer would have been pretty much forgotten by cinema history, like so many other films of the period.
But hey, it’s still better than the Neil Diamond version, right?
