“YOU AIN’T HEARD
NOTHIN’ YET!’’

. . . Blessed ones

of this–and every other–succeeding generation

who can, do, and shall discover

for their first time

the Voice of Jolson

and who’ll thrill to It

and who, hence, will love him.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

The Blue Boy is a beautiful picture, but comparatively few people have seen it. . . . My answer to that is people want entertainment. If The Blue Boy sang like Jolson, they’d go to see him.

MERVIN LeROY

There is little question that here was an example, like the performance of Dr. Johnson’s dog, of something being remarkable not because it was well done but because it had been done at all.

IRIS BARRY on The Jazz Singer

The film concludes with a scene in the theatre, with Mammy of Mine in the stalls . . . and the son . . . warbling down at her the most penetratingly vulgar mammy song that it has ever been my lot to hear. My flesh crept as the loud speaker poured out those sodden words, that greasy, sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed.

ALDOUS HUXLEY on The Jazz Singer

I won’t say that I’m the best singer in the world–

I’ll just say I sound better than anybody else!

AL JOLSON

Let me sing of Dixie’s charms,

Cotton fields and Mammy’s arms,

And if my song can make you homesick–I’m happy.

Popular Jolson song

While the Don Juan program was playing to full capacity houses, several other, relevant developments were taking place. On August 23, 1926 Rudolph Valentino died suddenly, only thirty-one years old and at the height of his career. The Great Arab had been born in the year that the Lumières presented France’s first public movie program. Ominously, he folded his tent for the last time on the eve of the coming of sound.

Early in September 1926, Warner Bros. announced its intention of providing means for enabling the deaf to hear and the blind to see their miraculous Vitaphone programs. Fifty selected seats in Warner theaters were equipped with headphones that would amplify the sound for patrons who were hard of hearing or would supply descriptive commentaries for patrons who had little or no eyesight. The reactions of the deaf and blind were given little or no publicity in 1926, but three years later, as we shall see in a later chapter, they were to respond to the talkie revolution in ways that were not anticipated by Warner Bros. It is unlikely that the innovations of 1926 actually made much difference to the afflicted, but doubtless the expense of the installations was worth the publicity Warners received from it. More significant was the announcement later in September that Warner Bros. was arranging to secure at least one important cinema in every big city in the U. S., and that the company would have control of at least fifty major movie theaters by the start of the fall season. This policy of rapid expansion showed no evidence of the imminent collapse that the rest of Hollywood had been expecting ever since Warner Bros. had begun pouring money into Vitaphone. To the contrary, the Warners radiated optimism, and their growing chain of movie theaters obviously had something to do with public interest in sound pictures and the Warners’ ability to communicate their faith in Vitaphone to the financiers who were providing the capital for their expansion.

Meanwhile, executives of the big movie studios were closely observing developments but saying as little as possible about it. Immediately after the opening night of Don Juan, movie tycoon William Fox took time out to remark, “I don’t think that there will ever be the much-dreamed of talking pictures on a large scale. To have conversation would strain the eyesight and the sense of hearing at once, taking away the restfulness one gets from viewing pictures alone.” (He was to have second thoughts on the subject sooner than anyone else in Hollywood.) But the rest of the movie industry, assuming that Warner Bros. would be overtaken by the inevitable, refrained from making even the obvious predictions.¹ In mid-September the silence was broken briefly when Fred Niblo, one of MGM’s leading directors, ventured the belated prediction that synchronized music would replace cinema orchestras. Probably as a counterblast to Vitaphone, he also suggested that radio would be used in conjunction with silent movies to supply synchronized sound effects, music, and even dialogue. However, for the time being it was Vitaphone that held the public interest. That now seems remarkable when measured against the tremendous competition offered by the rest of the movie industry during the brief period between the premiere of Don Juan (August 6, 1926) and the premiere of The Jazz Singer (October 6, 1927).

The last year of the silents, 1926, was a golden age for moviegoers. Across innumerable screens in America flashed the silent forms of Ronald Colman and Alice Joyce in Beau Geste, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil, Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson in The Scarlet Letter, Victor McLaglen and Dolores Del Rio in What Price Glory? (subsequently reissued in a synchronized sound version), Eddie Cantor and Clara Bow in Kid Boots, Rod la Rocque and Dolores Del Rio in Resurrection, Warner Baxter in The Great Gatsby, Lon Chaney in Mr. Wu, Mary Pickford in Sparrows, Pola Negri in Hotel Imperial, H. B. Warner in DeMille’s The King of Kings, Adolphe Menjou in D. W. Griffith’s The Sorrows of Satan, George Bancroft in von Sternberg’s Underworld, Laura La Plante in The Cat and the Canary Richard Barthelmess in The Patent-Leather Kid, Buster Keaton in The General and Harry Langdon in Long Pants. There were also the American premieres of Eisen-stein’s Potemkin, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse, Murnau’s Faust and Tartuffe, and Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul. In addition there were the attractions of color films (including color sequences in important feature films), wide-screen movies using the Magnascope or Widescope processes, and various less-publicized, less-developed, or inferior sound systems, including Vocafilm, Phonofilm, and Remaphone. But it was still Vitaphone that held the public interest.

Its promise became clearer with the second Vitaphone show, which premiered on October 5, 1926 at B. S. Moss’s Colony Theatre in New York. Like the Don Juan program, the new show consisted of a number of short films followed by a feature picture. But this time the offerings were in a much lighter vein: a comedy, The Better ‘Ole, preceded by a concert of vaudeville sketches and songs. In two respects the program anticipated the shape of things to come for Vitaphone. First, Al Jolson appeared in one of the short films entitled Al Jolson in a Plantation Act. And with more prescience than he could have realized at the time, Mordaunt Hall, who reviewed the show for the New York Times commented on Jolson: “This Vitaphone [short] assuredly destroys the old silent tradition of the screen.”² A month after its New York premiere, the second Vitaphone show opened on the West Coast, and by this time the trade papers were singling out the Jolson short as the hit of the program.³ The second development, which received comparatively little comment, was that in several of the other short films there were snatches of dialogue and sound effects, and in the short movie of George Jessel there was a fairly lengthy monologue. Talk was, almost imperceptibly, creeping into what had been conceived by the Warners as a medium for recorded music.

The second Vitaphone program, like the first, opened with an orchestral overture. It was followed by Reinald Werrenrath singing “The Long, Long Trail” and a medley of other melodies, and then by Elsie Janis, atop an army truck, dancing and singing the songs she had popularized on her wartime tours:“Madeion,” “In the Army,” “The Good Old War,” and “Good Bye-ee.” She was accompanied by a chorus of soldiers from the 107th Regiment of the U. S. Army. Next, Willie and Eugene Howard appeared in a vaudeville sketch entitled Between the Acts at the Opera, which was one of the items provided with such sound effects as a starter’s whistle and a taxi horn–effects used in developing the comic situation. There was also a jazz quartet. And then came Jolson, in blackface, singing to the accompaniment of Al Goodman’s orchestra (off-camera) three of the songs always associated with him: “The Red, Red Robin,” “April Showers,” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” Jolson’s movie audience was “silent, so keen was everybody to catch every word and note of the popular entertainer, and when each number was ended it was obvious that there was not a still pair of hands in the house.”⁴ The Jolson short, produced by Robert Green and directed by Philip Roscoe, had been observed in production early in September 1926 by a reporter for Moving Picture World:

Al Jolson made his debut on the Vitaphone last week at the Manhattan Opera House. Workmen for over a week there were busy night and day building the setting for the comedian’s number, which is to be one of the big features of the [new] Vitaphone prelude. . . . A representation of an old Southern plantation was built especially for Mr. Jolson’s “act,” which took up the whole of the stage and the auditorium of the opera house. All the props were in evidence, including cotton in bloom, corn tasselling and water-melons ripening. A little old log cabin was constructed, from which Jolson emerged when he sang. . . .

By ironic coincidence the Jolson film was followed by the short movie of George Jessel, who was currently starring in the Broadway stage production of Samson Raphaelson’s play The Jazz Singer. (In June 1926 Warners had bought the screen rights to the play. They subsequently announced that they would spend half a million dollars making the film and that Jessel would be the star. But things were to turn out very differently from the way they looked in the fall of 1926.) Jessel’s short Vitaphone movie had nothing to do with The Jazz Singer. It opened with a comic monologue and concluded with a scene in which Jessel, seen only in shadow, gave a spirited rendering of Irving Berlin’s song “At Peace with the World and You.” The monologue was particularly well received; the audience laughed longer than expected. But the response to Jessel was patently less than the applause that had followed Jolson’s performance. The first star of sound movies was already rising, and his name was not George Jessel.

The New York Times reviewer noted that during the intermission “the conversation in the lobby was wholly devoted to a eulogy of the Vitaphone.”⁵ The program resumed with a live performance–a medley of war tunes played by the Vitaphone Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Herman Heller. It set the mood for the synchronized feature, The Better ’Ole, a comedy of World War I based on a play by Bruce Bairnsfather and Arthur Eliot. The film’s title was taken not only from the play but also from a celebrated newspaper cartoon depicting Old Bill, an imperturbable British Tommy, resignedly puffing at his pipe in a waterlogged trench and commenting, “If yer know a better ‘ole, go to it.” The Bairnsfather-Eliot play, previously filmed in England in 1919 (when its stars were Charles Rock and Arthur Cleave), was heavily influenced by Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918). The Vitaphone version was adapted to the screen by Darryl F. Zanuck and Charles F. Reisner; the latter also directed the picture. Chaplin’s brother, Sydney (who had appeared in Shoulder Arms), played the lead role of Old Bill, and Jack Ackroyd and Harold Goodwin appeared as Alf and Bert, his two sidekicks. Essentially a mixture of broad farce and slapstick, the movie focused on Old Bill’s exploits following his discovery that his major is a German spy. The level of humor can be gauged from the fact that the film’s most hilarious scene shows Bill and Alf escaping from the enemy by disguising themselves as the front and rear ends of a pantomime horse. Another scene, located rather improbably in an opera house where Bill and Alf were supposed to be performing (it was obviously the Manhattan Opera House, where the movie was made), reveals Warner Bros.’ cost-cutting efforts at improvising within the limits of immediately available facilities.

As an experiment in the use of Vitaphone, The Better ’Ole was of little or no significance. Most of its comedy was visual or based on intertitles. When it was released as a silent movie for theaters that were not equipped for Vitaphone, audiences were unaware that anything was lacking. Sound had been used in The Better ’Ole for rather obvious effects: explosions, pistol shots, the neighing of a horse. The film’s score, consisting mainly of a medley of war songs, was unmemorable and unobtrusive except for a few brief scenes in which music added to the comic effect. A typical example was the use of the song “Horses, Horses, Horses” as an accompaniment to the pantomime horse sequence.

Although little or no progress seemed to have been made in using Vitaphone, the second show demonstrated that the potential of Vitaphone went beyond filmed concerts, operas, and synchronized music scores. It offered a new dimension in popular entertainment. The whole range of vaudeville could now be presented on the screen. And as we shall see, the business interests behind vaudeville were not slow in recognizing this new departure of Vitaphone as a threat to their exclusive control of popular theatrical entertainment.

An encouraging view of Vitaphone’s future was expressed by Epes W. Sargent, who reviewed the show for Moving Picture World. Sargent maintained that the second show was probably “more in line with the immediate development of Vitaphone . . . notwithstanding a general tendency to regard Vitaphone as a musical matter.” This tendency, he asserted, was a

popular but decided error. Music is but one phase of Vitaphone activities. The device is all-embracing. It brings to a single medium every phase of amusements from opera and concert to the circus. It is, in its own peculiar way, the most elastic amusement medium ever developed. Its possibilities are limited only by the restrictions of human ingenuity, and for the time being it is probable that straight orchestral and instrumental music, unless presented by internationally known stars, is the least of these possibilities. . . . Any house with sufficient appropriation may achieve an orchestra of symphonic instrumentation. This is merely a matter of having at command sufficient money to pay salaries. But no house can, for example, command the money and the influence necessary to draw Al Jolson from his current musical comedy.⁶

Despite future development implicit in the second show, no one at Warner Bros. was ready to talk seriously about talking pictures or even feature-length musicals. The third Vitaphone program, premiered at the Selwyn Theatre, New York, on February 3, 1927, merely marked time with an awkward attempt to combine the appeals of the first two shows. Selections from grand opera were interspersed with musical-comedy pieces. The total effect was at best incoherent, at worst downright ludicrous. The operatic arias were, however, superior to those presented in the first show–both in choice of artists and quality of sound recording. The highlight was the quartet from Rigoletto sung by Beniamino Gigli, Marion Talley, Giuseppe de Luca, and Jeanne Gordon. The popularity of this performance was so great that it was frequently added to later Warner programs. Almost as well received were the solo arias by Marion Talley and Charles Hackett. One reviewer, commenting on the operatic pieces, observed that “there were moments when the vocal renditions came with marvellous precision from the images on the screen, and then there were moments when the tonal quality was burdened with the resonance of the reproducing horns. The stronger and more vibrant voices came forth with better effect than the weaker ones. But the synchronization was in all cases a triumph for the producers.”⁷

The feature that provided the second half of the program was When a Man Loves, directed by Alan Crosland and starring John Barrymore, Dolores Costello, Warner Oland, and Eugenie Besserer. Adapted by Bess Meredyth from Prevost’s Manon Lescaut, the film, despite its source, bore more than a superficial resemblance, in plot and character, to Don Juan, which, of course, had starred some of the same leading players. The composer of the synchronized music score for When a Man Loves has not been ascertained, and the music itself does not appear to have survived in either sheet music or recorded form. However, Mordaunt Hall noted that the “orchestra effect was so good that there were many in the audience who forgot until the last moment that there were no musicians in the pit. They were reminded of the absence of the orchestra when the body of musicians was depicted on the screen, and then the spectators were moved to applaud.”⁸

Before turning to Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer, it will be enlightening to review the off-screen developments preceding the momentous premiere of that movie. Some of them bear little or no direct relationship to one another, but collectively they suggest the vacillations and speculations, the optimism and uncertainty that prevailed in Hollywood (and vaudeville) during the months that followed the first Vitaphone show.

In November 1926 the Vitaphone Corporation set up its executive offices in the General Motors Building at Fifty-seventh Street and Broadway, New York. At the first meeting of the board of directors it was publicly announced that Vitaphone had plans for worldwide distribution. The system would be made available to “all producers of high class pictures and to producers and exhibitors of standing.”

By the end of the year the success of the first two Vitaphone programs was beginning to arouse the interest–and concern– of other Hollywood studios. According to Fitzhugh Green,

In December 1926, the leading silent film people held a Council of War. They had watched the Vitaphone opening, confidently expectant that like all other talking [sic] movies, this would fail. Now that it had not, they saw it as a threat to the conventional movie and movie show. Talkies, they felt, was something that if it came to be demanded by the public would cost them a dozen fortunes in modifying their present equipment and technique. It would rock the movie world. It would, as they foresaw perfectly, do exactly what it has done. And they were afraid. The so-called Big Five [at this time MGM, Universal, Paramount, First National, and Producers’ Distributing Corp. (P.D.C.)] decided to try to buck it. In the first place, they planned to undo the Warners. Secondly, if they were forced to adopt talking pictures, they decided that they were entirely unwilling to take sub-licences from Warners. They could not bear to pay Warner, a competing film company, royalties for the use of the Talkies; they felt that to acknowledge use of Warner or Vitaphone devices would cause them to suffer loss of prestige. They also engaged an engineer who spent about $500,000 in the next year and a half investigating and trying to perfect other devices. There was no doubt about their concern. As a final step in this defensive move, they mutually agreed, so that they would have a bartering point, that none of them would adopt talking pictures until they all did; and that “in the interests of standardization in the industry,” they would, when they did adopt the thing, all use the same device. . . . The Big Five believed that this threat of uniform equipment in the industry would be a strong bulwark against the inroads of Vitaphone on their precious properties. If they decided to use another set of inventions than those used by Warners they would be safe enough. With their huge combined outfit they could undoubtedly cause their type to be the standard equipment used by the bulk of the theatres in the country. They hoped further it would be one that Warner would not be able to use, so that the majority of theatres would be closed to the Warner product. . . . All these elaborate plans failed for just one reason. The Western Electric apparatus was [at that time] really the best of all the apparatus on the market. If the others had been able to find one even two-thirds as good they would have signed up and played freeze-out against the Warners in a minute.⁹

The Big Five must have been particularly apprehensive at the news that the Fox Company, which had not joined the council of war, was about to swallow its pride and open negotiations to secure the use of Vitaphone. In late December 1926, undenied rumors were circulating in Wall Street that William Fox, president of the Fox Film Corporation, was trying to contract with Warner Bros. “for the right to present the Vitaphone in all Fox theatres of reasonable size no matter where located” Shortly afterwards there were other undenied rumors that MGM, oblivious of its agreement with the other major studios, had endeavored, without success, to tie up with Vitaphone on an exclusive basis. The Vitaphone Corporation went some way towards confirming some of these rumors by issuing a declaration that no exclusive rights to Vitaphone would be granted to any company or companies.

The stories about Fox’s interest in Vitaphone were confirmed on January 8, when Moving Picture World revealed that the Vitaphone and Fox-Case corporations had signed reciprocal contracts–each licensing the other to use the sound systems over which it had legal control. (Fox had recently established the Fox-Case Corporation to develop and promote the soundon-film system he had bought from Theodore W. Case and E. I. Sponable.) Less than two months later the trade papers announced that Fox had already ordered Vitaphone equipment to be installed in his theaters “as soon as possible.”¹⁰ The Vitaphone-Fox agreements also extended to mutual use of studio and theater facilities and the exchange of artists and technicians. The announcement of cooperation was accompanied by brief statements by Harry Warner and William Fox. Warner offered his congratulations to the Fox interests “for the foresighted step they have taken in obtaining a licence from the Vitaphone Corporation. I consider this,” he added, “one of the greatest forward moves that has taken place in the industry since the inception of motion pictures. . . .”¹¹ Some months later he was to announce: “We have developed our machine with an extra attachment that costs less than a thousand dollars, which enables us to use also the Fox . . . method. So that a theatre putting in a Vitaphone can use either the method now used by us or the one on the film [i.e., the Fox-Case sound-on-film system].”¹²

Fox’s statement, following his corporation’s agreement with the Vitaphone people, revealed his personal vision of the future of sound cinema: “The amazing accomplishment, now perfected, is destined to have far-reaching influence in the world. Its influence will be felt not only in picture theatres everywhere, but in 150,000 churches for religious purposes and in 170,000 schools for educational purposes, and in 20,000,000 American homes.”¹³ He went on to acknowledge those who were responsible for Vitaphone and the Fox-Case sound system: the engineers of Western Electric Company and Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Case Research Laboratories of Auburn, New York.

Fox’s eagerness to tie up with Vitaphone can be explained in part as a means of covering his bets just in case the disk system won out. Another reason, suggested Fitzhugh Green, is that Fox discovered that he could not introduce his newly acquired sound-on-film system into theaters without using patents belonging to Western Electric. “The outcome of this situation was that . . . [Fox] approached Western and learned that Vitaphone had an exclusive sub-licence, which, however, required that Vitaphone sub-licence others in the industry as they applied, sharing the royalty fees with Western.”¹⁴ Fox was thus obligated to negotiate with Vitaphone if his system was to be put before the public.

In the previous chapter we heard about the origins of that system. It is time now to take the story further. On May 2, 1926, four months before the Don Juan premiere, Case and Sponable demonstrated “their” system (it was essentially De Forest’s) privately at the Nemo Theatre on 110 Street and Broadway in New York. One of those present was Courtland Smith, who brought the system to the attention of William Fox. Fox attended another Case-Sponable demonstration and decided that what they had to offer was worth an investment. (It is not known whether he had heard that the system had previously been turned down by RCA, General Electric, and Western Electric.) Fox’s interest in the Case-Sponable apparatus is rather puzzling since, the previous year, he had ordered the removal of De Forest equipment from several of his theaters where it had been installed without his personal consent. Also, in that same year, as we have seen, he had acquired 90 percent of the Western Hemisphere rights to Tri-Ergon.

Curiously, as Maurice Zouary has noted, while Fox was obtaining, through Case and Sponable, what was basically the invention of Lee De Forest, he was simultaneously involved in litigation against De Forest in an effort to prove that “his” TriErgon patents antedated De Forest’s Phonofilm system. A U. S. federal court was to uphold the priority of De Forest’s claim in 1935.

But that was a long way off. In 1926, Fox may have been genuinely unaware that he was really buying rights to De Forest’s work. Anyhow, the Fox Film Corporation acquired patent rights to Case-Sponable on July 23, 1926. Fox promptly established the Fox-Case Corporation to promote the system, which he renamed Movietone. Courtland Smith was assigned the task of developing it, which meant combining the best elements of Tri-Ergon with an improved Fox-Case system. Work on Fox-Case shifted to the Fox studios in Hollywood, where, in the second half of 1926, the system was used to make several synchronized film sequences. One of the private demonstrations of these films was attended by Adolph Zukor, who, as in his sampling of Phonofilm, was quite unimpressed; another was attended by Jesse L. Lasky, who was enthusiastic–as long as he was not going to put any of his own money into it. Fox himself waxed hot and cold. On at least three occasions before the end of 1926 he ordered Smith to stop work on sound movies. However, efforts to improve Fox-Case were continued despite Fox’s sporadic apathy. The first Movietone program was ready for presentation at the Sam H. Harris Theatre in New York on January 21, 1927. Considerably less ambitious than the Vitaphone premiere, Movietone’s initial offering consisted of a cycle of songs sung by the Spanish artiste Requel Meller. It provided a supporting program to the silent feature What Price Glory?^*

In the first half of 1927, Fox was in no particular hurry to promote his system through regular and frequent programs. The public had to wait several months before seeing the next Movietone. When it did appear, at last, on the same program as the silent feature, Yankee Clipper (Roxy Theatre, New York, May 2, 1927), it turned out to be an important, if little-noticed, advance for the Fox-Case system. For the Movietone engineers had taken their apparatus out of the studio and made an outdoor sound movie–a short film of cadets parading at West Point. The sound quality was evidently adequate; at least, there appear to have been no adverse critical comments about it. The next Movietone films were premiered on May 25, 1927, also at the Sam H. Harris Theatre. This time the program was an ambitious one: First, Movietone had been used to supply the feature film, Seventh Heaven (directed by Frank Borzage) with a synchronized score by Erno Rapee–including a dubbed-in performance of his song hit “Diane”–and sound effects. Second, there were three Movietone short films appealing to a variety of tastes. Requel Meller made a second Movietone appearance in a “Corpus Christi” recitation; Gertrude Lawrence sang a song from one of her revues; and Chic Sale supplied some comedy with a brief sketch entitled They’re Coming to Get Me, which had the distinction of being the first Movietone with dialogue. But this innovation was overshadowed by the critical acclaim for Seventh Heaven.

However, Movietone’s next offering, which opened at the Roxy Theatre, New York, on June 14, 1927, received worldwide attention. On the same bill as the silent feature Secret Studio were Movietone shorts of Lindbergh’s reception in Washington by President Coolidge and Mussolini making brief speeches in English and Italian. This time the feature was scarcely noticed, but the shorts received press comment throughout the world. The great public interest they had generated led to their revival on September 23, 1927, when they were shown at the Times Square Theatre, New York, along with Murnau’s Sunrise, which was provided with synchronized music and sound effects (Movietone), and additional Movietone shorts–of the Italian Army on parade and the Vatican Choir. Again the Mussolini and Lindbergh films were widely discussed. And their success was a major reason for the establishment of the regular series of Fox Movietone Newsreels (beginning October 28, 1927, at the Roxy Theatre).

So far we have emphasized the value of the Vitaphone-Fox agreements to the Fox interests. For different reasons the agreements were no less valuable to Warner Bros. The contracts minimized the danger of Warner Bros. being wiped out by the policy of the Big Five or by the emergence of a superior or more commercially viable sound system. The latter danger was already clearly discernible during the second half of 1926. For in the U. S. De Forest’s Phonofilm was available to any studio offering terms that were favorable enough to De Forest, and Vocafilm was already receiving advance publicity for its first program (some sound shorts and a Babe Ruth baseball film supplied with music and special effects)–which would actually be delayed until July 25, 1927. In Britain there were other ominous developments. In her History of the British Film: 1918–1929, Rachel Low notes that less than two months after the Don Juan premiere, an advertisement appeared in England for the Gaumont system, British Acoustic.

This was a sound-on-film system, using a separate film for the sound which, according to [Sir Michael] Balcon, ran 50 percent faster than the picture and through a separate projector. The company had been busy with the system for some time and claimed in its favor that it gave fidelity, volume, distinction, a wide range of production, and that it was practicable outdoors [which Vitaphone, of course, was not] and unaffected by mixes, fades and chemical manipulation during development. [The subjects of the British Acoustic test films included the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace and Sybil Thorndike delivering speeches from Shaw’s Saint Joan.] No public demonstration took place at this date, however. At the same time, the Phonofilm system, with sound on the side of the picture film, was demonstrated in a program of shorts of British vaudeville artists, the best known of whom was Billy Merson, at the Capitol, Haymarket, on September 27th 1926.¹⁵

Meanwhile, inventors in France, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, and elsewhere were no less active. However, systems were only one side of the development of sound cinema. Financial resources, promotion, exhibition outlets were another, and equally important. These assets Fox could provide in abundance–whether or not Movietone (Fox-Case) turned out to be more viable than Vitaphone. Between them, Fox and Warner Bros. controlled sufficient theaters and adequate capital to insure the survival, if not the dominance, of the sound systems they were jointly promoting.

At the end of January 1927, MGM executives began dickering with Vitaphone again.¹⁶ Their objective was to buy a controlling amount of stock in the Vitaphone Corporation. They lost interest, however, when Warner Bros. revealed that it held 70 percent of the stock and had the option of buying the rest. The Warners announced defiantly that they had “shouldered the responsibility for Vitaphone and took all the risks in the beginning, and that now . . . [they were] entitled to control the stock.” Again they affirmed that exclusive rights to Vitaphone would not be granted and any studio wishing to use the system would have to accept Warner Bros.’ terms. In February 1927, the perplexity of the major Hollywood studios in the face of the mounting sound revolution led the Big Five–MGM, First National, Universal, Paramount, and PDC (Producers’ Distributing Corporation)–to approach the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (generally known as the Hays Office) with a request for an expert study of existing sound systems as a basis for determining which should be adopted, if necessary. It is not known whether this study was actually conducted.

Meanwhile, to add to the growing vexation of executives at MGM and other studios, Will C. Durant, the so-called Wall Street Wizard, declared in an interview for Forbes magazine that Vitaphone was “The thing that has the biggest possibilities of anything and everything I have come across in the last forty years.”¹⁷ Such enthusiasm was tempered, however, by the elderly Edison, who remarked, blandly, that he had made a talking picture system (the Kinetophone, of course) some fifteen years earlier, but “discarded it as having no permanent value.”¹⁸ As we know, it was the public, not Edison, who had “discarded” the Kinetophone; but memories of what had happened in 1913 were probably vague in 1927. No one contradicted the aged inventor, but he was to change his tune only nine months later, after attending a private screening of some Fox Movietone Newsreels at his laboratory in Orange, New Jersey. “There is,” he said, “no question but that Movietone is a distinct advance towards the perfection of talking pictures . . . and I believe that it will go a long way toward creating a better understanding among the peoples of all the world.”¹⁹

A potentially serious blast at Warners came late in March, when J. J. Murdock, general manager of the nationwide KeithAlbee Theatre Exchange, which handled vaudeville interests, announced that henceforth players contracted to Keith-Albee would not be permitted to perform for sound movies. To this declaration of open hostilities between vaudeville and Vitaphone, Sam Warner defiantly responded with the assertion that vaudeville had more to worry about than Vitaphone, which “has and is doing more to publicize artists than any other form of entertainment.” He warned that “unless a sensible attitude is taken by vaudeville, it will be the sufferer not Vitaphone, as we can give well-known artists a yearly contract for as much salary as any vaudeville circuit can afford to pay, and they can work all season without leaving New York or Los Angeles.”²⁰

Murdock began taking a “sensible attitude” rather sooner than was generally expected. Early in April, barely two weeks after disclosing Keith-Albee’s hostile policy towards sound movies, he realized that he had shot his mouth off too hastily. The way things were going, vaudeville might, after all, have to compromise with sound movies. But as he had already antagonized the Warners, he would have to seek a compromise with another viable system. There was no point in approaching Fox, since he was now contractually associated with Warner Bros. But Phonofilm was still up for grabs. De Forest had installed his system in the Palace Theatre in New York, and was giving private demonstrations of short Phonofilms to potential investors. Murdock and other executives of Keith-Albee attended one of these demonstrations. Their initial response was guarded. They were satisfied, more or less, with the system, but realized that De Forest was not yet in a position to supply sufficient apparatus and an adequate number of sound films to equip and supply the Keith-Albee circuit with strong counter-attractions to Vitaphone.

Murdock left the demonstration without making any commitments, but promptly announced a Keith-Albee policy change. Henceforward, movie stars might be booked into special vaudeville acts while they were marking time between film productions. Warner Bros. presumably interpreted this offer as a reply to Sam’s tempting bait of yearly contracts to vaudeville stars: if the Warners knew how to lure vaudeville people into movies, Murdock had ways to entice movie stars into vaudeville. However, the Keith-Albee policy shift was actually an expression of compromise rather than another salvo against sound movies. In announcing that vaudeville was prepared to accommodate movie stars, Murdock was really persuading himself (and vaudeville) that show business could even accommodate movies.

On April 9 it was revealed that the Vitaphone Corporation was coping with an average of twelve installations per week and that the system would soon be active in 150 movie theaters in the U. S. The announcement spurred Murdock to a flurry of activity. Within two weeks he had arranged with the Pathe Corporation to exhibit Pathe (silent) movies in Keith-Albee theaters. A month later, he had begun formal negotiations with De Forest for the purpose of securing rights to Phonofilm. Warner Bros. responded to these developments by advertising “considerable reductions” in the installation costs of Vitaphone, leaving exhibitors in no doubt that Vitaphone– the tried, tested, and well-publicized system–would be cheaper to install than Phonofilm or any other process whose reliability was still open to question.

Within a short time, Murdock, having realized that sound movies would deal a devastating blow to vaudeville,

merged with the film interests of Joseph P. Kennedy, a Boston promoter, and with the Radio Corporation of America [soon to develop the Photophone sound-on-film system]. Kennedy, backed by John J. Raskob and Mike Meehan of Wall Street, had bought the American interests of Pathé and an English firm, Film Booking Offices, popularly called F.B.O. David Sarnoff, president of R.C.A., became chairman of the board of the combined corporation, known as Radio-Keith-Orpheum (R.K.O.).²¹

Meanwhile, in mid-1927, it was announced in the trade papers that Warner Bros. had bought out Walter J. Rich and were now the main controllers of Vitaphone Corporation. Harry Warner replaced Rich as the corporation’s president, and Jack L. Warner was appointed vice president. The directors of the corporation were the brothers Warner and Waddill Catchings of the brokerage firm of Goldman, Sachs & Co.²² It was further revealed that henceforth installation of Vitaphone apparatus and the licensing of producers to use Vitaphone and/or Movietone would be conducted exclusively by Electrical Research Products, Inc. (ERPI), a subsidiary of Western Electric. Warner Bros. and Vitaphone would be responsible for insuring that there would be sufficient programs of sound movies to keep pace with the rapid spread of installations.

Preparations for increasing the production of Vitaphone films were soon under way. The first and most important step was the construction of a sound studio on Warner Bros.’ thirteenacre lot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Begun in April 1927 and more or less completed by October of the same year, the new studio became officially known as Stage Three. “At that time there was no other talking picture studio in the world– nor was there to be for nearly a year following!”²³ The Jazz Singer was to be filmed at Stage Three shortly after it was ready–in May 1927, and even before that picture was completed, Stage Four was under construction and Stage Five was being planned.

The world’s first sound studio was provided with everything the Manhattan Opera House had lacked. It had double, insulated, soundproofed walls and floors lined with felt and Celotex.

Thought had been given to its acoustics, to its qualities of resonance; its echoes had been scientifically considered. It had all the specific fittings of the movie studio. For the first time lighting and scenic work could be carried out with ease, instead of in the makeshift manner of the Manhattan. And in addition, it had talking-picture-making innovations.²⁴

First there was the monitor room, or “mixing booth.” Situated some 15 feet above one side of the large stage (it was approximately 75 feet wide by 100 feet long), the monitor room was a doubly soundproofed, glass-enclosed box in which an operator could observe the action on stage and regulate the sound so that it was recorded at the required levels of tone and volume.²⁵ Then there was the “playback room,” which was equipped with a loudspeaker

wired through the mixer to the recording room and the recording apparatus. Through this system any “wax” [recording] could be played back as soon as it was made. . . . The actors and director, then, could go to the playback room as soon as they had finished their work, and hear the “sounds” they had just recorded. This was invaluable as an aid to better recording, as an actor could tell just how his voice sounded, where he should speak louder, etc.²⁶

The camera booths used in the Manhattan Opera House, “with their felt masks around the front opening, designed to keep the sound in, had been very limited.”²⁷ They had restricted the camera to shooting in only one direction, usually straight ahead. The new, improved booths gave the camera somewhat more freedom. They were soundproofed and moveable–they could be “swung” to follow action–and were provided with nonrefracting windows, three feet square, through which the camera could shoot. (However, compared to silent film-making, shooting a sound picture at Stage Three still involved considerable restrictions of camera movement and setup.)

There was also a new lighting system. Applying his experiences at the Manhattan Opera House, Warner Bros.’ chief electrician, Frank Murphy, discontinued the use of carbon arcs (then in general use throughout movie studios) and installed noiseless, incandescent globes. They were suspended from beams at the top of the studio and were supplied with special reflectors to strengthen their candlepower. Since “incandescent light brings out colors of the spectrum, inconspicuous under carbon lighting,” it was necessary to use a new kind of film stock, panchromatic film, “a type of negative vastly more sensitive than that previously used.”²⁸

A regular production unit was assembled to handle all the technicalities of the new studio. The production chief was Bryan Foy (son of Eddie Foy, the vaudevillian), who had directed a number of the sound shorts made at the Manhattan Opera House. Aside from his general responsibilities for Vitaphone production, Foy handled all matters pertaining to booking and casting of actors and performers, and he continued to undertake directorial assignments. Ed DuPar, another veteran of the Manhattan experiments, became chief cameraman. Colonel Nugent Slaughter, a technician who had worked for Western Electric, was appointed chief recording engineer. A. M. “Doc” Salomon became superintendent of the studio’s 700 employees, and George Grove was placed in charge of sound “mixing.” Vitaphone had now been put on a regular production basis.²⁹ By early October 1927, Warner Bros. announced that all its films would henceforth be made with “a complete synchronized Vitaphone accompaniment.”³⁰

Almost every week since April 5, 1927, Warner Bros. had been able to provide its programs with a selection of short Vitaphone pictures, mainly opera arias and vaudeville sketches. On June 28 an anonymous New York Times reviewer noted: “As is usual with the Warner Brothers’ presentations nowadays, [the] . . . feature is prefaced by a Vitaphone concert.” These “concerts” included Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt singing two songs at a New York recital (he was later to appear in The Jazz Singer); Bernardo Pace (mandolin) and Beniamino Gigli in a scene from Cavalleria Rusticana (released April 5, 1927); “Whispering” Jack Smith, “The Rollickers,” Vincent Lopez and his orchestra, and Giovanni Martinelli and Jeanne Gordon in a scene from act 2 of Carmen (released April 12); “The Revellers,” the Vitaphone orchestra playing the Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld, and John Charles Thomas in the Prologue to I Pagliacci (April 20); Mary Lewis (soprano), Albert Spalding (violin), and Margaret McKee–the whistling “bird in a cage” (released April 26); Leo Carillo in At the Ball Game and George Jessel in A Theatrical Booking Office (released May 6); and John Charles Thomas and Vivienne Segal singing “Will You Remember?” from Maytime (released late May 1927).

A particularly interesting concert selection accompanied the June 21 premiere of Alan Crosland’s feature Old San Francisco. In fact, the New York Times reviewer described the short films as “infinitely more sane and far more interesting than the principal film subject.”³¹ The concert items included Gigli singing arias from La Giaconda, William and Eugene Howard, and Blossom Seeley with Tom Brown and the Six Brown Brothers.

Despite critical objections, the feature film did give a spectacular demonstration of Vitaphone’s ability to provide powerful sound effects combined with a synchronized score. Old San Francisco, which starred Warner Oland, Dolores Costello, Anna May Wong, and William Demarest, was based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck. Although its visuals were completed before the erection of Stage Three, it was one of the first features scored in the new sound studio. Because of the improved technical and acoustic conditions, the recording was the best achieved up to that time. But, unpredictably, New York censors ordered that cuts be made in one reel of the movie, which meant the synchronization would be destroyed. It was easy to cut footage from the film, but there was no way known to remove the equivalent sound passage from the wax recording. The idea of doing a new recording of the music was rejected. It had cost $900 an hour to hire the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra to play the score for the film. An easier and less expensive solution had to be found, one that could be used again when ever similar difficulties arose. After some trial and error, the Vitaphone sound engineers solved the problem by re-recording the sound of the original Vitaphone disk, deleting the unwanted sound passages. This method, which became standard procedure in sound recording, was promptly nicknamed “duping,” a contraction of the word duplicating.

Aware that similar problems would arise when film broke during a theater showing, Vitaphone engineers came up with another solution, which was promptly passed on to the movie theater operators. Vitaphone films were sent out to the theaters together with a reel of blank footage so that if a break occurred in the film the operator could simply replace the damaged or useless footage with exactly the same number of frames of blank film. In this way, the synchronization could be preserved even with a Vitaphone film that had many cuts and splices. The problems arising out of censorship of Old San Francisco thus turned out to be a blessing in disguise.³²

But Crosland’s film was something of an endurance test for audiences who were becoming accustomed to more sensitive and melodious uses of Vitaphone. Culminating in scenes of the great earthquake of 1906, Old San Francisco was enlivened by screams, thunderous crashes, and an intense musical score by Hugo Riesenfeld. The sensational sound effects were created by Herman Heller, Warner Bros.’ musical director, who had been experimenting with sound dubbing since the earliest Vitaphone shorts. Heller provided earthquake noises by having “tons of bricks . . . rolled down a chute and recorded, then the assembled voices of several extras were dubbed in over the sound.”³³ The ear-splitting, horrendous climax was sufficient to drive the most prejudiced admirers of Vitaphone back to the tranquil sanctuary of silent cinema. Alan Crosland’s next feature film would be far less noisy, but its repercussions would be unimaginably vaster.

The Jazz Singer was to be the start of Warner Bros.’ regular production of features conceived for Vitaphone and made generally available for distribution to all Vitaphone-equipped theaters. It was to be a prestigious picture and was promoted in advance publicity as the studio’s “supreme achievement.” In mid-1927, however, not even the wildest optimist at Warner Bros., nor anyone else in Hollywood, vaudeville, or Wall Street, would have predicted that this movie-and more specifically the charisma of its star, Al Jolson–would decide the fate of silent cinema and determine the future of sound pictures.

In his book Stardom, Alexander Walker corrects the oftrepeated assertion that The Jazz Singer made Jolson into a star. As he states, “The Jazz Singer owed far more of its success to the celebrity he already possessed.”³⁴ During the twenty years preceding The Jazz Singer, Jolson was America’s most popular vaudeville artist. He played the lead in nine consecutive Broadway hits between 1911 and 1925. Walker notes that in the early 1920s Jolson’s “phonograph royalties for one month alone amounted to 120,000 dollars; his musical, Big Boy, grossed 1,419,000 dollars plus half the net profit which could well have totalled another 150,000 dollars.”³⁵ In 1921, when the Shuberts built a new theater at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, they acknowledged his enduring appeal by naming it the Jolson. During the 1926–27 season he was earning $17,000 per week at the Los Angeles Metropolitan, and for a single appearance at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre he received $16,500. The $350,000 he received for the entire season broke all box office records for the twenties.

As a singer, Jolson’s style was fixed and familiar long before it became internationally famous with The Jazz Singer. In 1913, while appearing in blackface as Gus in Honeymoon Express, he had the inspiration of getting down on one knee and delivering his songs with arms outstretched. According to one of his biographers, the source of this inspiration was an ingrown toenail, which made it painful for the singer to stand up. Whatever the reason, the response of his adoring audiences encouraged him to adopt this manner of delivery as part of his regular routine.

It is widely assumed that Jolson made his screen debut in The Jazz Singer. But, as noted earlier, in the previous year he had appeared in the second Vitaphone program, and, in fact, he was involved in other movie projects even before Vitaphone. As early as 1915 Jolson had appeared in a short silent film (title unknown), in which he burlesqued screen acting. A production of the California Motion Picture Corporation, the movie was made for presentation at the 1915 Panama Exposition. About this time Jolson turned down an offer of $50,000 to star in a silent feature film. In 1916 he was persuaded to make a short silent movie for the Vitagraph Company on the understanding that the picture was to have a limited showing and that all profits were to go to a benefit fund for traffic policemen. A viewing of this film left Jolson unimpressed. (“I’m no good if I can’t sing.”) Later, he ordered the picture to be suppressed when he discovered that Vitagraph had released it for general exhibition and that some of the profits were not going to the prescribed fund.³⁶

Jolson’s already unfavorable attitude towards movies and the film industry was aggravated by his dealings with D. W. Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation. Griffith repeatedly tried to induce Jolson to star in one of his movies, and he was so persistent and persuasive that at last, in 1923, Jolson accepted the lead in a film tentatively entitled either Black and White or Mammy’s Boy. Jolson’s role was that of an attorney who disguised himself as a Negro in order to solve a crime. The masquerade was, of course, a device for presenting him in his familiar blackface appearance. It is unlikely that Black and White was conceived even in part as a sound film. As we noted in chapter 2, two years earlier Griffith had tried to use synchronized sound (Orlando Kellum’s sound-on-disk system) in connection with his film Dream Street, in which Ralph Graves sang a love song. The results were so unsatisfactory that he discontinued the experiment after a short trial run. And in an article published in Collier’s in 1924, Griffith assured his readers that “It will never be possible to synchronize the voice with the pictures. This is true because the very nature of the films forgoes not only the necessity for but the propriety of the spoken voice.”³⁷

At the outset of work on Black and White, Jolson threw himself into the production with his characteristic drive and enthusiasm. All went well until he saw the rushes. The comic scenes (in blackface) looked fine, but he was appalled at the love scenes, which he had played seriously, in whiteface. Immediately, he resolved to pull out of the picture, and to make sure that Griffith would not be in a position to change his mind, Jolson boarded the first available ship for Europe. Only six reels of the movie had been shot when the cameras stopped rolling. The picture was never completed. Griffith was furious. He promptly sued Jolson for half a million dollars. But an unsympathetic judge (perhaps one of Jolson’s innumerable fans) allowed him to collect a meagre $2,627.

After this misadventure there was every reason to expect that Jolson would never again set foot inside a movie studio, but only two years later he accepted $10,000 for singing a song in one of De Forest’s short experimental Phonofilms. It was Jolson’s first experience in making sound movies. His reaction was lukewarm. He considered sound movies just a passing curiosity; they could never replace or challenge vaudeville. But the money he received for making the Phonofilm was excellent, and the time and effort involved were negligible and did not interfere with his stage career. So he agreed to perform for the second Vitaphone show, in 1926. That, presumably, was to be the limit of his association with Warner Bros. and Vitaphone. Certainly no one considered the possibility of getting Jolson to play the lead in The Jazz Singer. George Jessel had been the star of the Broadway production and had signed a $2,000-a-week contract with Warner Bros. to do the movie version. Advance advertising for the film announced that Jessel would be the star. Then the unexpected happened. Warner Bros. announced that Al Jolson would replace Jessel.

There are at least four versions of what occurred. According to a confused account in Moving Picture World, Jessel understood that he was going to make a silent film and agreed to play the title role for $100,000.

After his trunks had arrived at the Santa Fe station and the actor was introduced to the Vitaphone annex to the regular Warner Studio, we hear that for ‘Vitaphoning’ he must receive something like a second one hundred ‘thou.’ About this time, we gather, Warners decided that they could get that internationally known crooner of black babbles to do the two jobs [i.e., acting and singing] for just a couple of hundred thousand. [Presumably Warner Bros. considered that Jolson was worth $200,000 but that Jessel wasn’t.] On checking up all of this at the Warner Studio, we learned that ‘something like that’ did happen. . . .³⁸

The account given by Pearl Sieben, one of Jolson’s biographers, is that

Jessel signed a contract to make the picture, but when he saw the finished script, he had misgivings. The ending had been changed considerably and he did not like it. Another thing that made him reluctant to make the film was his belief that the movie would kill his chances of keeping on with the stage play, and in those days an actor could run for years in the same show. He told Warners that he did not want to fulfill the contract. The Warners argued with him, but they finally gave in and allowed him to work out the contract with two silent pictures.³⁹

Alexander Walker more or less combines both of these explanations:

Jessel . . . pointed out that since he would be expected to make two or three records for Vitaphone . . . he ought to get an additional fee. Negotiations with him were abruptly broken off–and opened with Jolson. Jessel is also believed to have claimed that he could get two more years out of the stage version of The Jazz Singer and he did not want to see the Vitaphone disks sold in competition with himself!⁴⁰

The version provided by Michael Freedland, Jolson’s latest biographer is that

with the uncertainties of a talkie and the effect it might have on his career, Jessel wanted insurance to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars. Warners said no and approached Eddie Cantor. He, too, said he was too worried about the effects of talking pictures on his career to contemplate the idea. Darryl Zanuck suggested they try to get Jolson. They knew Jolson loved a gamble. “What about asking Al Jolson to put money into the picture and draw stock from its takings?” Zanuck asked. Jolson insisted on complete secrecy about the whole matter while he thought it over. . . . The next day [Jessel] read in the papers that Jolson had signed with Warner Brothers to make The Jazz Singer. “Is it any wonder I always felt bitter?” Jessel asks. “I felt sick. It was my part and partly my story. Jolson got the role because he put money into it. But he was better at it than I would have been.”⁴¹

Leo Guild, in his recent biography of movie tycoon Darryl F. Zanuck, rather dubiously explains what occurred as the outcome of a personality conflict between Jessel and Jack Warner. This “explanation” is sandwiched between even more dubious accounts of how Guild’s “hero” originated the idea of filming The Jazz Singer and later came up with the inspiration for the spoken dialogue sequences:

Zanuck was called into Warner’s office and Warner’s orders were to find a property that they could use to introduce sound. [What had they been doing since Don Juan?] When Zanuck did find the property, The Jazz Singer, Harry Warner threw up his hands. He refused to buy it.

“No,” he said, “it’s too strongly Jewish. Therefore it limits its appeal.”

Zanuck argued, “Look, Harry, you’ve seen Nanook of the North. Well, when that Eskimo woman loses her child on the ice cap do the audiences stop to ask what religion she is? No, they just burst out crying.”

Harry shook his head. Jack Warner chewed on his cigar and said, “Let him do it. He usually knows what he’s doing.”

. . . So Harry went along with it. They had long conferences and decided they’d put Georgie Jessel into the lead of The Jazz Singer. He had done it on Broadway and everyone thought he was just right for it.

But Jessel and Jack Warner couldn’t get together. They ended cursing each other. Jessel said they didn’t have enough money to make it worth his while. Zanuck wanted Jack to give him what he wanted but Warner, always stubborn, refused. So Jack went to Al Jolson.

Zanuck always said, “I paid for twelve dinners before Al agreed to do the picture.”

While the picture was being done Zanuck put some words in it too. He couldn’t stand just using music with this great invention of sound. So several sentences were added. . . . It was a big hit from the beginning and the beginning of sound in film [really?] and it was Zanuck who had the courage and the necessary sticktoitiveness to get it on the screen.⁴²

Aside from their inconsistencies, each of these explanations is open to question on specific details. Moving Picture World was later to contradict its own, earlier, confused report (quoted above) that Jolson had received $200,000 for playing in The Jazz Singer by announcing, on September 10, 1927, that he had actually received only $150,000. Sieben’s story indicates, unconvincingly, a complete lack of foresight on the part of Jessel (or his agents). Warner Bros.’ heavy investment in the screen rights to The Jazz Singer would obviously have made it necessary to find an attractive replacement for the lead role (Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor) if Jessel backed out. We are expected to believe that Jessel would not have realized that or would have been unconcerned by it. Finally, we are asked to assume that it was only after he had signed the contract that Jessel realized that a film version with or without Jessel might pose a threat to the stage show. The problem of Freedland’s version is that it is ambiguous and there is no factual support for it. What was the “insurance” of a hundred thousand dollars that Jessel allegedly asked for? Was it his fee or a sum over and above the fee? Freedland maintains that it was Zanuck’s idea to replace Jessel by Jolson, but, as we saw in the previous chapter, Jack Warner has also claimed credit for that. Freedland also intimates that Jolson received no fee for making the picture but actually invested in it. And he quotes Jessel’s assertion–which is hardly credible–that Jolson only got the part because of his investment. Jessel’s remark has the distinct flavor of sour grapes. It is the comment of a man who does not want to admit to the worst mistake of his career. Leo Guild’s account indicates that the personal animosity between Jessel and Jack Warner was the root cause of the former’s replacement by Jolson. And that may indeed have been an important factor in what occurred–although it is rather curious that Guild seems to be the only writer who has ever mentioned it.

Whatever actually happened, as the years passed, Jessel evidently became increasingly aware that he had been deprived (or had deprived himself) of a fortune and a permanent niche in film history. For on one item all the sources agree–it was Jessel’s withdrawal that led to Jolson’s becoming the star of The Jazz Singer. Jolson’s own, brief account of the events that led to his appearance in The Jazz Singer is curiously vague. Diplomatically, perhaps, he avoids any mention of Jessel.

I couldn’t be convinced that the silent screen was a proper medium for me to use to reach an audience. Several producers and directors tried to persuade me but I was always dubious. I went so far as to make tests and to plan a story, but I was still dubious and finally decided that the silver screen was not for me. I’m still skeptical–about silent pictures–but the public has been kind in its approval of The Jazz Singer. . . . I had resisted some tempting offers to try the silent picture and was on the road with my show Big Boy when the suggestion that I make a “singing picture” was first discussed. We were in Denver with the show and before we left there I had thought the proposition over and decided to make the experiment. Warner Brothers who had just then perfected the Vitaphone and who had approached me with the proposal that I make their first full length talking [sic] and singing picture, were notified that I would accept their offer to make one Vitaphone picture. During the rest of the tour of Big Boy we planned the story of The Jazz Singer and when the road show closed I went to Hollywood for the first tests. I was not easily won away from my intention to make the legitimate stage the only medium between the public and me but the Vitaphone offered me an opportunity I could not resist. The success of The Jazz Singer is now motion picture history. It did ‘break’ into the movies with a loud bang which is echoing yet, and I found a new and satisfactory way of reaching a vastly increased audience. Having made the break, it followed naturally that Warner Brothers wanted more pictures and that I was willing to make them. . . . I looked a long time before I leaped but once the leap was made into movies I had no regrets.⁴³

It should be noted that Jolson does not mention his experiences with D. W. Griffith. His recollections were written in 1929, six years after the fiasco of Black and White, but the memory was still a painful one. Jolson says that he was approached with a suggestion to appear in a “singing picture”; later he amplifies it into a proposal to make Warner Bros.’ “first full length talking and singing picture.” The word “talking” is, of course, slipped in to convey the idea that The Jazz Singer was actually planned as a talkie. In fact, there is not a shred of evidence to support this notion, but good reason for believing that the dialogue passages on the sound track were the results of Jolson’s unexpected ad-libbing.

Particularly dubious is Jolson’s motive in remarking that he was involved in “planning” the story of The Jazz Singer during the road tour of Big Boy. There was obviously no need to plan what already existed in theatrical form (as a successful Broadway show) and in screenplay form (as a potential vehicle for a Jessel movie). However, Jolson ungenerously ignores Samson Raphaelson, who wrote the play (it was based on his original short story “The Day of Atonement”), and Alfred A. Cohn, who adapted it to the screen. In his version, The Jazz Singer was planned by Al Jolson and some other individuals whose names are not worth mentioning. Except for the Warners, who are allowed the credit of having “perfected” Vitaphone and the inspiration of having approached Jolson, we are expected to believe that the achievement was by, with, and from Jolson and all for the benefit of his adoring and ever-widening public.

The switch from Jessel to Jolson occurred in the course of a week at the end of May and the beginning of June 1927. Moving Picture World for May 28 reported that Jessel had arrived in Hollywood and The Jazz Singer would go into production in a week. Alan Crosland was to direct the picture, May McAvoy would costar with Jessel, and vaudevillian William Demarest, a recent “discovery” of Warner Bros., would make his feature film debut in one of the minor roles. A week later, the same journal announced that Jolson was to get the title role in The Jazz Singer. With the news that Jolson had replaced Jessel came the first reports that there was something unusual about the picture. Like Don Juan, it would have intertitles and a synchronized music score provided by Vitaphone, but this time songs and sounds would somehow be incorporated into the movie’s dramatic structure.

Alan Crosland began shooting the picture in mid-June. It was not, of course, the only movie then in production at Warner Bros., but because of its importance in the development of Vitaphone and because its star was Al Jolson, The Jazz Singer generated more interest than all the other films in progress at the studio.

Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt had been contracted to sing in the picture, and his arrival in Hollywood on June 7 made headlines in the trade papers.

Joseph Rosenblatt, the greatest cantor in America, if not in the world, is to appear in The Jazz Singer. . . . Cantor Rosenblatt was signed this week by H. M. Warner and is to appear as a singer not as an actor. . . . He has already made two songs [in New York] on the Vitaphone which will be used, and the finishing touches will be made at Warners’ Hollywood studio. . . . The Cantor has had all sorts of offers to appear in motion pictures, both here and abroad, but has refused to appear on the screen other than as a singer, which is made possible only by Vitaphone.⁴⁴

During the second week in August a writer for Moving Picture World visited Warner Bros. and reported that

Work throughout the entire Warner Studio–except on the set where Alan Crosland is filming The Jazz Singer–was suspended for one day this week while the whole production staff listened to Al Jolson, star of the picture, sing for the sequences which are to bring the Vitaphone into the dramatic action of a feature for the first time. The Jazz Singer has been under way for about ten weeks and the shooting schedule has now progressed to the point calling for the making of the several song numbers that are to be included as an integral part of the plot’s development. These numbers will take several more weeks to complete.⁴⁵

According to Fitzhugh Green, it was Jolson who made the most innovative contributions to the picture. They also turned out to be its most sensational aspects. During the shooting of one scene

Jolson became imbued with the spirit of the thing. He began to ‘ad lib.’ He is a natural ‘ad libber.’ When he is confined to tight lines his style is cramped. He works best when he can simply let himself go, put his own words into the thought that he is trying to get across–play it naturally, entirely in character. . . . They were working on a song which he was singing to his mother. The script called for him to summon her to the piano, and then to start singing it for her. All the action up to the start of the song was supposed to take place in the silent part of the film. They rehearsed, lined up, started the take. And before he sang, Jolson spoke to his “mother,” spontaneously. “Come on, Ma,” he said. “Listen to this!” She went over to the piano, and he began to sing. The action went ahead. Sam Warner and Alan Crosland had not expected Jolson to speak. But when they heard it in the play-back, that spontaneous bit sounded good. They decided to leave it in. That decision made history.⁴⁶

The filming of Jolson’s songs occupied much of the last month of production. “The remainder of the time was consumed in shooting interiors at the Warner Studio and in allowing Director Alan Crosland to make a location trip to New York with several of the principals.”⁴⁷ The purpose of the trip was to film scenes of the Lower East Side that were to appear at the beginning of the movie.

At the end of September, immediately after the completion of the picture, Warner Bros. announced to the press that the premiere of The Jazz Singer would take place in New York, at the Warner Theatre, on Thursday evening, October 6, 1927. There followed a week-long, rapid-fire promotional campaign involving a flurry of billboard and press-release activity, collaboration with Grosset and Dunlap, who published a novelized version of the film story (it was the work of Arline De Haas, who also prepared a serialized version that was made available free of charge to newspapers from coast to coast), and a tie-in with Brunswick Records, Inc., who were to issue recordings of songs from the film.⁴⁸ A trailer for The Jazz Singer was actually made after the premiere and was used in connection with the general release of the picture following the first three months of its run in New York. A landmark of sorts, the trailer was the first in which sound was used. It showed not only scenes from the film but also the crowds outside the Warner Theatre on opening night and some of the show-business personalities who had turned up for the big event.

Richard Watts, Jr., who reviewed The Jazz Singer for the New York Herald Tribune, voiced the opinion of many critics in describing it as “a pleasant enough sentimental orgy” that was “inherently far from sensational.” This impression was not, however, shared by the “milling, battling mob” that swarmed outside the theater before and after the premiere. Even the thousands who did not manage to get in to see the picture evidently considered the combination of Al Jolson, Vitaphone, and the show in which Jessel had triumphed on Broadway as unique an event as Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic some six months earlier. It wasn’t just any premiere: it was the movie sensation of 1927–and they had to be there. As they waited, a steady procession of celebrities–from composer Irving Berlin and comedian Johnny Hines to Mayor Jimmy Walker–stepped out of their limousines and paused on the sidewalk to entertain the crowd with a song, a dance, or some small talk before passing out of sight into the foyer. Among the last to arrive was the star of the show, Al Jolson, escorting a very young Ruby Keeler (to whom he was not yet married).

Al’s brother Harry Jolson recollected that when the show started its star was ensconced

in an orchestra seat, nervous and worried. Never before had he sat in an audience to see and hear himself on the stage. There was tremendous applause when his voice came from the screen. Tears were in every eye when the picture ended, with the jazz singer chanting the prayers in the synagogue. Al broke down completely, for tears always came easily to his eyes. The critics joined in a paean of praise. Talking pictures were here to stay.⁴⁹

There are some inaccuracies in this description. The picture does not end with the jazz singer chanting in the synagogue but with the jazz singer singing “My Mammy” in a theater. Also, the critics did not “join in a paean of praise.” Critical opinion of the picture ranged from ecstatic to antipathetic; mostly it was lukewarm. But Harry was probably correct about his brother’s nervousness on that momentous opening night. Jolson was, above all, a performer. Passive observation–even of himself–was unnatural, even intolerable to him. Then, as we have already seen, he had long been dubious about appearing in movies; he was probably even more doubtful about the future of Vitaphone. If The Jazz Singer flopped what would it do to his reputation? Above all, he was probably reacting to the fact that the story unfolding on the screen was in certain respects his own. He too was a jazz singer, and like the hero of the film, his career was a reaction against an orthodox Jewish background.

The plot of The Jazz Singer is concerned with a conflict between old-world and new-world values, represented in the refusal of a Jewish cantor to tolerate his son’s commitment to popular music. The father wants him to become a cantor, but the boy wants to be a jazz singer.

Thirteen-year-old Jakie Rabinowitz has run away from New York and his orthodox Jewish parents after his father (Warner Oland) has punished him for singing popular songs in a tavern. “Years later–and three thousands miles from home,” Jakie, who now calls himself Jack Robin (Al Jolson) begins his showbusiness career as a singer in Coffee Dan’s nightclub. Here he meets and falls in love with Mary Dale (May McAvoy), who is already a rising star in vaudeville. His talents and her assistance and encouragement eventually land him a part in a big Broadway show. Back in New York for rehearsals, he visits his parents’ home. His mother (Eugenie Besserer) is overjoyed to see him, but his father refuses to acknowledge a jazz singer as his son and orders Jack out of the house. On the opening night of the show, Jack hears that his father is dying and that the old man’s last wish is to hear his son sing in his place as cantor of the synagogue. Forced to make a painful choice between losing his big chance on Broadway or breaking his father’s heart, Jack deserts the show and goes to the synagogue to sing “Kol Nidre.” The old cantor, having expressed his love for his son, passes joyfully away to the strains of Jack’s voice drifting in from the neighboring synagogue. Time passes. Although Jack had let the show down, all is forgiven. Once again he gets his big break. But this time there are no conflicts. He goes on stage and proves to be a tremendous success–much to the delight of his ecstatic mother and an adoring Mary, who are in the theater to join the rapturous applause as he sings “My Mammy.”

As the picture faded out on Jolson (in blackface), the onscreen applause was taken up and amplified by countless audiences throughout the world. But what the public applauded, many critics deplored. Leading the chorus of critical denunciation was the novelist Aldous Huxley, who, predictably, was revolted by his first experiences of sound movies. He summed them up in an essay titled “Silence is Golden” (first published in 1929), an eight-page tirade against sound movies in general and The Jazz Singer in particular.⁵⁰ The subject provided him with an opportunity for making odious comparisons between his own elevated aesthetic standards and the decadent taste of his less-cultivated fellowmen. Curiously, despite his sophistication and refinement, he was not above indulging in cheap anti-Semitic jibes. The program in which he saw The Jazz Singer included a short movie of a jazz band. He describes it as a performance by “dark and polished young Hebrews, whose souls were in those mournfully sagging, seasickishly undulating melodies of mother love and nostalgia and yammering amorousness and clotted sensuality which have been the characteristically Jewish contributions to modern popular music.” (Aside from its anti-Semitism, the comment displays total insensitivity to the work of such composers as George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and Harold Arlen.)

When Huxley turns to The Jazz Singer he has already made it clear from his prejudice against “dark . . . young Hebrews” and his deeply rooted antipathy to what he called “standardized entertainment” that he is not going to attempt an objective assessment of the picture. He starts out by satirizing the plot, which he considered sheer absurdity. (Actually it is the summit of intelligence and credibility compared to the heroic drama of Dryden, in whose work Huxley professed admiration.) His treatment of the plot is too long to quote in full; a few choice passages will suffice:

When, after what seemed hours, the jazz band concluded its dreadful performance, I sighed in thankfulness. But the thankfulness was premature. For the film which followed was hardly less distressing. It was the story of the child of a cantor in a synagogue, afflicted, to his father’s justifiable fury, with an itch for jazz. This itch, assisted by the cantor’s boot, sends him out into the world, where in due course and thanks to My Baby, his dreams come tree-ue, and he is employed as a jazz singer on the music-hall stage. . . . The crisis of the drama arrives when, the cantor being mortally sick and unable to fulfill his functions at the synagogue, Mammy of Mine and the Friends of his Childhood implore the young man to come and sing the atonement service in his father’s place. Unhappily, this religious function is booked to take place at the same hour as that other act of worship vulgarly known as the First Night. There ensues a terrific struggle, worthy of the pen of a Racine or a Dryden, between love and honor. Love for Mammy of Mine draws the jazz singer toward the synagogue; but love for My Baby draws the cantor’s son toward the theatre. . . . Honor also calls from either side; for honor demands that he should serve the God of his fathers at the synagogue, but it also demands that he should serve the jazz-voiced god of his adoption at the theatre. . . . With the air of a Seventeenth Century hero, the jazz singer protests that he must put his career before even his love. The nature of the dilemma has changed, it will be seen, since Dryden’s day. In the old dramas it was love that had to be sacrificed to painful duty. In the modern instance the sacrifice is at the shrine of what William James called “the Bitch Goddess, Success.” Love is to be abandoned for the stern pursuit of newspaper notoriety and dollars.

Huxley’s mockery of The Jazz Singer’s plot could, of course, be extended to the story lines of innumerable operas and musicals (in both theater and film), but in the final analysis his ridicule is insensitive because it ignores the intensification and enrichment that comes with the interaction of dramatic and musical elements that in themselves may seem trite. His snobbish critique anticipates the kind of imperceptive objection to the musical and other popular screen genres that has persisted among a certain type of intellectual since the beginnings of film criticism.

Anyone who has seen The Jazz Singer will realize that Huxley’s satirical account of it is inaccurate. The hero as a child is not booted out by his father–he leaves home of his own accord. It is not “Friends of his Childhood” who implore Jack to sing in his father’s place but Yudelson the Kibbitzer, who had betrayed young Jakie to his father when the boy was singing in a tavern. And it is not love for Mary (or My Baby, as Huxley calls her, in mocking echo of the lyrics of popular songs of the period) that pulls Jack toward the theater; it is clear in the film that being a jazz singer had meant everything to Jack even before he met her. Aside from such specific details, the struggle to which Huxley refers is not between Love and Honor (or Success and Duty) but between Personal Ambition and Duty– or, more precisely, between Narcissism and Responsibility. It is a struggle in which, quite exceptionally, no value judgments are involved. The hero’s commitment is to the modern world and his own self-expression, to getting theater audiences to listen to him singing the kind of music he loves best–that obviously counts for him much more than “newspaper notoriety and dollars.” (Significantly, the first piece of recorded dialogue to be heard in the film is Jack’s speech to the audience in the nightclub: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet. . . .”) By contrast, the cantor’s commitment is to tradition and to expressing what man owes to God rather than what he considers due to himself. There is a genuine, meaningful conflict here. It cannot be trivialized by deliberate distortion and mockery.

While other critical reactions to The Jazz Singer never approached the cynical prejudice of Huxley’s, many were equally irrelevant. The film was most persistently criticized for being nostalgic and sentimental: a rather pointless objection since that is precisely what it was intended to be. Little consideration was given to the more valid questions of whether it was a good film of its kind (there are standards in sentimental and nostalgic movies) and why it was so much more conspicuously successful than the numerous other nostalgic and sentimental films of the period.

In fact, there has been no serious thought about this historically important film until very recently. Alexander Walker, in his book Stardom (1970), notes that The Jazz Singer is concerned with

three of the most emotionally charged themes round which any film has been built–Jewish traditions, showbiz sentiment and mother love. All three are interwoven in a mawkish, yet crudely effective story. . . . It is undoubtedly this calculated pitch to the basic sentiments of an audience which makes the film’s poorly recorded sound so emotionally effective even today and which, in its day, gave it what one might call a heart-start over the other part-talkies on the screen. . . . One may be pardoned for the irreverent thought that the only trick the film-makers missed was having Jolson sing Kol Nidre in blackface, thus achieving an unbeatable concentrate of racial sentiment.⁵¹

Perceptive as his commentary is, Walker actually gives a rather limited impression of the film’s themes. For the movie was also concerned with modern reaction against traditional values, with duty to parents, and with the desire for self-fulfillment. Moreover, the central conflict was patently Oedipal, and this familiar situation together with the universality of most of the aforementioned themes extended the film’s appeal far beyond its focus on Jewish characters. Thus The Jazz Singer reached out to the widest possible public: to young and old, parents and children, modernists and traditionalists, the ambitious and the dutiful. Added to all that, The Jazz Singer attracted its audiences with memorable popular songs sung inimitably by one of the great stars of vaudeville. It moved them with the intensity and sincerity of its performances (particularly Jolson’s and Warner Oland’s). And last but by no means least, it offered the novelty of Vitaphone used in a new and unexpected way. For The Jazz Singer was a film that talked!

Robert E. Sherwood was one of the film’s few contemporary critics to rise above superciliousness or mindless glorification and recognize the potential importance of the picture. In October 1927 he wrote:

There is no question of doubt that the Vitaphone justifies itself in The Jazz Singer. Furthermore, it proves that talking movies are considerably more than a lively possibility: they are close to an accomplished fact. The Jazz Singer isn’t much of a moving picture, as moving pictures go . . . and Al Jolson as an actor is only fair. But when Al Jolson starts to sing . . . well, bring on your super-spectacles, your million-dollar thrills, your long-shots of Calvary against the setting sun, your close-ups of a glycerine tear on Norma Talmadge’s cheek–I’ll trade them all for one instant of any ham song that Al cares to put over, and the hammier it is, the better I’ll like it. In view of the imminence of talking movies, I wonder what Clara Bow’s voice will sound like. [He was very soon to find out.]

Sherwood added, with more foresight than he could have realized: “I wonder whether the speeches that the Hollywood sub-title writers compose will be as painful to hear as they are to read.”⁵²

Curiously, although millions heard what Jolson said, there is widespread inaccuracy and confusion among film historians about the recorded dialogue in The Jazz Singer. Here are some typical examples: According to Lewis Jacobs “The audience responded riotously to Al Jolson’s ‘Come on, Ma! Listen to this. . . .’ ”⁵³ But Jolson never uttered that line in the film. Richard Griffith writes that Jolson spoke only at the end of the picture, when he said, “Hey, Mom, listen to this.” Then, continues Griffith, “he sang two songs. To hear these two songs and the five words that introduced them, New York and the world queued up for months.”⁵⁴ This account is totally incorrect: Jolson speaks twice in the film and when he talks to his Mom (Eugenie Besserer) it is midway through the picture, not at the end. At that point in the movie he sings only one song, “Blue Skies.” Also, as we shall see, he says considerably more than five words to Eugenie Besserer, and what he says does not include “Hey, Mom, listen to this.” In David Robinson’s version, the film has only “a line or two of dialogue, including a catch phrase: ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.’ ”⁵⁵ Robinson is correct about the catch phrase, but quite wrong about there being only a line or two of dialogue. Finally, according to Gerald Mast, the film contains only two sequences using synchronized speech (and he is correct in this statement); he accurately identifies one of them, but then incorrectly states that the other sequence is the one in which Jolson sings “My Mammy.”⁵⁶

Admittedly, The Jazz Singer is not one of the masterpieces of world cinema, but it will always have a permanent place in film history. Therefore, once and for all it is worthwhile getting the details straight.

The two sequences in which synchronized speech occurs are: (1) Coffee Dan’s nightclub near the start of the picture, and (2) the episode, halfway through the film, when Jack Robin visits his parents’ home for the first time since he was a boy.

In the nightclub sequence, Jolson has just finished singing “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face.” (That is his first song in the movie –it is also the first time we are shown the adult Jack Robin.) As his audience applauds, Jolson raises his hands for silence and says: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet! Wait a minute, I tell you. You ain’t heard nothin’. You wanna hear ‘Toot-toot-tootsie’? All right. Hold on.” He turns to the band and says: “Now listen: play ‘Toot-toot-tootsie.’ Three choruses. In the first chorus I whistle. . . .” He then goes into his song. Jolson is the only person whose speech is recorded in this part of the movie. The scene concludes with Jack’s first meeting with Mary Dale. Their conversation is presented in typical silent cinema fashion–with visual intertitles.

Most of the recorded speech in the film occurs in the famous scene between Jolson and Eugenie Besserer, the scene that Robert E. Sherwood considered “fraught with tremendous significance” when he viewed it in the fall of 1927. “I for one,” he observed, “suddenly realized that the end of the silent drama is in sight. . . .”⁵⁷ The scene begins when Jack, seated at the piano with his adoring mother beside him, stops between verses of “Blue Skies” to involve her in the following exchange:

Jack: Did you like that, Mama?

Mama: Yes.

Jack: I’m glad of it. I’d rather please you than anybody I know of. Oh, darlin’–will you give me something?

Mama: What?

Jack: You’ll never guess. Shut your eyes, Mama. Shut ‘em for little Jackie. Ha! I’m gonna steal something. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

(He kisses her and Mama mock-protests.)

I’ll give it back to you someday too–you see if I don’t.

(She laughs.)

Mama darlin’–if I’m a success in this show, well, we’re gonna move from here. (She protests.)

Oh yes, we’re–we’re gonna move up in the Bronx. A lot of nice green grass up there. A whole lot of people you know. There’s the Ginsburgs, the Guttenbergs and the Goldbergs. Oh, a whole lot of bergs. I dunno ‘em all. And I’m gonna buy you a nice black, silk dress, Mama. You see, Mrs. Freedman, the butcher’s wife, she’ll be jealous of you.

Mama: Oh no–

Jack: Yes she will. You see if she isn’t. And I’m gonna get you a nice pink dress that’ll go with your brown eyes.

Mama: No–I–I–No, No–

Jack: Just what do you mean, “No”? Who–who’s tellin’ ya? Whadda ya mean, “No”? Yes, you’ll wear pink or else–Or else you’ll wear pink.

(He laughs.)

And darlin’–Oh, I’m gonna take you to Coney Island.

Mama: Yes?

Jack: Yes–for a ride on the Shoot-the-Shoot. And, you know, in the Dark Mill.

Mama: Yes?

Jack: Ever been in the Dark Mill?

Mama: Oh no!–I wouldn’t. . .

Jack: Well with me it’s all right. I’ll kiss ya and hug ya. You see if I don’t. Oh Mama, Mama! Stop now! Will you? Kiss me! Mama –Listen, I’m gonna sing this like I will if I go on the stage. You know–with this show. I’m gonna sing it Jazzy. Now get this–

(He sings a verse of “Blue Skies” and then interrupts with:) You like that slap in the tune? (Papa enters and yells: Stop!)

There is no other synchronized speech in the rest of the film. Examination of screenplays of the film confirms the oft-repeated assertion of film historians that the recorded dialogue was unplanned.⁵⁸ Alfred A. Cohn’s screenplay was delightfully vague on the question of how Vitaphone was to be used. Such directions as the following indicate the relative freedom with which Crosland was able to use the recording system:

Scene 43 MEDIUM SHOT OF PIANO PLAYER

The player plays the introduction to “Mighty Lak a Rose” [the song was not used for the film] and the boy starts to sing. (The various shots for this will have to be in accordance with Vitaphone and its necessities.) Vitaphone singing stops when cut is made.

Scene 74 CLOSE UP PIANO PLAYER

Getting the humor of the situation, he [Jakie] starts playing something appropriate, like “Stay in your own Backyard” [the song was not used for the film] or perhaps something more modern and more to the point.

Scene 123 CLOSE UP JACK

He starts to sing his song. (The song which is to be Vitaphoned should be one especially written for the occasion as any current number would be out of date long before the picture has played every theatre equipped for Vitaphone by release time.) [Actually, several of the songs in the movie were not current numbers. “Toot-toot-tootsie,” for example, was a hit five years before The Jazz Singer was made.]

Obviously, the screenplay encouraged–or at least permitted –the director to improvise in using Vitaphone. And in the course of his own improvisations, Crosland was, presumably, receptive to Jolson’s. But there is no reason to believe that Crosland and Jolson considered the ad-libbed lines as having any dramatic significance or that they anticipated the public reaction to them. Nevertheless, it has frequently been said that the film’s original audiences were excited by the integration of recorded speech into the action of the story. The movie itself demonstrates the inaccuracy of this notion. Jolson’s ad-libbing has no dramatic function. It develops neither situation nor character. True, it provides in one scene a transition from song to song and in another a transition from one verse of “Blue Skies” to another. But these transitions were unnecessary. Their omission would have passed unnoticed and would not, in any way, have impaired the film. The original audiences were excited not by a dramatic use of recorded dialogue but by synchronized speech being used naturally in contrast to “performed” songs and the conventions of the silent drama.⁵⁹

There was no novelty in recorded speech and songs coming from the screen. As mentioned in the previous chapter, a year earlier than The Jazz Singer the image and voice of Will Hays had addressed the audience at the first Vitaphone program, and in the intervening months Jolson himself had been among the many artists who had sung for short Vitaphone films. But the Hays film had presented a formal, prepared speech, whereas Jolson’s ad-libbing was exactly that: unexpected, informal, spontaneous. In those two scenes of The Jazz Singer, the occurrence of recorded speech created the illusion of a real experience. For a few moments, Jolson wasn’t merely an image on the screenhe was, or seemed to be, actually there, in person, speaking just the way people did when they tried to break in on conversation or applause, when they were kidding or making small talk. The earlier uses of Vitaphone had, at best, succeeded in recreating other synthetic experiences–opera, vaudeville, sound effects– but here, suddenly, inadvertently, it was creating realism.

While its synchronized speech received most attention, The Jazz Singer was also innovative, though less obviously, in its use of synchronized music.^* Here Crosland was able to apply and develop ideas and techniques he had first employed in making Don Juan. As with the earlier film, music provided most of the synchronized sound in The Jazz Singer. However, where Don Juan was supplied with an original orchestral score, the music to The Jazz Singer was more varied and in some respects rather more complex. It consisted of popular songs (new and traditional), Jewish cantorial music, and an orchestral score composed partly of variations on the themes of popular songs and partly of excerpts from works by Debussy, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Seven popular songs were scattered through the picture. The first two–“My Gal Sal” by Paul Dresser and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” by L. Wolfe Gilbert and Lewis F. Muir–were lip-synced by Bobbie Gordon, who played Jakie Rabinowitz as a boy. They were reputedly sung by Jolson, though that seems impossible as the voice is quite unlike his. The remaining five were all definitely sung by Jolson. “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” (by Jolson, Grant Clarke, Edgar Leslie, and James V. Monaco) and “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” (by Gus Kahn, Ernie Erdman, and Dan Russo) both occurred during the scene in Coffee Dan’s nightclub. (This setting, incidentally, had been used in 1926 for a Vitaphone short starring William Demarest, who also appeared in the nightclub sequence of The Jazz Singer.) “Blue Skies” (by Irving Berlin) was sung by Jolson in his famous scene with Eugenie Besserer. It had originally been written for Belle Baker, who sang it in the show Betsy (1926). But the song did not become popular until Jolson sang it in The Jazz Singer. The fourth number, “Mother O’ Mine” (by Jolson, Grant Clarke, and Lou Silvers) was the first of two that Jolson sang in blackface. The other blackface number was, of course, “My Mammy” (by Sam M. Lewis, Joe Young, and Walter Donaldson), which provided the film’s finale. Aside from these numbers, several more traditional songs were used as background music. These pieces–which were not sung–included “The Sidewalks of NewYork,” “In the Good Old Summertime,” “If a Girl Like You Loved a Boy Like Me,” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

The cantorial music consisted of excerpts from “Kol Nidre” and the “Yahrzeit,” both sung in Hebrew. The first was lipsynced by Warner Oland and actually sung by Cantor Rosenblatt, and Jolson himself sang part of “Kol Nidre” in the synagogue scene that occurs near the end of the film. In another scene, Jolson as Jack Robin goes to a concert of Jewish music and hears Rosenblatt, in person, singing the “Yahrzeit.”

The orchestral score consists mainly of excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, brief snatches of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Debussy’s “Beau soir,” and orchestrations of “Mother O’ Mine,” “My Mammy,” “Kol Nidre,” and the more traditional popular songs.

The great achievement of Alan Crosland and Lou Silvers^* (who was the film’s musical director) was the integration of these very different musical styles into the same picture without any incongruity. They successfully realized stylistic combinations that had been attempted less effectively in the third Vitaphone program. Much of The Jazz Singer’s music may have sounded hackneyed even in 1927, and all of it was distasteful to sophisticated tastes such as Aldous Huxley’s. But it appears that no one complained about the combination of popular songs and orchestral music, and of both of them with traditional cantorial melodies.

The skill with which the musical material was interwoven with the visual fabric of the picture can be exemplified by the opening of the movie–between the appearance of the film’s title and our first view of the boy Jakie singing in a Lower East Side tavern. The music heard across the credits is a quotation from the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture, which leads directly into the first of three brief, Hebraicsounding themes (the other two are to be associated with Jakie’s mother and father, respectively). The first theme, a tragic melody scored rather heavily for strings, accompanies the following intertitles: “In every living soul a spirit cries for expression– perhaps this plaintive wailing song of Jazz is, after all, the misunderstood utterance of a prayer,” and “The New York Ghetto throbbing to that rhythm of music which is older than civilization.” Significantly, the mention of jazz is accompanied not by jazz or popular music of any kind but by the Jewish theme: that is, jazz and the Jewish spirit are immediately set in conflict–suggesting from the very outset the antagonism that will dominate the picture.

Although it is Jolson’s songs that one remembers, from a dramatic standpoint it is the classical and cantorial music that pervades the film. This music is, of course, strongly associated with Jackie’s father. Repeatedly, Tchaikovsky’s themes interrupt and cut short the popular melodies that we identify with Jakie and his career in show business. But the fact that the Tchaikovsky passages are “love” music suggests the force that will eventually prevail over Jakie’s rebellious spirit.

This force is particularly evident in two of the film’s major sequences: Jakie’s return home, and his ultimate decision to sacrifice his big opportunity and sing for his father. Jakie’s arrival at his parents’ home is accompanied not by a jazz theme but by a brief quotation from “Kol Nidre.” We see Mama before she has noticed that her boy has come back. The music is now the gentle, Hebraic-sounding melody associated with Sara, the cantor’s wife. Then, as she turns and sees Jakie, we hear, for the first time, the tune “Mother O’ Mine” (it will not actually be sung until much later in the picture) followed by its preamble. So far there is no thematic or stylistic dominant in these musical snatches. Then Jakie takes his seat at the piano. In a moment, “Blue Skies” has established a new, buoyant tone: the jazz singer’s spirit is in the ascendant. Suddenly, the cantor appears. His peremptory “Stop!” (heard over the sound track) receives the response of a silent intertitle (“Papa!”) from Jakie.^* Thereupon the interrupted piano piece gives way to the love theme from Romeo and Juliet. It is developed in full (the orchestral sound replacing the solo piano) as Jakie, in a smiling, conciliatory manner offers his father the prayer shawl he has bought for the cantor’s sixtieth birthday. The development of the “love” theme continues as both gift and Jakie are rejected. But then, as Jakie leaves–with a resentful “Some day you’ll understand as Mama does”–the strains of “Mother O’Mine” are picked up briefly. The juxtaposition of musical themes clearly emphasizes both the father’s dominance and the son’s allegiance to his mother.

Later in the film, Jakie is in his dressing room, blacking his face before going on stage. His girlfriend, Mary Dale, is watching him. Over the sound track we hear not a theme associated with Mary but “Mother O’Mine.” Mary is encouraging him before his first big appearance on Broadway, but the music tells us that he is thinking of Mama. (This is one of many places in the film where music is used to reveal characters’ thoughts or states of mind: it demonstrates the effective application of techniques that had been tried out to a much more limited degree in the making of Don Juan.) As Jakie completes his makeup, the music cuts to “My Mammy.” Momentarily, the jazz singer is his buoyant self and the lively tune indicates that his concern for Mama has been absorbed into concern for the show. But at this point Mary mentions Jakie’s father, and “My Mammy” suddenly cuts out. In its place we start to hear a wistful cantorial theme. A haggard-looking Jakie confesses that the songs of his people are tugging at his heart. He looks at himself in a mirror, but what he sees is a vision of a synagogue service. By now, the strains of “Kol Nidre” have developed out of the wistful cantorial melody. Meanwhile, Mama has arrived at the theater. As she enters Jakie’s dressing room, “Kol Nidre” gives way to the Tchaikovsky “love” theme. The music alone tells us that the cantor will really be speaking through Mama. At first, Jakie resists her appeal to come to his father. He goes on stage, in blackface, and sings “Mother O’Mine,” in rejection of the cantor. But afterwards he does go to see his father. Debussy’s lovely melody “Beau soir” is heard during the deathbed scene, but when the picture cuts to the theater, where the producer of the show is announcing that the performance has been cancelled, we hear, once again, the strains of Romeo and Juliet. The father’s leitmotif has obliterated the music of the jazz singer. However, the movie ends with an expression of the mother’s dominance when Jakie returns to the theater to sing “My Mammy.”

In contrast to this overtly dramatic scoring, there are several scenes in the film where music is used for satiric effect. At the station where Jakie is about to hear the news that he is wanted for a Broadway show, one of his show-business colleagues is making envious comments about him. Our attitude towards her is influenced by the mocking, classical theme that accompanies her remarks. In another part of the movie, Yudelson the Kibbitzer is holding a meeting of the synagogue elders to determine who is to sing in place of the sick cantor (Jakie’s father). An absurd quarrel develops, which is satirized in some comic variations on Hassidic themes.

These few examples are sufficient to demonstrate that The Jazz Singer is scored like a modern picture. Music is used to create moods and psychological effects, to build an inner drama parallel to the outer action, to suggest and emphasize dramatic conflicts, and to create and develop character. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that after having seen the film only once, one can look away from the screen during a second showing and follow the narrative entirely through the music.

No observations on The Jazz Singer would be complete without a few words about the songs. They were obviously selected to display Jolson’s range as a performer. Accordingly, we have dramatic/pathetic numbers like “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,” lively, rhythmic songs like “Blue Skies,” and sentimental/nostalgic melodies like “Mother O’Mine.” “My Mammy,” the number that concludes the film, is a kind of summation of all the previous song styles. Characteristically, Jolson gives it everything he has. No one who has seen the film is ever likely to forget his impassioned rendering of that song as he goes down on one knee, arms thrown out to embrace the world, and with the light gradually fading out on his blackface, leaving only his white lips, white gloves, and tie momentarily visible.

The most vivid impression of Jolson at the summit of his career is Alexander Walker’s recollection of him in the film’s concluding scene:

Heavy-lidded, dark-eyebrowed, a skull-cap of hair, a lean, streaky, ever-eager look and a style that punches his personality over a row of imaginary footlights–Jolson plays the part like one who knows he is the star of the show. But what must have been striking at the time was the new dimension that sound could add even to this star personality. May McAvoy, as the singer’s girl-friend, sums it up in one line when she tells him [in an earlier scene], “There are lots of jazz singers, but you have a tear in your voice.”⁶⁰

Many of the reviewers who were unenthusiastic about the film as a whole, considered The Jazz Singer a personal triumph for Jolson. Thus, Richard Watts, Jr., observed,

What they [the audience at the premiere] saw was an impressive triumph of both Mr. Jolson and the Vitaphone over the formerly silent drama. . . . But it should be recalled that this is not essentially a motion picture, but rather a chance to capture, for comparative immortality, the sight and sound of a great performer. . . . The Vitaphone makes the entertainment . . . a great show, but hardly a transcendent motion picture. . . . But, of course, the evening was Jolson’s.⁶¹

An anonymous reviewer for Picture Play (January 1928) had praise for Jolson the singer, but was less than favorable about his acting or his interpretation of the lead role:

The Jazz Singer is important because of Al Jolson and the Vitaphone. As a picture it is second-rate, but with the comedian actually heard singing some of his famous numbers in conjunction with the story, The Jazz Singer offers genuine entertainment. As almost everyone knows, the comedy depicts the conflict between Jewish tradition and the glamor of theatrical life. . . . All this is perfectly fitted to Al Jolson’s songs . . . and he sings them as only Jolson can. It is too bad that he does nothing to make his rôle real. Instead of being a wise-cracking youth, as the character was played on stage, Jack Robin in Jolson’s hands becomes a veteran performer, who knows that he is the star of the picture and takes that fact with gravity. Thus it becomes no characterization at all, but simply an opportunity to see Jolson on the screen and hear his inimitable art. . . . Bobbie Gordon plays Jakie at thirteen. The boy makes you wish that Jakie hadn’t stopped being such a good actor when he became Mr. Jolson.

Among the relatively few reviews that were unqualified in their admiration for every aspect of the picture was another anonymous one, in the trade paper Moving Picture World, which welcomed the picture as “The Best Show on Broadway,” and described it as

Entertainment all the way through, the sort of box-office combination of tears and smiles that will always be sure-fire. The Jazz Singer is nothing short of a magnificent triumph for Warner Brothers, for the Vitaphone, for Al Jolson, and for Director Alan Crosland. It should do tremendous business. . . . ⁶²

It did–wherever it was shown in its full Vitaphone version with synchronized sound. But in some theaters that were not wired for Vitaphone, the picture was presented with an accompaniment of ordinary phonograph records of Jolson played during appropriate scenes of the film. At such theaters, the box office returns were moderate at best. And in other theaters, where not even a record accompaniment was provided, the returns were far worse. The lesson was not lost on Warner Bros. Recorded music helped to “sell” the picture, but it was the unique, synchronized dialogue passages that were making it the big movie hit of the year.

At the end of 1927, as The Jazz Singer began its triumphal tour of the world’s capitals, vast sums of money began to pour into Warner Bros.’ empty coffers. The great gamble with sound was paying off. The burgeoning spirit of success was not dimmed by the untimely death of Sam Warner, who had led his brothers into the involvement with Vitaphone, or by the resignation of Alan Crosland and his screenwriter Bess Meredyth, who were seeking potentially greener pastures at Columbia Pictures.

Warner Bros.’ optimism was symbolized by the newly approved trademark for the Vitaphone Corporation. Designed by Jack R. Keegan, the head of Vitaphone’s publicity department, the trademark first appeared on the credits for The Jazz Singer and was subsequently to become a familiar sight on Warner and First National pictures. In its August 27, 1927 issue, Moving Picture World described it as

simple and effective. The single word Vitaphone is strongly in the foreground across two tangential globes, each showing half of the world. Around the background, tieing the whole together, is the motto that Vitaphone has adopted. This gives the complete message. “The Voice of the Screen–Vitaphone–is Thrilling the World.”

It was. Ironically, only six years later it was rumored that the picture whose success Jolson had helped insure might be remade with Jolson in the lead role in order to help the star “recapture some of his former appeal.”⁶³ The rumor was unfounded. Instead of a remake, Warner Bros. had actually decided to find out whether the original film still had any box-office attraction. As there were no longer any theaters equipped for showing Vitaphone, the film was re-released, in 1935, with its original sound-on-disk transferred to sound-on-film. The revival passed almost unnoticed. But A. F., in Today’s Cinema, one of the few reviewers who considered the film worthy of comment, noted with surprise that despite its “flowery verbiage” and “frank sentimentality,” its story was told with an admirable compactness. “Its sum total of entertainment is far from negligible for it has a vitality all its own and its well recorded score and camera qualities are on the credit side rather than the debit side.”⁶⁴

Jolson himself was never to do a remake of The Jazz Singer. The Jolson Story (1946), a Columbia production directed by Alfred E. Green, was a fanciful musical biography of the star, but it contained no scenes or recreations of scenes from The Jazz Singer. Jolson himself appeared, unrecognizably, in a long shot during one scene of The Jolson Story,⁶⁵ and his singing for the film was lip-synced by Larry Parks, who played the title role.

In their book, Show Biz from Vaude to Video, Abel Green and Joe Laurie quote the remark of Variety’s editor Sime Silverman, “Al Jolson without a talking picture wouldn’t mean a thing on the screen.” They then comment:

But a talking picture without Al Jolson could mean plenty–as long as it was about him, and had his voice–as The Jolson Story and its sequel, Jolson Sings Again [1949, a Columbia production directed by Henry Levin], proved almost twenty years later. Where The Jazz Singer earned $3,000,000 for Warners, and put them into the big league, the two “Jolson” pictures, via Columbia –Jack L. Warner had nixed the first one–grossed $15,000,000, and over $5,000,000 of that . . . accrued to Jolson as his net. Thus, already a legend within his own time, did Jolie complete the cycle from vaudeville to minstrelsy, to star at the Winter Garden, to the historic impetus that gave soundpix their start, and finally to glorification in celluloid as the subject, twice-over, of two biopix.⁶⁶

In 1952, three years after Jolson’s death, Warner Bros. decided, at last, to produce a remake of The Jazz Singer. Why? Presumably because Jack Warner wished to rectify his costly mistake in turning down the opportunity of making The Jolson Story. One New York Times film reviewer also suggested that there had been some “theorizing [at Warner Bros.] to the effect that the present generation would cotton to the remake of The Jazz Singer as much as its forebears did to the original.”

The new version was directed by Michael Curtiz and starred Danny Thomas. It was made in Technicolor, had an updated plot, and except for “Kol Nidre,” contained entirely different music from the original. The film’s hero (played, of course, by Danny Thomas) was renamed Jerry Golding. Jerry is a Korean war veteran, “who returns to his Philadelphia home to find that he cannot carry on the family tradition, since his heart really does not belong to daddy, but to Miss [Peggy] Lee and life behind the footlights.” The New York Times reviewer found this new version “well dressed” and “well mounted,” but concluded, “They are not likely to change the course of film history with this Jazz Singer.”⁶⁷

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* “Charmaine,” Erno Rapee’s theme song for this film, became one of the first hit theme songs in the history of the cinema.

* A recording of the complete soundtrack of The Jazz Singer has appeared on Sountrak ST-102 (Van Nuys, Cal.: Sunbeam Records, 1974).

* Silvers had previously written scores for three D. W. Griffith films: Way Down East (1920), Dream Street (1921), and Isn’t Life Wonderful (1924).

* One commentator has made the following interesting observation about Papa’s “Stop!” “It was the first word spoken on the screen that ever advanced a plot.” Ben M. Hall, The Best Remaining Seats (New York: Bramhall House, 1961), p.249.