THE JAZZ SINGER (1952)

No BlackFace in this remake of the 1927 Al Jolson original.  So, progress?*  Alas, not much else improved.  No doubt someone at Warner Bros. thought popular nightclub entertainer Danny Thomas could carry a film.  After this, Thomas never tried again.  Now best known for his charity hospital (daughter Marlo still fronting donations), Thomas was a pleasant rather than riveting presence, just the thing for tv.  (Even more successful as a producer.)  Monologist rather than jokester, his strength as a performer something the film fails to get across.  So, we’re left with the old story of a Jewish Cantor Father assuming his son will carry on the family tradition at Sinai Temple rather than go into showbiz.  Tempting songster Peggy Lee’s around to encourage his ambitions, but Danny backtracks when he doesn’t make a quick breakthru.  Not much director Michael Curtiz can do with this one; Thomas changing his direction with the wind, Peggy Lee disconnected from the main action (backstage insider stuff completely outgunned by next year’s THE BANDWAGON/’53), while attempts to make the plot less melodramatic only thins out the atmosphere & texture, the two main things going for the 1927 original.  That and Jolson’s raw, almost disturbing, force.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In a parallel Father/Son story, the 1927 original (considered Hollywood’s first Talkie) was directed by Alan  Crosland, father of this film’s editor, Alan Crosland Jr.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *BlackFace is back, baby!  For all you masochists, BlackFace returned (less black than fleshly gray & clownish) when Jerry Lewis remade JAZZ SINGER for a 1959 live tv production ‘in Living Color.’  Real deal Yiddish theater star Molly Picon brings verisimilitude as Momma and Eduard Franz repeats from here as ‘Poppa.’   And if you think Jerry doesn’t take over shabbos services while still wearing traces of that clown-face makeup, you’ve got another think coming.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBe0qy5k8vk

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Nothing we’d call ‘jazz’ found in any version of this story.  The term has narrowed over the decades; but who’d go to see THE SYNCOPATED ‘POP’ SINGER?   (A perfect title for the Neil Diamond/Laurence Olivier iteration of 1980.)  ALSO:  A real Jazz Singer story might be found in the loving relationship between American Songbook composer Harold Arlen and his father, longtime Cantor at Temple Adath Yeshurun in Syracuse, NY, who used to sneak his son’s tunes into services.  Imagine hearing bits of ‘Blues In The Night’ in the midst of his cantorial melismas.