What is the Deal with Al Jolson?
Since I started reviewing new movies for my Substack Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas roughly a week and a half ago my mind is much more focussed on cinema’s present, which I previously had the insane luxury of being able to ignore before I hopped onboard the Substack bandwagon.
Then again, it’d probably be more accurate to say that I foolishly assumed that I had the luxury of ignoring new movies as a full-time pop culture writer because I ended up paying a real price for not engaging with the uncertain present as aggressively as I probably should, or at all, for that matter.
Part of my befuddled brain is fixated on the hot new releases of the day, important works of art like The Devil Conspiracy and Cocaine Bear. But because I am also deep into the process of writing a massive tome about more or less the entirety of American movies about the filmmaking process another part of my cerebellum is stuck forever in the distant past.
I’ve been watching more old movies than ever before for my upcoming book The Fractured Mirror. I’m particularly fascinated by the terrifying and exhilarating period in American history when silent film was breathing its last, melodramatic breaths while a new cultural force known as sound changed everything forever.
The legendary vessel for this sea change in the art, business and technology of film was the 1927 musical The Jazz Singer, a semi-autobiographical vehicle for Al Jolson, popular known as The World’s Greatest Entertainer.
At a time when Jews in Hollywood understandably seemed to subscribe to the notion that if they kept their heads down and were inconspicuous maybe people wouldn’t try to kill them Al Jolson flaunted his Judaism.
Jolson’s persona and aesthetic were so aggressively, incontrovertibly Jewish that a movie about his life would have to be rooted in the synagogue and the world of Judaism as much as minstrel shows and the world of secular entertainment.
It still boggles the mind that one of the most important movies ever made, a movie that can legitimately be called an all-time game-changer, is so Jewish in every conceivable way.
The masses didn’t just accept the Judaism that was at the core of Jolson’s shtick: they embraced it. Jolson’s genius was to combine explicitly black music like jazz and the sacred Jewish music he grew up with in a way that entertained people who did not care for Jews or African-Americans.
Jolson was one of the most beloved and influential performers in the history of American pop culture because he was a shameless cornball, not despite it. There was something about the unapologetic cheesiness and drama of his style that connected with the masses in a big way.
When Jolson sang, it felt like he was singing specifically to you with all of his heart and soul and tricks picked up from long, hard decades entertaining rubes and hicks on the road.
The fictionalized story of Jolson’s conflict between his need to perform and his responsibilities to his religious family is so central to film history that it was inevitable that Jolson himself would receive the biopic treatment.
1946’s The Jolson Story took the expected wild liberties with the facts and details of Jolson’s life. You’d think that Jolson’s life was dramatic enough without needing to invent hogwash to make it even more exciting but then making everything as cornball as possible was true to Jolson’s dynamic.
The Jolson Story feels padded in its third act but it was a massive hit as well as the third top grossing movie of the year. So three years later The Jolson Story was followed by 1949’s Jolson Sings Again.
Unfortunately for the filmmakers, there wasn’t much ground to cover thematically after The Jolson Story so, in a fit of pure shamelessness worthy of its subject itself, the entire third act of Jolson Sings Again is devoted to what it depicts as one of the unassailable highlights of Al Jolson’s career: the making of The Jolson Story.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a sequel that devoted so much screen time to dramatizing its predecessor’s incredible success. If The Jolson Story was a shameless cinematic advertisement for Jolson—who provided vocals for star Larry Parks to lip-sync enthusiastically and exhaustively— and his albums then Jolson Sings Again is a feature-length ad for The Jolson Story.
You’d think such a cynical and pandering project would struggle at the box-office but this insane vanity project was the single top grossing film of 1949.
Jolson Sings Again never begins to justify its existence but the American people loved the blackface-performing minstrel show staple so much that they threw money at the silly sequel to his hit biopic.
Jolson is such a fascinating, charismatic and complex figure that I would love to see an honest movie about him but that’s unlikely to happen for various reasons, many involving our revulsion towards the blackface minstrelsy that Jolson embodied just as much as he did intense, in your face Judaism.
I’m so intrigued by Jolson that I’m going to make a point of listening to his music as well. I’m sure it will be hopelessly cheesy and old-fashioned to an almost prehistoric degree but that’s a feature of his persona, not a flaw.
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