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Key words: Adaptation; Al Jolson; blackface performance; The Jazz Singer; E. A. Dupont; The Ancient Law (Das Alte Gesetz); Big Boy; African Americans; Racism; Samson Raphaelson.
Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (Warner Bros., 1927), starring Al Jolson, was the first featurelength "talkie", and so one of cinema's milestones. If its importance has been impossible to ignore, the picture has been subjected to frequent, wide-ranging criticismthat has tendedtofall into three different but ultimately related categories. First, there has been a long-standing criticism of the film due to its excessive appeal to emotions, its sentimentality and its lack of obvious seriousness.1 Echoing the sentiments of Samson Raphaelson, who wrote the play from which it was adapted, Neal Gabler has declared that the film "failed as a drama".2 Second, commentators have often condemned the film for the way it depicts the Jewish immigrant community in the United States. Lester Friedman and others have, for instance, harshly criticizedthe filmas"assimilationist" because it presents a model of success that "depends upon a severe curtailing, if not a total rejection of traditional Jewish values".3
Third, and perhaps most forcefully, as Americans have continued to struggle with their fraught history of race relations, the film has come to be demonized as a racist text. When Warner Bros. released an eightieth Anniversary DVD set, Entertainment Weekly's Steve Daly savaged the movie, remarking that "there's an ugly stereotype under wraps here", for "Jolson spends a significant portion of Jazz Singer in blackface, masquerading as an African-American man - that is, as a grotesque, degrading approximation of one". In the process, he "blunted his own 'racial' heritage (a term used freely at the time in discussing Jewish identity) by assuming the trappings of another. The gimmick helped make him a recording superstar ... and pigeonholed him forever inside an indefensible minstrel-show tradition". At the end of his review, Daly concludes, "Thankfully, history has moved beyond this movie and its attitudes. How sobering to be reminded that something so wrong could ever have been so popular."4
The Jazz Singer and the production of excessive emotions
While it is tempting to focus on the most fraught aspect of this criticism - condemnations of The Jazz Singer as a racist "text" - these three areas of concern are...