The Jazz Singer (1927) Reviews

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was available on YouTube, I thought I might as well check it out, especially since it had quite an impact. Indeed, it is considered as the first ‘talking’ movie so it was pretty huge when it was released at the time. Well, I was rather surprised by how little dialogue was actually involved in the damned thing after all and they still used intertitles for most of the duration. Basically, the sound was mostly used for the songs performed by Al Jolson. The songs were actually all pretty good by the way. And, yet, during these songs, Jolson did improvise some dialogues and it was basically the first time ever that you had some audible dialogue. Well, I thought that even when you watch this movie almost 100 years later, the effect was still really neat. Concerning the movie itself, well, to be honest, the story is not really strong and you might wonder why it has been remade twice already (the Neil Diamond version has especially a really lame reputation). There was also the issue that Al Jolson was in his 40’s and at least 20 years too old to play this character, even if he was a great performer (it's quite incredible that they made exactly the same mistake with the Neil Diamond remake). There was also the fact that he kept performing with some blackface and, even though it was apparently a common practice at the time, it is still really unsettling to watch it nowadays. The weird thing, at least to me, was that Jolson didn’t sound like a black guy at all when he was singing so I didn’t really see the point of this make-up. Anyway, to conclude, even if the whole thing didn’t really work out, it is still actually worth a look though, if only for its historical value.