The Jazz Singer (1927)

DVD Extras

• 2 discs. Disc 1: The Movie. All new feature digital transfer and immaculately refurbished soundtrack from restored picture elements and original Vitaphone-Sound-on-Disc recordings
• Commentary by film historians Ron Hutchinson and Vince Giordano
• Collection of rare cartoons and shorts: I Love to Sing - a classic 1936 WB parody cartoon directed by Tex Avery
• Hollywood Handicap, classic MGM short with Al Jolson appearance
• A Day at Santa Anita, classic Technicolor Warner Bros. short with Al Jolson & Ruby Keeler
• Al Jolson in 'A Plantation Act', the 1926 Vitaphone short made a year prior to The Jazz Singer
• An Intimate Dinner in Celebration of Warner Bros. Silver Jubilee
• 1947 Lux Radio Theater Broadcast starring Al Jolson (audio only)
• Al Jolson Trailer Gallery. Disc 2: The Early Sound Era. New feature-length documentary The Dawn of Sound: How Movies Learned to Talk
• Two rarely-seen Technicolor excerpts from Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929 WB film, most of which is considered lost)
• Studio shorts celebrating the early sound era: Finding His Voice (1929 Western Electric animated promotional short, produced by Max Fleischer)
• The Voice That Thrilled The World - Warner Bros. short about sound
• Okay for Sound 1946 WB short celebrating the 20th anniversary of Vitaphone
• When Talkies Were Young, 1955 WB short looking back at the early talkies
• The Voice from the Screen - a 1926 WB demonstration film that explores the Vitaphone technology and looks at the making of a Vitaphone short.

Film Details

Cast

Warner Oland, Al Jolson, May McAvoy

Technical Details

Star Review

Since the birth of the cinema, when Thomas Edison had tried to couple a moving image with his new phonograph, pioneers had worked on sound synchronisation. The fascination of novelty has always played a major role in film history. Once the novelty of motion had waned, producers turned to longer feature pictures, but by the mid-1920s the novelty of the feature film had begun to wear off, box-office receipts weren’t what they once had been, and thus talkies were born. On 6 October 1927 Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, directed by Alan Crosland and starring Al Jolson, a phenomenally talented and popular Broadway entertainer and recording artist—one of the biggest stars in America and one of the greatest vocal stylists of all time. Originally a play, it is the sentimental story of a cantor’s son, Jakie Rabinowitz, who forsakes his father’s synagogue and leaves home to become Jack Robin, a Broadway star. The picture was a silent film, of course, with only a few synchronised dialogue and musical sequences (employing the Warner Vitaphone system, a sound-on-disc system perfected by Western Electric), but when theatres installed sound equipment attendance skyrocketed. By the spring of 1928 all the major Hollywood studios were converting to the roar that replaced silence. The Jazz Singer wasn’t the first real talkie, of course (that honour goes to Lights of New York, released in July 1928), nor was it even Al Jolson’s first talkie (he’d made a Vitaphone short, A Plantation Act, in October 1926), but when Jolson tells us, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” and breaks into “Toot, Toot, Tootsie”, “Blue Skies”, or “Mammy”, we’re witnessing a colossal milestone in cinema history. As film historian Alexander Walker wrote, “it is to Jolson’s driving energy that The Jazz Singer owes its contemporary impact and a lot of its subsequent durability.” Most of the earliest “talkers” (as talkies were originally dubbed) that audiences flocked to see were, on the whole, miserable productions that merely squawked, but The Jazz Singer was an exception, as significant today as it was in 1927.

R. Dixon Smith on 30th October 2007

View all 19 of R. Dixon Smith’s reviews

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Film Description

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’

Warner Brothers' landmark motion picture, The Jazz Singer, was the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue and musical sequences. The movie, which brought Broadway superstar Al Jolson “alive” and seemingly singing from the screen, was an immediate sensation when it opened in 1927 and created a revolution in the history of the motion picture industry.

Jolson portrays a would-be entertainer whose show business aspirations conflict with the values of his rabbi father. Initially conceived as a silent feature film, with synchronized underscore and sound effects, the film was to have synchronized singing sequences built around Al Jolson's performances. There was never any intention to have dialogue in the film, but during his first vocal performance, Jolson improvised the words: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" In actuality, The Jazz Singer contains a total of only two minutes of synchronized talking, most of it improvised, while the rest of the dialogue is presented through the typical standard title cards of the era. But after Jolson uttered his now famous line, the rest was history.

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