1,001 Films: "The Jazz Singer" (1927)

The Jazz Singer is one of those underwhelming landmarks: a slight shuffle forward for movie technology, but not much of an advance for the cinema, nor indeed for cinematic portrayals of ethnicity, doing for all things Semitic what Broken Blossoms had done for Chineseness before it. Jakie Rabinowitz is born to a strict cantor father in a devoutly Orthodox neighborhood of Brooklyn; Poppa wants son to follow in his footsteps, but boy just wants to sing ragtime songs about gals with names like Frivolous Sal - and doesn't it just say it all about the movies that these, rather than those of, say, a Shakespearian sonnet, should be the first lines ever heard by a paying audience?

Jakie leaves home, assumes the Anglicised name Jack Robin, becomes Al Jolson, and a huge Broadway success, all the while devoted to his mother ("I'd rather please you than anybody else I know of... Shut your eyes, Momma, shut 'em for little Jackie"), as though this were Old Testament Israel and not New York at the end of the Roaring Twenties. The film at least takes Judaism seriously enough to give the Cantor's prayers a proper airing - a tip of the yarmulke, perhaps, to those Jewish moguls who established the movie business in the first place; more problematic is the abiding view of Jewishness as something oppressive that has to be shucked off (or, come the blackface finale, which really isn't doing anybody any favours, painted over) to make it in the New World, just as Shmuel Gelbfisz became Sam Goldwyn.

I'm guessing Samson Raphaelson's original stageplay had rather more to say on the cultural sacrifices Jakie Rabinowitz feels obliged to make, and that Jolson was cast for his success in the stage role, because he's a resolutely odd screen presence: stiff, suited, inches-thick in pancake make-up, he looks like somebody's grandad who's been pumped full of enbalming fluid, tipped feet first out of the coffin, and zapped into movement with electrodes; when he finally speaks, it's something of a surprise his first words aren't "BRAINS! BRAINS!!" The spoken-word interludes are few and far-between; much of the time, we're back to watching the characters shrugging their shoulders or otherwise gesticulating.

The Jazz Singer's true legacy wasn't the Broadway film musical that proliferated over the next decade - which had a creative imagination and dynamism going for them - but the Heroic Mule narrative that's been a standby of both stage and screen for almost a century now, the tale of the kid who stubbornly refuses to step the path his elders wish for him: it's the film that gave us sound so that Geoff from Byker Grove could turn up in Billy Elliot to utter the immortal line "Son, you look like a reet wanker."

The Jazz Singer is available on DVD from Warner Home Video.