The Jazz Singer (1927-28)

 

The Jazz Singer was not the first film to use sound, as is commonly believed. However, it was the first successful feature film to use synchronized sound and is widely credited with making sound films the only viable option for filmmaking after its release. It is still a mostly silent film, though, and contains just a handful of sequences that feature singing and dialogue. Al Jolson plays the son of a cantor who wants to sing ragtime or jazz or popular music rather than the religious music that his father has taught him to sing. Jolson’s Jakie Rabinowitz is played as a young man by Bobby Gordon. Gordon’s Jakie sings ragtime songs like “My Gal Sal” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” in a local beer garden, and once his father finds out and punishes him, Jakie runs away from home even though it means he must leave his beloved mother behind. Years later, when Jakie (now played by Jolson) becomes an adult, he changes his name to Jack Robin and slowly starts making a name for himself. He meets a pretty girl named Mary Dale (played by May McAvoy)—certainly, she’s pretty for the conventions of the time—and writes letters back home to let his mother know he’s doing well. These letters make his mother worry that he’s fallen for a shiksa, or gentile girl. The film is very steeped in Jewish culture and features several scenes of cantors. I’ve often wondered if the audiences in 1927 were familiar enough with the Jewish culture to understand some or all of the references, or if they were just so entranced by the novelty of people singing and talking on film that they glossed over those moments. Jack still loves his mother, so when he’s given a shot at a show in New York, he returns home, hoping to reconcile with his father. However, the tension remains. Jack has to choose between following his faith and his family’s heritage or choosing to build a career in show business. You’re under a lot of pressure when you’re the only son in a family that has had five generations of cantors and you would be the first not to follow in that legacy. Jolson is not a typical matinee idol; he was already in his 40s when he starred in The Jazz Singer. Yet he became an even bigger star by being in this historically significant film. He sings a few songs in that unique style of his; he does have a “tear in his voice” that listeners respond to when hearing “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” or “Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye)” or “Blue Skies.” As his parents, Warner Oland and Eugenie Besserer demonstrate that many actors hadn’t yet perfected the art of film performance; they come across as very stagey in their mannerisms and facial expressions. Jolson fares better, but much of that is due to his singing style. You do a disservice to film history by not noting that Jolson performs two songs while in blackface, “Mother of Mine, I Still Have You” and “My Mammy.” It’s very cringe-inducing to watch as Jolson puts on the blackface makeup for the first time because there’s no reason within the plot itself for his doing so. Instead, it merely taps into a long history of racist imagery in America and its films, in particular. By the time he gets down on his knees to perform “My Mammy” at the film’s end, you wonder why he’d dedicate the song to his Jewish mother while he’s in blackface. I’d seen those two scenes before, of course, as have most people who’ve studied film history, but nothing quite prepares you for how much time the film devotes to this use of demeaning imagery. It becomes even more complicated when paired with Jakie’s desire to hide his Jewish identity by changing his name in order to reach a broader audience (in those days, and beyond, believed to be mostly a white audience). Even though its place in history is secure, The Jazz Singer really raises more complex issues than just its impact regarding the use of sound in future movies. It’s such a shame that the feature film that popularized synchronized sound isn’t a better movie.

Oscar Win: Special Award to Warner Brothers for “producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry.”

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Writing / Adaptation

Green Dolphin Street (1947)

 

Green Dolphin Street is quite the potboiler. It’s an epic soap opera about two sisters who fall in love with the same man, about how a woman’s ambitions during the 1840s had to be subsumed into her husband’s, even about the dangers of colonialism. It’s also, for a thrilling six minutes, a spectacular disaster movie. Lana Turner and Donna Reed are the Patourel sisters, and they both fall in love with newly arrived neighbor William Ozanne (played by Richard Hart). Oddly enough, their mother, played by the superb Gladys Cooper, had a relationship decades earlier with William’s father, Dr. Edmond Ozonne (Frank Morgan, best remembered as the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz but demonstrating some real emotional depth here). Reed plays Marguerite, the so-called “nice” sister, and Turner plays Marianne, the sister who’s always scheming and looking for a way to make money. She has a good mind for business, but being a woman during that time means that she isn’t taken seriously. The film has a rather leisurely pace at almost 2.5 hours, but a lot happens to the characters over the span of the several years covered by the plot. For example, William joins the Navy thanks to Marianne’s influence, but he’s charged with desertion after being drugged and robbed in China. That leads him to escape to New Zealand to avoid prosecution. He meets Van Heflin’s Timothy Haslam, who had a secret crush on Marianne back in her hometown of San Pierre off the English coast. (The oddest coincidences occur in this film.) William gets drunk, writes a letter to Marguerite’s father, accidently asks to marry the wrong sister, setting of a chain of events that leads to Marianne coming all the way to New Zealand to marry him. The move challenges Turner’s Marianne, but she acclimates enough to start advising William and Timothy how to run their lumber business better. Turner and Hart may be meant as the primary focus of the film, but several members of the cast have memorable moments. Cooper delivers an amazing deathbed scene, where her character confesses to her husband (played by Edmund Gwenn, still best remembered as Kris Kringle from Miracle on 34^th Street) that she grew to love him more than she ever loved Edmond. There’s a nice parallel scene later in the film when Hart’s William explains how his feelings have evolved for Marianne. Marguerite, the “jilted” sister, is really a supporting role, but Reed does get a very physical scene involving her climbing up the center of a mountain to avoid the rising tides. The film won an Oscar for its special effects, and it’s easy to see why. The earthquake and flood sequence is a true highlight. As an aside, Turner’s character is meant to be pregnant at the time of the earthquake, but of course, she doesn’t look pregnant at all, certainly not in the period costume in which she’s clothed. Films weren’t allowed to show pregnancy onscreen during the era of the Production Code, which is quite ludicrous when you’re told that the woman on screen has given birth. That’s a minor objection, though. Otherwise, since Green Dolphin Street is an MGM film, many elements, such as the production design and costume design, are first rate. You have to admire a film that has an abbey at the top of a mountain so that the sisters are frequently divided from the rest of San Pierre by rising tides. (I guess that’s one way to keep the nuns mostly isolated from the rest of society.) Turner was really more of a movie star than a great actress at this point in her career, and she easily is the most interesting performer in this picture. She’s paired with a rather wan leading man, frankly, so by comparison, she’s given many moments to shine. I think some of her most effective work occurs when she and her family are captured during a Maori rebellion—I told you that a lot happens in this movie. However, as good as Turner is, the script fails her when it requires her to pretend that she didn’t know that William was more in love with her sister than herself. That rings particularly false for an attentive viewer and almost undermines what has transpired in the first two hours of the film.

Oscar Win: Best Special Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Best Sound Recording, and Best Film Editing

Bugsy Malone (1976)

 

The gimmick of exclusively using child actors in a gangster movie makes Bugsy Malone a clever film overall. Adding songs to the mix and you have a quite intriguing genre, the gangster movie musical. Much of the plot is about the rivalry between Fat Sam (played by John Cassisi) and Dandy Dan (Martin Lev), two crime bosses trying to take control of the city. Dan’s gang seems to be coming out on top because they have the use of “splurge” guns, which “kill” people by hitting them with pies (or the makings of a pie) rather than bullets, so no blood. Since it’s a kid’s movie, you don’t actually see anyone truly die, but there are lots of faces and bodies splattered with pies before the film ends. Bugsy Malone, the character, is played by a very young Scott Baio in his first major role. Bugsy is one of those characters on the fringes of the gangster milieu, but he has to step up to help Fat Sam after most of Sam’s underlings get splurged. The biggest star in the movie, Jodie Foster, plays Sam’s moll and the lead singer at Sam’s speakeasy, but she obviously finds Bugsy attractive and makes a play for him. Bugsy, however, only seems interested in Blousie (Florence Garland), an aspiring singer and dancer who really wants to go to Hollywood so she can get her big break. Bugsy tries to help her but faces the obstacle of keeping enough money to buy their tickets while constantly fighting off members of Dan’s gang. Adult situations performed by child actors isn’t an easy feat to pull off, but Bugsy Malone mostly works because it’s meant to be fun, and it is. However, the film is not without its controversial depictions. Most of the Asian actors play laundry workers although one is a member of Dan’s gang. Most of the African American actors are drivers or boxers, and the film does traffic in stereotypes of Americans of Italian and Irish descent. It is very much a product of its time in those respects. Most of the actors are clearly non-professionals, but Foster and Baio demonstrate a clear star quality that led them to have long careers. Foster had a great year in 1976, performing in Taxi Driver and earning an Oscar nomination. Cassisi as Fat Sam is also a highlight; he seems to know that the film calls for a big personality, and he certainly has one. The costumes and production design are first rate, very evocative of the period in which the movie is set, the 1930s. The music, written by one of my favorites, Paul Williams, is also delightful, but it is very disconcerting that the actors are lip synching to tracks recorded by adult singers. Surely, it would have worked just as well to let either the young actors sing or to have younger singers provide the soundtrack. Williams himself sings many of the songs, and that distinctive voice of his is often a welcome addition to the soundtrack. By the way, the final song of Bugsy Malone, “You Give a Little Love,” is the best, but its message gets a bit muddled because it’s “performed” by a lot of people who have just been involved in an epic pie fight. I’ll admit that it is disconcerting at times to watch kids perform as gangsters and molls and other underworld types, especially when the dialogue requires them to crack wise in ways that would suggest a world weariness far beyond their ages, but I suppose that winds up being a large part of its charm.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Best Adaptation Score

The Great Race (1965)

 

The Great Race is a sweet if disjointed homage to the kind of slapstick comedies that were common during the silent movie era. Overacting is the order of the day, and Jack Lemmon (in a dual role) outdoes everyone else on the screen when it comes to scenery chewing. Sadly, at a running time of 2 hours, 40 minutes, The Great Race drags a bit too much to be consistently funny. The overall plot is a simple one: two turn-of-the-last-century daredevils join a race from New York to Paris, driving westward across the United States and crossing to Europe via Alaska. The villainous Professor Fate (Lemmon) and his sidekick Max (Peter Falk, not quite as funny here as he was as Columbo) face off against the Great Leslie (Tony Curtis, rather stolid when compared to his former Some Like It Hot co-star) and his sidekick Hezekiah (Keenan Wynn). The race quickly becomes a face-off between the Great Leslie, always clad in white, and Professor Fate, dressed in black. It’s very easy to pick sides when everything, even the cars, is color-coded so obviously. Along for the ride is Natalie Wood’s Maggie DuBois (an odd amalgam of Tennessee Williams character names, isn’t it?), a reporter for the New York Sentinel and an advocate for women’s rights. By the way, there is an interesting subplot involving a group of suffragettes led by the wife of editor of the New York Sentinel newspaper (the wife is played by Vivian Vance of I Love Lucy fame), but the emphasis on women’s rights fizzles as the movie progresses. Even Wood’s “emancipated” character is inconsistently presented, being grossly objectified throughout the last third of the movie. She’s wearing just undergarments, sometimes wet ones, but the closest to objectification of the male characters is when Curtis goes shirtless during a duel. Sometimes you wonder if Hollywood was directly trying to undermine the feminist movement. If you present the suffragette movement but also put your “leading lady” on display as a sex object for a significant amount of screen time, have you really helped the cause of women? Speaking of Wood’s character, where would she have acquired such a large and fabulous wardrobe? The Edith Head gowns are, as always, stunning, and Maggie always has an outfit to fit the occasion, no matter how small her luggage is. The race itself is an odd one, taking the cars through such out-of-the-way places as Boracho and Grommet and Potsdorf. Apparently, you don’t pass through any major cities when you drive from New York to Paris. The Great Race spends quite a bit of time in Potsdorf, primarily because Professor Fate is a doppelganger for Crown Prince Friedrich (also played by Lemmon), who is having his coronation as king the next day. He’s a bit of a drunk and rather loose-limbed in his mannerisms, and he has several people who are trying to keep him from taking control of the throne of Carpania. There’s an attempt to swap out Professor Fate for the Crown Prince, but it’s all rather silly stuff with a lot of unnecessary moments such as the attempted torture of Hezekiah and a change in equipment in the middle of a duel. The Potsdorf subplot ends with a rather epic pie fight that lasts for four minutes and must have taken a long team to clean up after. The film tries to cram a lot of stuff into its long running time, so we have a saloon brawl that lasts about seven minutes and a sequence on an ice floe that goes on for almost six minutes. Throw in a wandering polar bear and a car that emits tons of black smoke and even a sing-along opportunity, and you’ve got a muddled series of moments that don’t necessarily contribute to the impact of the film overall. There’s even a little bit of homoeroticism in a couple of places. It certainly seems like the Crown Prince is enamored with the Great Leslie; he looks as if he’d like Curtis’s white-clad daredevil to “tuck him in” at bedtime, particularly since he feels the General isn’t very good at that task. And Falk’s Max seems at times similarly infatuated with his boss. He tries to kiss Professor Fate when the Great Leslie and Maggie are kissing at the end of the race in Paris. As with most of the details, the movie doesn’t do much with those moments. They pass by quickly, requiring more attention than most moviegoers would give them. That leaves some interesting characters and performances will small contributions. I’ve already mentioned Vance’s role as suffragette Hester Goodbody (again, is this helping the feminist cause?), but her husband is played by the reliable Arthur O’Connell. Dorothy Provine has a small but bright scene as saloon singer Lily Olay, and her performance of “He Shouldn’t-A, Hadn’t-A, Oughtn’t-A Swang on Me!” is a real showstopper. Even Denver Pyle shows up in a cameo as the Sheriff of Boracho. The Great Race throws a lot at you as a viewer. Some of it works, but ultimately, there might just be too much to make it coherent overall.

Oscar Win: Best Sound Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Color Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Song (“The Sweetheart Tree”)