The Jazz Singer (Three-Disc Deluxe Edition)
by Alan Crosland, Bobby Connolly, Bryan Foy, Buster Keaton, F. Lyle Goldman
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DVD details
Actor: Al Jolson, Anna Case, James Cagney, John Barrymore, May McAvoyDirector: Alan Crosland, Bobby Connolly, Bryan Foy, Buster Keaton, F. Lyle Goldman
Brand: JOLSON,AL
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 89 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-10-16
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- The first feature film to utilize Synchronous Sound. The story is about Cantor Oland's son who goes into show business over his objections. Tunes include "Mammy," "Toot, Toot, Tootsie" and more. Academy Award Nominations: 2, including Best Adapted Writing. Academy Awards: Special Award for technical achievement. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre:?MUSICALS Rating:?NR Ag
DVD Reviews of The Jazz Singer (Three-Disc Deluxe Edition)
DVD Review: Stupefying
Summary: 2 Stars
This is a 3-disc set. Disc one has "The Jazz Singer", and a few shorts. I thought the restoration was quite good. Also of some note on disc one is Jolson's short "A Plantation Act", which I found interesting and amusing; "An Intimate Dinner..." with multiple celebrities--very dull and a waste of CD space; two horse-racing shorts, neither very good; and a modestly entertaining WB cartoon, spoofing The Jazz Singer.
Disc two has a pretty good documentary about the history of sound film. Probably about 30 minutes too long. Then you get five more documentaries, made at various times by Warner Brothers, unctuous and redundant. In my opinion, a disappointing waste of time.
Disc three, to modify the content notes a bit, has over 4 hours worth of stupefyingly boring historic Vitaphone shorts. You MUST be an intense student of Hollywood history to make it through this disc. Other than "The Night Court" and the Burns & Allen short, I cannot possibly recommend this collection, although I admit the restoration is fabulous.
Overall, 5-stars for the restorations, 4-stars for "The Jazz Singer" as a historical document (3-stars for the movie of itself), and 1-star for the rest of the junk on this DVD set.
DVD Review: DVD SET OF THE YEAR!!!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Al Jolson, "The World's Greatest Entertainer", has yet to get his due on DVD. This is a good start with The Jazz Singer. Of particular note is the marvelous gem "A Plantation Act". The documentaries are quite informative about early sound history. Some of the Vitaphone shorts might seem a bit slow, but are all historically interesting. There are some really fantastic shorts in there. The Gold Digger excerpt problem has been mentioned before. I did appreciate the explanations when there was a problem with a short. The PC police only marred this set once with a message inside the booklet reproduction(rendering it into an altered reproduction that is now no longer original). Fortunately, they left the discs alone. "Everyone" in a movie is a stereotype.DVD Review: More Than Just A 'Curiosity Piece'
Summary: 3 Stars
An historic film, billed as "the first talkie," this was a surprise because many of the lines are not verbalized, only when Al Jolson sings or just before or just after his songs. Otherwise, most of it is still a silent film with the words shown on the screen as in the other silent films.
This is a powerful story with interesting characters and good songs, to boot. It was different to see Warner Oland as somebody else besides Charlie Chan. He played Jolson's father and I never would have recognized him had I not read the credits. Nor would I have recognized William Demarest.
Jolson, however, is the man who dominates the film. Some of this songs wound up being classics, ones played for years and years, such as "Toot, Toot Toosie" and "Mammy."
Faced with a very tough decision on what to do with his life, Jolson's character does the right thing in the end, which was nice to see. Overall, it's entertaining.
DVD Review: 1.5 stars out of 4
Summary: 2 Stars
The Bottom Line:
The historical significance of this film as the first "talkie" (sort of), has apparently blinded people to the fact that this is a slow and terribly contrived and formulaic story (even for 1927) without a surprise in sight; if you're interested in film you probably must see it, but otherwise stay far away.
DVD Review: You ain't heard nothing yet.
Summary: 5 Stars
The disc of shorts is worth the price alone. But with the booklet and wonderful restored film and commentaries, just a great package.
Description of The Jazz Singer (Three-Disc Deluxe Edition)
No Description Available.Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 16-OCT-2007
Media Type: DVD
It's one of the most famous titles in film history, and everybody knows why: in a handful of sequences in The Jazz Singer, sound and image are excitingly synchronized. By 1927, some short subjects had already been "talkies," and a few features had synchronized music, but The Jazz Singer gets the prize as the breakthrough. Because the film is largely without dialogue, you can--even watching the film today--almost palpably sense the shift in movie epochs, as cinema takes an evolutionary leap from one form to the next. The movie itself, based on a successful Broadway show by Samson Raphaelson, is strictly melodrama of an ancient kind. Young Jakie Rabinowitz is expected to follow in the long line of family Cantors, but his heart yearns to sing "Toot Toot, Tootsie" instead of "Kol Nidre." Al Jolson plays Jakie (later Jack Robin of footlights fame), and you get a taste of why he was widely considered the greatest entertainer of his time; watch him with a tearjerker such as "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" and you'll see the skillful, completely irony-free manipulations of a master storyteller. Equally fun is Jolson's non-singing patter--in fact, this is where you get the thrill of talking pictures, more so than the songs. "You ain't heard nuthin' yet," he burbles, and it's hard not to catch the excitement.
Jolson's numbers include his blackface act, a longstanding tradition of minstrel shows and music halls, and an unavoidable source of awkwardness for later viewers (see The Savages for an amusing account of the embarrassment this can cause). Blackface is a bizarre show business reality, and it's part of the movie, so some historical context is required.
Warner Bros. rightly considers The Jazz Singer a key moment in the studio's history, and this three-disc DVD package gives the deluxe treatment. The film itself is beautifully restored, and reproductions of original supporting materials (souvenir program, stills, ads) are fun. A booklet on early Vitaphone shorts clearly predates The Jazz Singer, for Jolson is mentioned only as a star of Vitaphone shorts, and George Jessel is tabbed as the future star of The Jazz Singer (he'd played Jakie on Broadway). A 90-minute documentary gives a fine account of how the Vitaphone system worked, and how other systems actually became the industry standard.
Supplemental short films are a true treasure trove. A Plantation Act is more Jolson blackface, Hollywood Handicap a studio short comedy directed by Buster Keaton, and I Love to Singa a hilarious 1936 Tex Avery cartoon--a spoof of The Jazz Singer starring a bird named Owl Jolson. A flabbergasting collection of Vitagraph shorts--over four hours' worth--makes up disc 3 of this set: utterly weird and wonderful performances by some of the strangest acts ever to kill vaudeville. There are a few names here: George Burns and Gracie Allen in a short called Lambchops, the Foy Family doing wacky stage business. But the cornball timed jokes of Shaw & Lee, the saucy songs of Trixie Friganza, not to mention "The Wizard of the Mandolin," Bernardo De Pace--these are gems, folks. Anyone with a taste for showbiz past will love them. --Robert Horton
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