The Jazz Singer, Silent Shakespeare, and the Law of Three

The central dichotomy in "The Ancient Law" being between the "heart" and the "law," it seems appropriate that in my preparation for reviewing the first feature-length musical part-talkie, "The Jazz Singer" (1927), oft credited and mythologized as the principle film to make synchronized-sound cinema the law of the land, that I would seek out this silent film that's at its heart, from three old worlds, a silent film made in Weimar Germany and set in the mid-19th century Austrian Empire. The similarities shared by "The Ancient Law" and "The Jazz Singer" are so striking that the former has not only been credited as anticipating the latter, but the latter has even been claimed a remake.

That's part of film historian Charles Musser's contention, at least (see works cited). Of course, there were other inspirations or precedents for "The Jazz Singer," for which the short story and play it's adapted from, playwright Samuel Raphaelson has made clear was based on the (mythologized) life and performances of Al Jolson himself. There's also other melting-pot melodramas and shiksa stories, such as "Abie's Irish Rose," and other dramatizations of the clash between tradition and modernity, including other German films at the time reflecting the migration of Eastern European Jews to Western European cities, fleeing the WWI-era turmoil of the Russian Revolution and collapse of the Austria-Hungarian Empire--Paul Wegener's "The Golem" (1920) and Carl Dreyer's "Love One Another" (1922), for example. Musser sees this as another clash, reflecting those within the story, between adaptation and remake, between stage and screen.

Perhaps, Musser argues, Raphaelson was influenced by this E.A. Dupont film in his adaptation from his own short story, "The Day of Atonement" (1922), to "The Jazz Singer" play (1925), including adding such scenes as the performer conflicted in his dressing room going on stage on the day of a Jewish holiday and the plotline of him receiving his big break via the promotion of his interfaith love interest. In turn, Dupont's film may've been inspired in the first place by Raphaelson's short story, although like Jolson with it, this is said to be inspired by the life of actor Bogumil Dawison. An even more enticing connection between the two films involves Ernst Lubitsch, who originally planned to adapt "The Jazz Singer" for Warner Bros. It seems to be uncertain how far along in a treatment Lubitsch was before he parted company with the studio on his way to Paramount, but it's interesting and possibly telling that he did a similar adaptation-slash-remake with his "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925), both an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play and a remake of the 1916 film adaptation of the same name. Further evidencing Lubitsch's appreciation of Raphaelson's play, the playwright later became Lubitsch's partner in screenwriting, although it wouldn't be until "To Be or Not to Be" (1942), which like "The Ancient Law" turns on Shakespearean performance, that Lubitsch finally lent his touch to a Hollywood treatment of Jewish stage performance.

For all the striking similarities--a strict traditionalist father who renounces his show-business son and the weeping mother, the Jew-Gentile cross-culture romance, a pivotal mirror shot (here, the pun of his cutting his sidelocks (Orthodox payot) for the Viennese stage intercut with scenes back home at the Galician shtetl and, in "The Jazz Singer," the dissonance of the blackface), the date of the son's big break on stage conflicting with a Jewish holiday, the Oedipal symbolism of a dying father and his Laconian law disobeyed in favor of a love linked with the mother, the stage as a place of multicultural and multiracial integration from the monocultural and monoracial tradition (although this film ultimately balks at the more integrationist narrative of "The Jazz Singer")--there are also some significant differences between the two films. The overriding divergence in the governing rules, or laws, of the two, as I see it, is that while both are liminal in their break from tradition, "The Jazz Singer" is a film of doubles--all the way to its blackface coda--whereas "The Ancient Law" abides more strictly the Rule of Three. Thus, we don't only have a son choosing between his father and his mother, between his parents and his sweetheart, ghetto or Broadway/Court Theatre, or between synagogue and stage. There's also a love triangle, as his Jewish sweetheart waiting for him in the village competes with affections with the shiska of the state, the Viennese archduchess. The latter adds a third law of that of the state, or "etiquette," as she says at one point, to those of religion and theatre. We even get three plays-within-the-play ("Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet," and "Don Carlos") and three Jewish holidays (Purim, Yom Kippur, and Passover), as opposed to the repeated, or doubling, of only Yom Kippur in "The Jazz Singer," as well as the doubling of songs from stage to screen, from three to six.

That addition of a whole other number probably explains much of the nearly forty more minutes of runtime in the silent film compared to its talkie progeny. Besides lacking the artistically historical symmetry of the film's narrative mirroring that of the film's production as a part-talkie that makes "The Jazz Singer" doubly intriguing, "The Ancient Law" also suffers some by comparison without the charisma of a star like Jolson. Frankly, I don't see what the ladies see in this ham of a Shakespearean whose acting is only made to seem impressive by the reactive performances of Henny Porten as the archduchess and Hermann Vallentin as theatre director Heinrich Laube and who's by contrast overly obsequious and seemingly indifferent in his romantic affairs (likely an over-correction to the anti-Semitic stereotype of sexually-aggressive Jewish men), or what, for that matter, the father is so upset over, as the only bigger ham here is him. His conniption fit turns into uncontrollable convulsions by the end. The biggest star in the film, Porten, only occupies the supporting role of the archduchess, but even in her limited screen time it's evident she, and Vallentin, should be on the stage instead (and despite Porten not having stage experience).

This film was also made before Dupont would've been influenced, as seen in his subsequent "Varieté" (1925), by the unchained camera and deemphasis on intertitles in such films as F.W. Murnau's "The Last Laugh" (1924) (the cinematography for both provided by Karl Freund). The not-so-silent aesthetic is further compounded by the bard-heavy plot. You better believe the father will be told, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Which isn't to say there's not some fine filmmaking technique on display here. The plays serve well to thoroughly reflect the outer film, including the climactic doubling superimposition. Small touches such as the rabbi initially mistakingly opening a book of Shakespeare at the back as though it were Hebrew lend a sense of authenticity, with this sense of sacred texts also performing the role of singing shared by cantor and jazz singer in the later film. The lighting, what film historian Lotte Eisner cited as "true stimmung" and like Rembrandt etchings, and the reconstructed tinting are lovely, as are the settings, and there's some especially good work done with thematic crosscutting: the mirror sequence, as aforementioned, but also, for instance, the rituals of lighting candles of the synagogue and the theatre for their respective sacred events, as well as the performativity of both prayer and character acting. One character serves as an itinerant storyteller-within-the-story, traveling between the village and Vienna, driving the plot from its outskirts. It's also interesting how at least a couple historical figures are included in the fictional diegesis, namely Heinrich Laube as the director of the Burgtheater and, in one brief appearance, Johann Strauss conducting some diegetic music with his Viennese Waltz.

The more unfortunate historical confluence weighing against this film that's a Jewish-themed and largely Jewish-made production is that it's from a country that would be ran by Nazis in a decade's time. Director Dupont (later of "Piccadilly" (1929)) and stars Ernst Deutsch (probably most famously appearing in "The Third Man" (1949)), the son, and Abraham Morewski, the father, all Jewish, got out of the country in time and worked overseas. Ironically, both Porten and Margarete Schlegel, who plays the Jewish sweetheart, were Gentiles but married Jewish men. Schlegel emigrated to Britain, but Porten winded up trapped and forced to placate the Nazis on screen, although she managed to refuse Nazi demands to divorce her husband. Fritzi Kramer is absolutely right that this story should've been a biopic by now. Even more unfortunate, Grete Berger, who plays the mother here, was murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp and screenwriter Paul Reno at that of Bergen-Belsen. Another sad postscript to an anti-hate German production involving "Don Carlos" as a play-within-the-play, along with "Mädchen in Uniform" (1931).

Works Cited
Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen. University of California Press, 1973.

Kramer, Fritzi. "The Ancient Law (1923) A Silent Film Review." Movies Silently website (2019). moviessilently.com/2019/06/10/the-ancient-law-1923-a-silent-film-review/

Musser, Charles. "Why Did Negroes Love Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer?: Melodrama, Blackface and Cosmopolitan Theatrical Culture." Film History 23, no. 2 (2011): 196–222. www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.23.2.196