The Forgotten Blockbuster That Made Audiences Forget the Silents

"Wait a minute, wait a minute...."

Is this the biggest, and perhaps most innovative, historical Hollywood blockbuster where maybe even many film buffs aren't familiar with it? The film history forgot. Of course other top-grossing flicks the likes of "The Birth of Nation" (1915), "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), "Gone with the Wind" (1939), "The Sound of Music" (1965), "The Godfather" (1972), "Jaws" (1975), "Star Wars" (1977), "E.T." (1982), "Jurassic Park" (1993), "Titanic" (1998), "Avatar" (2009), and "Avengers: Endgame" (2019) are well known, much seen and discussed, but "The Singing Fool?" I'm the hundredth person on Letterboxd to record watching it, only the eleventh to review it. Yet, it was the highest-grossing talkie for about a decade. Back when a few million dollars really added up. Not until "Sergeant York" (1941) did Warner Bros. finally make more money on a picture. Granted, there was a Depression in between those releases, but still. Even more impressive, the film's main draw was synchronized singing and talking, and it was released when most theatres weren't yet wired for sound. Indeed, historian Douglas Gomery claims theatres ordered sound equipment just to play "The Singing Fool."

Star of the film, Al Jolson "was a phenomenon," as Gomery also says, "entertainment king of the Roaring Twenties." The later crooners the likes of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra who built their careers upon his knew it. He came to motion pictures and was pivotal at a critical juncture for Hollywood, to headline a cinematic revolution from silent film to sound film. There probably hasn't been a more fundamental shift in the art and the industry since--not television, not digital, not streaming. The transition was hardly a given, either; indeed, talking pictures had failed several times before during the silent era. Edison, Gaumont, Oskar Messter, Kellum Talking Pictures, and Lee de Forest's Phonofilm had all failed to catch on before Warner Bros' Vitaphone (and Fox's Movietone - see here). That's why the rest of Hollywood decided to wait and see whether Warner Bros. and Fox would successfully innovate before converting. In short, then, Jolson was a big deal.

So why was "The Singing Fool" forgotten? Well, I suppose it's because early talkies were an awkward adolescence. Nobody wants to reminisce over their acne-covered pictures from the past. About as soon as talkies became the norm, it seems, history started settling on another Jolson feature to practically solely represent this embarrassing but important phase, "The Jazz Singer" (1927). One may see the prior picture via well-restored multi-disc DVD or Blu-ray collector editions full of Vitaphone shorts, documentary, and commentary extras, whereas the later release gets the bare-bones, made-on-demand DVD Warner Archive treatment. The print is scratchy, the intertitles only exist in the plain text of a UK print that removed the title art along with Americanisms, and the film footage of one song is missing (because a copyright lawsuit resulted in its removal from UK prints, apparently the only ones that survived).

Why? "The Jazz Singer" was also financially successful, but not as much so as "The Singing Fool." It has a claim to "the first talkie" primacy, but this follow-up is literally more of a talkie. Perhaps, it's just that the prior picture is much better. Today, "The Jazz Singer" is usually criticized for two major reasons: blackface and sentimentality. "The Singing Fool" has a blackface finale, too, so no difference there much, and, if you think "The Jazz Singer" nears the maudlin, to quote Jolson's catchphrase, which he repeats a couple more times in this film, "you ain't heard nothin' yet." (And the movie oughta come with a surgeon general's warning that playing a drinking game for every time Jolson says "wait a minute" will kill you.) "The Singing Fool" is so mawkish it's ridiculous. Al's cuckolding by a man named "John," of all forenames, is predictably pathetic. It's a melodramatic weepie that, to today's peepers, is eye-rolling. Even the film's fiercest promoter, Gomery, concedes the story is thin. I think "The Jazz Singer" did surprisingly well over the years with its well-trodden material to avoid cliché, but that's not the case here.

Moreover, "The Jazz Singer" is of particular interest for its representation of Jewish immigrant life, which is further leveraged for a reflexive subtext on the transition from silent films to talkies. Here, the only reference to Jolson or his character's Jewishness is a crack about meat on the bone given to a doorman's cat being "kosher." Michael Rogin does well to argue that the plot of "success entails loss" equates success with the talkie sequences and the lack thereof with the silent ones, but in practice that's only loosely adhered to at best, and there's no character like the father in "The Jazz Singer" to embody the silent film, and as contrast to Jolson's "talkie" character. Everyone here has their scenes of silence and periods of prattle. Rogin is more convincing in talking about the picture's "celebrating performance as vehicle for emotional intensity" as part of the photographic medium's memorializing of death, of making "absence present." "The Jazz Singer" did the same--did it better even.

Rogin's commentary on blackface is exceedingly debatable once again, too. His book claims that Jolson doesn't sing "Mammy" this time but rather plays a mammy type, with a turn later towards an Uncle Tom mold mourning his Eva. Kind of interesting that given that, as Linda Williams has pointed out, Harriet Beecher Stowe borrowed from Victorian literature's sympathy for tragic white children to lend sympathy to the abolitionist cause of her novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and to enslaved African Americans, and thereby introducing the tragic mulatto and tragic Tom literary figures. Meanwhile, as Jolson takes on traditionally maternal characteristics, it's the new woman who is villainized. Rogin cites it as a precursor to "Kramer vs. Kramer" (1979). The radical departure from tradition of "The Jazz Singer" replaced by a reactionary retreat.

Arthur Knight's brief analysis of the film's blackface is potentially more intriguing. He says that the picture's remarkable shot of a foregrounded Jolson in blackface looking directly at the camera--something he also does, sans burnt cork and wool wig, upon his initial entrance in the film--as the blurred image of his actual-African-American valet is seen in the background offers a double reading. "For some audiences," he says, "this sympathetic proximity would cement the authenticity of Al's blackface persona; for other audiences, the comparison would delegitimate the imitation." As in "The Jazz Singer," Jolson highlights the performativity of blackface, but doubly so this time with the inclusion of an African-American character in a supporting role--and who prominently only appears in Jolson's make-up room. Racial issues are further questioned, as Knight suggests, by the film's flirting with a kiss between the blackfaced performer and his white sweetheart under the gaze of a character named "Mr. White." Knight says the film is asking its late-20s audience, "Would we rather maintain racial purity or have the satisfaction of the kiss?" It wouldn't be until "Go Into Your Dance" (1935) that his girlfriend, in response to a darkened Jolson's quipping, "If I didn't have this black on, I'd kiss ya," replied, "Don't let a little black stop you." Clearly, Jolson was playing with crossing America's color line in a manner more sophisticated than mere simplistic stereotypes (although there's some of that here, too, with the supposed comedy made of the valet sleeping). This was especially true of the foregrounding of his Jewish identity and his shiksa romantic relationship in "The Jazz Singer."

Enough about how "The Jazz Singer" is a better movie, though. There's some good stuff here. Although it's mostly a talkie, "The Singing Fool" is deceptive about it. The gag about the black valet sleeping, for instance, comes after a silent sequence, for which it initially appears to be a continuation, but upon waking, there's a sudden surprise of synchronized sound. Most of the picture, talkie sequences included, is also scored non-diegetically like a silent film in contrast to some largely-scoreless early talkies. It seems Warner Bros. still saw recorded scores as a primary benefit of the Vitaphone system that began in features, with "Don Juan" (1926), as only a recorded score and sound effects. As in "The Jazz Singer," there's quite a bit of intercutting of silent footage of crowds or reaction shots (sometimes conspicuously sped-up to sound film speed) with sound shots of Jolson performing. It's also interesting how sheet music and albums are included in the picture. Its song "Sonny Boy" is even credited with being the first single to sell a million records. For an early talkie, though, the most surprising highlight here is probably the occasionally impressive cinematography. Aside from the aforementioned fourth-wall-breaking and blackface doubling, there's some well-framed shots through windows and doorways (or both, as with a speakeasy door peephole). Visually, the standout shot comes early during the opening silent sequence, before any singing or talking, with an extended, shaky, roaming, and voyeuristic moving-camera point-of-view shot.

I suppose the generous interpretation would be that "The Singing Fool" represents more of a happy, if talkie-leaning compromise between silent and sound films compared to the conflict-oriented juxtaposition of "The Jazz Singer." On the other hand, whereas the "Blue Skies" scene in the "Jazz Singer" made a convincing case for the triumph of talkies over silents, the tour-de-force POV shot of "The Singing Fool" raises the question, wait a minute, why did they abandon such silent virtuosity for this gabby schmaltz.

Works Cited
Gomery, Douglas. The Coming of Sound: A History. Routledge, 2005.

Knight, Arthur. Disinitegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. Duke University Press, 2002.

Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. University of California Press, 1996.

Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton University Press, 2001.