The Jazz Singer (1927)
Time: 1h 28mins
Director: Alan Crosland
Quick Summary: The son of a Jewish Cantor must defy the traditions of his religious father in order to pursue his dream of becoming a jazz singer.
Even though this is such a groundbreaking film, I was pretty underwhelmed.
While it is very impressive and satisfying that one of the first lines of spoken dialogue is "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet! Wait a minute, I tell ya! You ain't heard nothin'!", it's a shame how this film is overall. It really failed to live up to the hype for me.
This revolves around the classic theme of the conflict between tradition and individual aspirations. However, it fails to bring anything new even to this story as was done years ago. For something that was made well before most things were, it feels clichéd and predictable, lacking any fresh perspective or unique twists that would make it stand out from similar works and actually be interesting.
Now to get to the elephant in the room. The blackface is used in this. I would like to note that the cultural norms and attitudes toward race were significantly different during the time this film was made. It was okay and normal to use it back then. Really it was about the strained relationship with his traditional Jewish family and his desire to pursue a career in jazz music, which his family disapproves of. So he uses it more as a rebellion thing against his family and the entertainment business. So Really, I wouldn't class this as trying to be racist, it was more about combating racial stereotypes.
The pacing of this is really slow and with not a lot of investing things happening, this was hard to get through. I struggled to be interested in any of the characters since none of them had any emotional depth, and honestly, it was incredibly dramatic at times. I don't think I even liked any of the songs sung in this.
Pretty lacklustre and only really worth watching if you want to see the start of the transition to talkie films.
3/10
I actually quite like how this one played out. I feel like the lacklustre areas are because of a similar thing with Seinfeld or The Odyssey; it feels so generic and played-out not because it is similar to everything else, but because everything else is similar to it, and it's just the curse of being an influential predecessor.
ReplyDeleteHowever nothing will redeem the blackface lmao