“The Jolson Story” opening review

26 02 2010
\"The Jolson Story\" - clips

\"The Jolson Story\" - clips

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Liberty, October 19, 1946

A perfect tribute to Al Jolson, this movie is as schmaltzy, spirited, and unforgettable as the singer himself. It affectionately traces Jolson’s tune-packed, knee-bending fifty years in show business.

With Larry Parks catching the Mammy singer’s eye-rolling exuberance in a bang-up impersonation, the film highlights in Technicolor such Jolson lore as his bouncy blackface routines, his one-man shows at Broadway’s Winter Garden, and his pioneering in talking pictures. Read the rest of this entry »


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“The Jazz Singer” Opening review

26 02 2010

The Jazz Singer movie premier

New York Times
October 7, 1927

By MORDAUNT HALL.

Published: October 7, 1927. In a story that is very much like that of his own life, Al Jolson at Warners’ Theatre last night made his screen début in the picturization of Samson Raphaelson’s play “The Jazz Singer,” and through the interpolation of the Vitaphone and the audience had the rare opportunity of hearing Mr. Jolson sing several of his own songs and also render most effectively the Jewish hymn “Kol Nidre.”

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The spirit of Larry Parks

19 02 2010

Taken from Monthly Review online magazine, “MRZine”  Feb. 19, 2010

Parks was called to testify before HUAC on March 21, 1951, not long after attaining stardom in two biopics about Al Jolson.  Parks told the congressional Committee: “Being a member of the Communist Party fulfilled certain needs of a young man who was . . . idealistic . . . for the underprivileged, the underdog.” Read the rest of this entry »


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How I Came to Write “The Jazz Singer”

16 02 2010

Samson Raphaelson

How I Came to Write “The Jazz Singer,”   By Samson Raphaelson
from the original Souvenir Program  of “The Jazz Singer”

When I was a junior at the University of Illinois, it became very necessary that I should impress a certain young lady. I had a date with her for a certain evening. I wanted to show her the best time to be had in the town of Champaign, Illinois. I borrowed ten dollars and bought two tickets for the one-night performance of Al Jolson in “Robinson Crusoe Jr.” Read the rest of this entry »


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Jack Benny dedicates Jolson’s memorial

1 02 2010

Al Jolson's statue

from Jack Benny, , by Mary Livingstone Benny, 1978

On September 23, 1951, when, according to Jewish tradition, the monument–a magnificent statue of Al, bending on one knee, exactly the way he performed when he sang “Mammy”–was formally unveiled, it was Jack who delivered the memorial address:

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Eddie Cantor meets Jolson

12 01 2010

from “Take My Life”, by Eddie Cantor (1957)

While I was still a stooge for Bedini and Arthur, still rushing around backstage at Hammerstein’s taking suits out to be pressed or seeing that Jean Bedini’s laundry was back on time- a fellow in blackface wandered onto the stage one day. He was from Lew Dockstader’s Minstrels. Now he was doing a single and there was something electric about him that sent a thrill up your spine. He sang and talked; but he was more than just a singer or an actor, he was an experience, and he was to become the most romantic figure of a romantic era, the King of it. Al Jolson. Read the rest of this entry »


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Judy Garland sings Al Jolson

4 09 2009
Judy Garland sings Jolson songs

Judy Garland sings Jolson songs

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Music and the Racial Imagination
By Ronald Michael Radano, Philip Vilas Bohlman (2000)

The film A Star Is Born further complicates the issue of impersonation by having Judy “do” Al Jolson. . . .  But the key moment in the number is Garland’s version of Al Jolson’s “Swanee.” By the early 1950s, Jolson’s blackface was a central figure of nostalgia in “American” mass culture, not only due to its role in the history of cinema from Singin’ in the Rain, but also in relation to the very popular new Jolson films of the late 1940s, The Al Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again, the latter being the top grossing film of 1949. Not only was Jolson’s figure a central mnemonic for an imagined national past, but Garland’s stardom was intimately associated with the nostalgia that this mnemonics guaranteed. Read the rest of this entry »


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A Star is Born: Larry Parks as Al Jolson

17 08 2009

poster - jolson story

New York Times, Oct. 27, 1946imes, Oct. 27, 1946

“A STAR IS BORN
Introducing Larry Parks, Al Jolson’s Alter Ego”

A YOUNG man from Olathe, Kan., who is prancing the Music Hall’s screen as Al Jolson, is the sudden current personification of the “‘Star Is Born” motif. His name is Larry Parks. In setting about to make “The Jolson Story” two years ago, Columbia Pictures put on the traditional search for the man who would play the name role. Most of the aspirants had indulged in that popular American indoor sport, giving an imitation of the “Mammy” perpetrator. None, however, seemed to be just what Sidney Skolsky, the columnist who who turned producer to film the story of his lifelong friend, ordered. Read the rest of this entry »


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“You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”

11 07 2009

Opening night of "The Jolson Story"

A New Jewy? America since the Second World War
 By Peter Y. Medding, Oxford University Press, 1992

While Einstein was based in Zurich, formulating in abstract mathematical terms the notion that energy consisted of mc², he might have easily discovered its most ebullient embodiment dominating the vaudeville circuit across the Atlantic. Perhaps no white entertainer in American history has ever exuded the demonic razzle-dazzle and the kinetic force of Al Jolson; probably no one could match his Eureka gift for deluding everybody in the audience into believing that “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody” or “Sonny Boy” was being belted out just for them. Read the rest of this entry »


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Show Business to Korea’s Front Lines

4 07 2009
Jolson visiting a Tokyo hospital

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jolson, other names want to work in Korea

Billboard, August 12th 1950.

HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 5. — With the intensification of the Korean crisis, showbiz here is girding for battle. Names and various orgs devoted to entertaining the troops during the last war are either resuming their previous operations or are ready to go into action on a call from Washington. Al Jolson, one of the first personalities to hit the fighting front in World War Two, has volunteered to entertain armed forces in Korea. Read the rest of this entry »


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“Rose of Washington Square”

5 06 2009
Jolson Wash Sq2.

Jolson Wash Sq2.

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Twentieth Century-Fox Strolls Down Melody Lane in ‘Rose of Washington Square,’ at the Roxy

New York Times
By Frank Nugent
Published: May 6, 1939

Twentieth Century-Fox’s latest tour down Melody Lane has come to the Roxy under the blushing title “Rose of Washington Square,” the Rose being neither Al Jolson nor Tyrone Power (as we had feared), but Alice Faye, who flowers lushly in the cabarets and flounces of the post-war years. Obviously designed as a thematic sequel to “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” the picture makes much the same capital of its sentimentally evocative score, its nostalgic reminders of the speakeasy era, its delicate reminder that the Nineteen Twenties already have become a “costume period.” Read the rest of this entry »


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The significance of “The Jazz Singer.”

19 05 2009

Kol Nidre - Barrios
A Song in the Dark: the Birth of the Musical Film
by Richard Barrios (1995)

The most detectable asset of The Jazz Singer is the conviction put into it – Warners’ and Alan Crosland’s belief in the project and Jolson’s belief in his powers as a musical entertainer. Whether the material was worthy of belief is another issue; what matters is that this story carried a force that more conventional screen fare lacked. Jewish themes were not uncommon in 1920s cinema, not only trivia of the Private Izzy Murphy/Kosher Kitty Kelly variety but sensitively considered dramas such as Humoresque (1920) and His People (1926). Read the rest of this entry »


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Jolson’s last starring role

6 05 2009
Busby Berkeley directing a scene with Sybil Jason
(click to enlarge)
Excerpt from the biography by Edward Jablonski:
Harold Arlen: Rhythm, Rainbows, and Blues (1998)

Around the same time Arlen took his camera to a location shoot of “The Singing Kid” in nearby Franklin Canyon on a misty, coolish morning. Anya, not in this film, wore a heavy coat with a stylish fluffy white fur collar. Her companion was equally modish in an overcoat and scarf, no hat. He carried a pipe and sported a neat mustache. The proletarian Harburg came simply in slacks, sweater, and sport jacket. They waited for the filming, under the director William Keighley, to begin, comfortably seated on a pier near a small lake; there was a small upright piano on the pier.

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Al Jolson Dies: NY Times 1950

5 05 2009

New York Times cover story

Al Jolson, “The Jazz Singer,” died at the St. Francis Hotel here tonight. He had recently returned from Korea after entertaining troops there.

Death came just after 10:30 P.M. (PST) as Mr. Jolson was playing cards in his room with friends. He was in San Francisco to be the guest star on the Bing Crosby radio program scheduled to be recorded Tuesday night.

Mr. Jolson checked in at the St. Francis today. He was playing gin rummy with Martin Fried, his arranger and accompanist, and Harry Akst, songwriter and long-time friend. Read the rest of this entry »


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Radio Days

15 03 2009

jolsonandbing

The Jolson Story:
Al’s Success in Radio Adds New Luster to Career of Master Minstrel”
New York Times, April 13, 1947
By Jack Gould

The season of 1946-47 may yet become known as the year of the “comeback.” Back last fall Jack Benny confounded the pundits of Radio Row by climbing up again to the top of the comedy brackets. Now, as the formal program semester nears a close, another veteran showman, Al Jolson, has caught the public’s fancy anew.

Al is, as the saying goes, as “hot” as anything on the dial at the moment. His guest appearances with Bing Crosby and Eddie Cantor stimulated mightily the usual ratings of those worthies and last Monday night he gave an added fillip to the Radio Theatre’s star-studded production of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” not to mention the Bob Hope show on Tuesday.
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