All that "Jazz"

There's been a lot of ink devoted to the new DVD release of "The Jazz Singer," which is both weird (it's 80 years old, it's mostly silent, Al Jolson's stage-whistling bit gives a lot of people the creeps) and absolutely fitting. The 1927 Warner Brothers Vitaphone release wasn't the first sound film by a long shot but it was the commercial watershed -- the film after which there was simply no turning back. Dave Kehr does his usual fine historical spadework in today's New York Times DVD column, discussing exactly what preceded the film in the talkie marketplace and pointing out that "Jazz Singer" wasn't quite the box office sensation we now take it for. I wish he'd talked a little more about the movie, though.

Tom Russo in Sunday's Boston Globe Home Entertainment section discusses Jolson's star power and gives due diligence to the DVD extras (more on that below) but still doesn't address the movie itself. And my old Entertainment Weekly colleague Steve Daly, in his review, just can't past the fact that Jolson spends the sizable part of the movie's back half in blackface.

Well, yes, he does, and to focus on that and that alone is short-sighted at best, naive at worst. I'm not about to apologize for the minstrel sins of pre-Civil Rights American pop culture, but it has always seemed to me that getting outraged over blackface is a waste of time and emotion, and that it makes so much more sense to understand it in its historical context (which also means to mourn the ignorance and racism of our grandparents) and try and recognize when it crops up in the here and now, which it does whenever any white entertainer borrows black locutions and style for reasons of credibility alone. (A few years ago, Spike Lee made a maddening, incendiary theoretical masterpiece about this and other aspects of modern minstrelsy called "Bamboozled". It's a mess but well worth seeing.)

Fact is, Jolson was renowned for his blackface numbers; to a 1927 audience, seeing the star without the burnt cork would have been only half a show. Minstrelsy was so deeply entrenched as a theatrical genre that one of the best-known African-American entertainers of the pre-WWI era, Bert Williams, performed in blackface. And for what it's worth, "The Jazz Singer" got positive reviews from at least two black newspapers, the Baltimore Afro-American and the Amsterdam News.

What does this mean? Simply that minstrelsy was the then-accepted cultural mechanism by which the governing white culture could appropriate and tame various representations of black people -- could reduce the race to a populist cartoon that delivered spirituals and other "coon" culture in a way that would have been unacceptable coming straight from the source. It denied African Americans a chance to express their own art in the mainstream (not that that was about to happen) by handing that art over to white performers who diminished it in a bid to gain "soul." (Again, sound familiar?)

To see "The Jazz Singer," then, is to see Al Jolson, the Lithuanian-born son of a Jewish cantor play Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor (himself played by Warner Oland, a Swedish-born actor who'd gain fame in a few years playing the Chinese detective Charlie Chan). In a bid to assimilate, Jakie turns his back on his heritage, recreates himself as "Jack Robin" and becomes a vaudeville star. But he still needs a conduit to express that un-WASPy passion: He's a sensation singing "Toot Toot Tootsie" without make-up, but in the film's scheme of things, he can only attain true artistry by corking up, donning a nappy wig, and singing "Mammy." Thus the dangerous emotions of the immigrant kid become acceptable only when strained through the romanticized but recognizably "American" caricature of the Darky.

The mind reels.

Watching "The Jazz Singer" in 2007 means being assaulted with so many cross-currents of cultural intent that you can't take them all in at one viewing. (And here's one more: When Oland's character sings, that's the voice of the famed Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, who also performs as himself in the film -- surely the first case of cross-ethnic dubbing in Hollywood history). But we need to take them in if we're to understand where we've been, because to understand where we've been is to begin to solve the puzzle of where we are. "The Jazz Singer" demands to be seen; to dismiss it out of hand as a racist artifact is to refuse to engage in the argument it presents.

I watched it with my daughters -- how bent is that? They wanted to, actually. We've seen a ton of old movies together, they'd heard "Jazz Singer" referenced in "Singin' in the Rain," they knew the basics of the film's importance to history. I warned 'em. I told them Jolson wears blackface in a few scenes and they looked a little fidgety but insisted I put it on. They got into it at first, too. The notion of a movie that's mostly silent but that slides into sound appealed to them -- you really get the sense you're present at the start of something. And Jolson is charming in a way that has no correlative today; with his moony eyes and hambone elocution, he's eccentric and a little insane but there's real charisma there.

Then he put on the blackface and my girls' jaws hit the floor.

A good, meaty conversation ensued. They'd taken in the casual, unthinking racism of old movies before -- the comic Negro train porters and such -- and they'd learned that with classic film (and all old pop culture, really) you have to develop binocular vision. You have to understand the moment in which the thing was made while not letting it off the hook by the standards of today and of one's own conscience. But this -- this seemed to require special dispensation. Complicating the matter was the fact that my older daughter is getting ready for her bat mitzvah, so she was really digging the Jewishness of the movie (highly unusual for its time; the old immigrant movie moguls generally took pains to appear assimilated. If Louis B. Mayer could have been reborn a Catholic, he would have).

And, yeah, we took the conversation into the nearer past and the present. Was what Elvis Presley did blackface? Eminem? How about the suburban white boys trying to act like gangsta rappers in the girls' home-rooms? At what point does honest imitation and homage become exploitation and caricature? What do we think we gain when we borrow black style, and what are the parts of the package we think we're leaving behind?

To watch "The Jazz Singer" is to be forced to confront all these questions and to try to formulate your own answers. In addition, you get a historical artifact and a very strange, oddly endearing movie. I highly recommend it.

Other reasons the three-disc "Jazz Singer" set is worth checking out: The second disc includes a marvelous 90-minute documentary on the development of sound technology, with rare clips included. The third disc collects early Vitaphone shorts of long-forgotten vaudeville acts, a true time capsule. And someone at Warner Home Video had the smarts to toss in 1936's beloved animated "Jazz Singer" parody "I Love to Singa." All that's missing, as EW's Daly notes, is a feature on the history and cultural ramifications of blackface. But that's probably asking for more soul-searching than a global entertainment conglomerate is able to bring to the table.