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Author Topic: 'The Jazz Singer' (1927) - DVD availability Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 08-07-2004 01:29 PM                        Agreed totally... compared to some of the technically sophisticated Hollywood late silents (The Crowd and The Wind come to mind), my memory of The Jazz Singer is that it's positively neanderthal. I just fancied seeing it again to see if my thoughts about it had changed, that's all, and thought that it would simply be a case of a couple of clicks to order a DVD. The last and only time I've seen the film was in a tired old 16mm print at the NFT, which must have been well over a decade ago.  |  IP: Logged Patrick J. McCart Film Handler Posts: 24 From: Blue Ridge, GA, USA Registered: Nov 2001 posted 08-07-2004 05:56 PM                        Warner Home Video is working with The Vitaphone Project to release a special edition DVD in the near future. The visuals are being restored and they're using an unsealed, fresh set of vintage Vitaphone discs to digitally remaster the soundtrack. I may be wrong, but this version may finally use the full-aperture 1.33:1 Vitaphone version instead of the cropped sound-on-film dupe that is more commonly seen. It should also feature "A Plantation Act" as a special feature among other things. (However, nothing on a 2-disc SE for Lights of New York)  |  IP: Logged Will Kutler Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1506 From: Tucson, AZ, USA Registered: Feb 2001 posted 08-07-2004 10:10 PM                     I can see why some of you would be bored and such with the Jazz Singer....it would be the same as a non-Cristian getting all excited and wound-up about a Christian film! But the Jazz Singer is significant in that it deals with maintaining your roots/heritage/religious faith while also attempting to assimiliate into society. These are topics that still hold true for people of all backgrounds today. Relating the Jazz Singer to the Holocaust also comes into mind...the attitudes of those who thought they were immune because they had assimiliated into society...and were important for whatever reason. As the old poem goes...first they came for this group, then that group, then the next and so forth.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 08-08-2004 01:10 PM                        Point taken, and I wasn't trying to belittle the content of the film in any way - in fact, that's one of the reasons I wanted to see it again. I was, however, agreeing with Mark that (unless my memory of it is by now pretty inaccurate), the technical aspects of The Jazz Singer really do give away the fact that it was only the second attempt to make a feature-length film with synchronised audio all the way through. Incidentally, one of the earliest British sound films to survive is also about Judaism - a 1924 experimental short made by De Forest Phonofilms of the Music Hall (Vaudeville) star Teddy Elben performing his sketch 'When the Yiddisher Band Played an Irish Tune'. It's about a Jewish band which is invited to play at an Irish wedding and failing miserably to perform the right kind of music, which grew out of the fact that in the 1920s, East London had very strong Irish and Jewish communities living in the same area. The film contains about every politically incorrect joke about the Jews and the Irish you can think of, and then some. You ought not to laugh, but can't help it. Being a De Forest Phonofilm it runs at 20fps (although the National Film & Television Archive corrected the offset when reprinting it - originally, De Forest Phonofilms printed the track behind the picture, and the optical sound reader sat on top of the projector, like a Dolby digital penthouse), but still sounds pretty good nonetheless.  |  IP: Logged Will Kutler Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1506 From: Tucson, AZ, USA Registered: Feb 2001 posted 08-08-2004 03:16 PM                     Leo... Get a copy of "The Official Jewish/Irish Joke Book" by Larry Wilde But did'nt ya know that the Irish are actually Jewish?...After all, Corned Beef is actually an Eastern-European Jewish concoction!  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-14-2004 10:00 AM                     Sorry Will but the Jewish theme of "The Jazz Singer" has absolutely nothing to do with how awfully primative it looks. It has the appearance of being shot on 16mm with a cheap Russian Krasnagorsk camera! I actually enjoy watching films with religous themes to them anyway but this one rates a zero in my book except for its historical sound track. Mark  |  IP: Logged Bruce McGee Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1776 From: Asheville, NC USA... Nowhere in Particular. Registered: Aug 1999 posted 08-14-2004 07:16 PM                     I've seen Jazz Singer in 16mm many times. In 35 on TCM once. It was like night and day. The 35/TV version looked so nice and clean. Decent contrast. etc. I like the soundtrack the most, too.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 08-14-2004 07:42 PM                        The only time I've seen the film was on 16mm - and the print looked like an umpteenth generation dupe to me. It was abnormally flat and fuzzy. Based on lots of other Hollywood films from the late '20s I've seen, I really don't think that represented in any way what an original release 35mm print would have looked like. I certainly hope that better elements survive. But I do agree that, from my dim and distant memory of it, that the content of the film is pretty primitive. The continuity is clumsy, and it's as if some scenes were paced to fit the music cues rather than how they'd naturally have been directed and acted if there wasn't any synchronised music to worry about. I'd be interested to see Don Juan, to find out if it suffers from a similar problem. What prompted me to start this thread was recently seeing a restored print of The Wrecker, a 1929 British film which had a music track synchronised with RCA Photophone, but no dialogue. The first British feature which actually had recorded and synchronised dialogue, Blackmail (directed by Hitchcock), followed a couple of months later. So for obvious reasons I was comparing The Wrecker to The Jazz Singer in my mind several times while watching it, therefore, and thought that I could answer a lot of the questions which cropped up simply by ordering a DVD from Amazon. When I found that I couldn't, I started this thread.  |  IP: Logged Tim Reed Better Projection Pays Posts: 5246 From: Northampton, PA Registered: Sep 1999 posted 09-24-2004 02:37 PM                       I ran this in 35mm, in a 1922-vintage 1,100 seat showplace in the mid-80s. Wonderful!  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 09-25-2004 10:23 AM                      |  IP: Logged Dan Lyons Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 698 From: Seal Beach, CA Registered: Sep 2002 posted 10-01-2004 01:44 PM                     I still prefer the 1980 version for the music. Great soundtrack on that film; the MFSL pressing of the soundtrack sounds soooo nice. danny  |  IP: Logged Will Kutler Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1506 From: Tucson, AZ, USA Registered: Feb 2001 posted 10-02-2004 03:04 PM                     There have actually been three versions of The Jazz Singer: Jolson, Danny Thomas (mid 1950's) and Neil Diamond's. All three are available.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 10-02-2004 03:07 PM                     And all three are Mark  |  IP: Logged Will Kutler Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1506 From: Tucson, AZ, USA Registered: Feb 2001 posted 10-10-2004 04:57 PM                     The 1927 version was on Turner Classic Movies this past week, and it was a very clean print! Another historical aspect of this film that I had almost forgotten: Many celebrated Cantors were also major opera stars: Jan Pierce, Richard Tucker and others. Actually, The Jazz Singer is largly based on Jolson's life. One of these reknown stars, Yossi Rosenblatt, was featured in this 1927 version.  |  IP: Logged Steve Kraus Film God Posts: 4094 From: Chicago, IL, USA Registered: May 2000 posted 10-10-2004 08:23 PM                    The Diamond version had some 70mm blowup prints. Was this perhaps one of the last attempts at a roadshow release?  |  IP: Logged

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