[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
The Jazz Singer – or, to be precise – the massive popular success of the film, which brought Warner Brothers back from the brink of bankruptcy – is the first talking film that mattered. Others were experiments; The Jazz Singer transformed movies. No matter how much you nitpick, it is the film that made talkies possible and put an end to the silent cinema.
[/QUOTE]
Like I said.
[QUOTE=lissener]
Me, I consider Sunrise–a far, far greater movie than the nearly unwatchable Jazz Singer–as the first feature sound film. No dialogue, but synchronized score and sounde effects.
[/QUOTE]
The first Vitaphone feature was Don Juan (1926), with a synchronized music score and sound effects — a year before Sunrise or The Jazz Singer.
I enjoy The Jazz Singer*, by the way, and have seen it several times. Of course Al Jolson is hammy and over the top sometimes, but that was a big part of his appeal.
[QUOTE=priapus]
Mammy is an offensive word, like squaw.noun
[/QUOTE]
You’ve been the victim of a false etymology.
[QUOTE=Rodgers01]
Even if he hadn’t sung it in blackface, I think the song would still be uncomfortably un-PC today. I think the mammy character (basically, think of Mammy in Gone With the Wind) is associated with old stereotyped caricatures of African-Americans along the lines of Uncle Toms and “pickaninnies”. If a white kid today had a black nanny, he would never be taught to call her his “mammy.”
**A quick google search indicates that the lyrics of the song may have originally meant to refer to the singer’s birth mother, not his “mammy.” Even so, I think most people today would not hear it that way.
[/QUOTE]
A hijack on this re: “pickaninnies”: When I first moved to NW NJ from Florida (daughter of a Southern belle from NC), imagine my horror when I picked up the newspaper and read a headline that said “Picatinny History”. I had to do a double-take and was of course embarrassed when it was explained to me that “Picatinny” was a military arsenal in NJ. :wally
VCNJ~
[QUOTE=Walloon]
The first Vitaphone feature was Don Juan (1926), with a synchronized music score and sound effects — a year before Sunrise or The Jazz Singer.
I enjoy The Jazz Singer*, by the way, and have seen it several times. Of course Al Jolson is hammy and over the top sometimes, but that was a big part of his appeal.
[/QUOTE]
I’d forgotten about *Don Juan, *which, while a hoot, can you blame me? *Sunrise *is one of the great masterpieces of movie history, so it’s *my *first. 