Mammy? Offensive?

[lissener]

@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.

Like I said.

[Walloon]

@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.

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.

[Walloon]

@priapus

Mammy is an offensive word, like squaw.noun

You’ve been the victim of a false etymology.

[UntouchedTakeaway]

@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.

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~

[lissener]

@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.

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.