Word: jolson
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When sound movies first came in a good many years ago it was Al Jolson in Vitaphone's "The Jazz Singer" who put the new fad across. And it's the same old Al at the Met this week. The old boy still has that spark that makes you believe it when he says "You ain't heard nothing' yet." "Go Into Your Dance" is the feature of a good program from start to finish...
Paramount and Fenway -- "Wonder Bar". Al Jolson's new picture with 600 girls, 5 song hits and 10,000 thrills according to the press agents. Also "Two Alone" with Tom Brown and Jean Parker...
...Jolson sings well but sings about three times too often; he brings in his gags self-consciously as an amateur vaudeville performer. Dolores Del Rio dances beautifully. Ricardo Cortez as her dancing partner looks like a hard, bad man; we like him better smiling. Dick Powell in a serious revival of his humorous part in "Blessed Event" is a singing, composing orchestra leader faintly reminiscent of a well-known insecticide. Kay Francis as a banker's lonely wife looks too gloomy. Louise Fazenda with her setback coiffure provides some good laughs, while Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert are conventional chaperoned...
Wonder Bar (Warner) is the Grand Hotel of musical pictures. It delineates occurrences in an elaborate Paris night club run by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), where a lovely patroness (Kay Francis) bored with her husband, a depraved dancer (Ricardo Cortez) and his svelte partner (Dolores Del Rio), an impoverished financier and the eccentric but high-spirited host involve themselves in the emotional entanglements customarily reserved for one room melodrama...
Director Busby Berkeley to make three chorus girls out of one and to turn a waltz routine into something that resembles a panorama painting of an army on the march. Songs in Wonder Bar are superior to those which Al Jolson sang in its stage version in Manhattan four years after he made the first successful talkie. The Jazz Singer. Most tuneful of them are "Goin' to Heaven on a Mule." "Why do I Dream those Dreams." In "Goin' to Heaven on a Mule" the rostrum in the Wonder Bar represents everything from a Negro cabin...