Word: jolson
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...Jazz Singer. The first talking picture with the biggest star in America, Al Jolson, on his knees for half the movie. This has the famous "You ain't heard nothin' yet" line and a few songs. In a strange way it is a fascinating movie, almost irresistible in its strange view of Lower East Side New York life. If you look, you'll see William Demerest, hardly a day younger than he seemed twenty, forty or fifty years later...
...Howe shrewdly compares to Italian opera (where the emphasis is on virtuoso performance rather than content), was not shy about amending Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was set in a Polish village, and Friar Laurence was recast as a Reform rabbi. The famous performers originating in the ghetto included Al Jolson, the Marx Brothers, George Jessel, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice...
This plum has been given to Irene Worth, a great actress. She overwhelms the play, with a sexy vibrato not unlike Al Jolson's, and stalks the stage like a jaguar vacationing among field mice...
Died. Larry Parks, 60, journeyman film actor who became a celebrated casualty of McCarthy-era antiCommunism; of a heart attack; in Studio City, Calif. A B-movie player in the early 1940s, Parks' fortunes rose sharply after his brilliant performance as Singer Al Jolson in the 1946 hit The Jolson Story, which earned Columbia Pictures more than $8 million and brought him several more starring roles. But his career was shattered in 1951 when he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating Communist influence in Hollywood. Parks became the first of dozens of actors...
...asked, "What movie musical even worth noting has been produced under any auspices except Hollywood's?" There was no answer. There never has been. American movies learned to sing at the same moment they learned to talk: the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927 starring Al Jolson, was a musical and a smash...