Word: jolson
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...first of Hollywood's ex-Reds to come clean for the House Un-American Activities Committee's current probe was Larry (The Jolson Story) Parks (TIME, April 2).-Last week ex-Communist Parks got his answer from his employer. Columbia announced that his one-film-a-year contract was being terminated by "mutual agreement...
...Talkies. With Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, the brothers introduced feature-length sound movies with talking in 1927, and revolutionized the industry. The revolution was profitable: in 1929, they earned $14.5 million after taxes. By that time Sam Warner had died, and President Harry ploughed the profits back into a string of theaters. The Warners owned 500 theaters, had assets of $230 million when the Depression hit, plunged them into a debt of $113 million. They ruthlessly sliced salaries in half, cut all other expenses just as deeply. Said Harry: "A picture is just an expensive dream...
Actor Larry Parks (The Jolson Story) flew into Washington to face "the most difficult thing I have done in my life." Chain-smoking restlessly in the crowded committee room, he confessed that in 1941, at the age of 25, he had joined the party. Off & on, he went to ten or twelve meetings, paid $50 to $60 in dues. But he had always been "a pretty bad member by their lights"; by 1945, when he began to get his first movie breaks, he lost interest in the party, "drifted out of it the same way I drifted...
...Died. Al Jolson, 64, black-faced, mammy-shouting musicomedy star (Sinbad, Bombo, Big Boy), whose brassy voice in The Jazz Singer for Warner Brothers in 1927 gave talking pictures their first real start; of coronary occlusion; in San Francisco. After a successful movie and radio career and then semi-retirement in the thirties, Jolson (real name Asa Yoelson) started a second career during World War II, when he entertained troops in Europe, Africa, India and the South Pacific. In 1946 his dubbed-in singing of his old favorites (My Mammy, Sonny Boy, Swanee, April Showers) in The Jolson Story...
Back from trouping the paddy fields of Korea, where he mammy-shouted through 42 shows in two weeks, Al Jolson had a beaming embrace for wife Erie (see cut), and a booming word for his public: "Know what it feels like to be back? I'm going to look up my income tax and see if I paid enough. Those guys are wonderful...