Word: jolsonlis
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Diamond's $15 million retooling of the old Al Jolson chestnut is a recklessly schmaltzy, relentlessly retrograde musical that, according to its "surprised and devastated" producer, Jerry Leider, "received 4-to-l bad notices." Neil, who does not go in for such meticulous and perhaps masochistic tabulations, nevertheless says...
...folks cheer his music; rednecks stomp and holler. He's a pop sensation, from The Bronx to the Hollywood Bowl, and a wonderful human being to boot. So where's the dramatic tension? It comes from an unlikely source: the 1925 Samson Raphaelson play and the Al Jolson movie version that ushered in the talkies. There is no Mammy in the new Jazz Singer; there's not even a momma. But the plot is the same: a young Orthodox cantor wants to become a singing star, straining to break the shackles of tradition even as he yearns...
...avid student of such glib greats as Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson and George Jessel, Youngman incorporated everything he could learn into an act that is strictly his own, and it works so well, he can't give...
Even before the opening credits, Jessica (Bergen) has kicked hubby Phil Potter out of their New York apartment and begun to sing. She sings like a gelded Al Jolson. Potter, a writer, ("my stuff is in those airplane magazines right behind the barf bags") escapes to Cambridge. Potter is believable, if wimpy, when he sits in the shadows of his bachelor pad and listens to "The Way We Were." At his brother's urging, he joins a divorced-men's therapy group where one ex-husband plans to marry the same woman for the fourth time and another dreams...
...minutes of exercises. At 10 he drives to his office in Hollywood and sits down with his four writers to work on new material. By 12:30 he is having lunch at the Hillcrest Country Club where he sits with other show business gentry. Groucho Marx and Al Jolson used to be regulars. Says Burns: "There was a time when not much sturgeon could be brought into California. But Jolson always had some in the kitchen anyway. So when he sat down, I would compliment him on what a great man he was and how the world was waiting...