The Jazz Singer (1927 film).

The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American part-talkie musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland and produced by Warner Bros. Pictures. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music and lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated sequences).

Its release heralded the commercial ascendance of sound films and effectively marked the end of the silent film era with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, featuring six songs performed by Al Jolson. Based on the 1925 play of the same title by Samson Raphaelson, the plot was adapted from his short story "The Day of Atonement".

The film depicts the fictional story of Jakie Rabinowitz, a young man who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. After singing popular tunes in a beer garden, he is punished by his father, a hazzan (cantor), prompting Jakie to run away from home.

Some years later, now calling himself Jack Robin, he has become a talented jazz singer, performing in blackface. He attempts to build a career as an entertainer, but his professional ambitions ultimately come into conflict with the demands of his home and heritage.

Darryl F. Zanuck won an Academy Honorary Award for producing the film; Alfred A. Cohn was nominated for Best Writing (Adaptation) at the 1st Academy Awards. In 1996, The Jazz Singer was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

In 1998, the film was chosen in voting conducted by the American Film Institute as one of the best American films of all time, ranking at number ninety. The film's copyright expired on January 1, 2023, when all works published in the U.S. in 1927 entered the public domain.

The first Warner Bros. Vitaphone features, Don Juan (premiered August 1926) and The Better 'Ole (premiered October 1926), like three more that followed in early 1927 (When a Man Loves, Old San Francisco, and The First Auto), had only a synchronized instrumental score and sound effects.

The Jazz Singer contains those, as well as numerous synchronized singing sequences and some synchronized speech: Two popular tunes are performed by the young Jakie Rabinowitz, the future Jazz Singer; his father, a cantor, performs the devotional Kol Nidre; the famous cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, appearing as himself, sings an excerpt of another religious melody, Kaddish, and the song "Yahrzeit Licht".

As the adult Jack Robin, Jolson performs six songs: five popular "jazz" tunes and the Kol Nidre. The sound for the film was recorded by British-born George Groves, who had also worked on Don Juan. To direct, the studio chose Alan Crosland, who already had two Vitaphone films to his credit: Don Juan and Old San Francisco, which opened while The Jazz Singer was in production.

Jolson's first vocal performance, about fifteen minutes into the picture, is of "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face", with music by James V. Monaco and lyrics by Edgar Leslie and Grant Clarke.

The first synchronized speech, uttered by Jack to a cabaret crowd and to the piano player in the band that accompanies him, occurs directly after that performance, beginning at the 17:25 mark of the film. Jack's first spoken words—"Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet"—were well-established stage patter of Jolson's. He had even spoken very similar lines in an earlier short, A Plantation Act (1926).

The line had become virtually an in-joke. In November 1918, during a gala concert celebrating the end of World War I, Jolson ran onstage amid the applause for the preceding performer, the great operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, and exclaimed, "Folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet."

The following year, he recorded the song "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet". In a later scene, Jack talks with his mother, played by Eugenie Besserer, in the family parlour; his father enters and pronounces one very conclusive word, "Stop!", the final line of dialogue in the film.

In total, the movie contains barely two minutes' worth of synchronized talking, much or all of it improvised. The rest of the dialogue is presented through the caption cards, or intertitles, standard in silent movies of the era; as was common, those titles were composed not by the film's scenarist, Alfred Cohn, but by another writer – in this case, Jack Jarmuth.

The First "Talkie".

The production cost for The Jazz Singer was $422,000 (approximately US$6 million in 2025 dollars), a large sum, especially for Warner Bros., which rarely spent more than $250,000.

It was by no means a record for the studio, however; two features starring John Barrymore had been costlier: The Sea Beast (1926), a loose and entirely silent adaptation of Moby-Dick, at $503,000 and Don Juan at $546,000.

Nonetheless, the outlay constituted a major gamble in light of the studio's financial straits: while The Jazz Singer was in production, Harry Warner stopped taking a salary, pawned jewellery belonging to his wife, and moved his family into a smaller apartment.

The premiere occurred on October 6, 1927, at Warner Bros.' flagship theatre in New York City. In keeping with the film's theme of a conflict within a Jewish family, the film premiered after sunset on the eve of the Yom Kippur holiday.

The buildup to the premiere was tense. Besides Warner Bros.' precarious financial position, the physical presentation of the film itself was remarkably complex: Each of Jolson's musical numbers was mounted on a separate reel with a separate accompanying sound disc.

Even though the film was only eighty-nine minutes long... there were fifteen reels and fifteen discs to manage, and the projectionist had to be able to thread the film and cue up the Vitaphone records very quickly. The least stumble, hesitation, or human error would result in public and financial humiliation for the company.

Critical reaction was generally, though far from universally, positive. The New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall, reviewing the film's premiere, declared that not since the first presentation of Vitaphone features, more than a year ago (i.e. Don Juan), has anything like the ovation been heard in a motion-picture theatre.... The Vitaphoned songs and some dialogues have been introduced most adroitly. This in itself is an ambitious move, for in the expression of song the Vitaphone vitalizes the production enormously. The dialogue is not so effective, for it does not always catch the nuances of speech or inflections of the voice so that one is not aware of the mechanical features.

The film developed into a major hit, demonstrating the profit potential of feature-length "talkies", but Donald Crafton has shown that the reputation the film later acquired for being one of Hollywood's most enormous successes to date was inflated.

The movie did well, but not astonishingly so, in the major cities where it was first released, garnering much of its impressive profits with long, steady runs in population centres large and small all around the country.

As conversion of movie theatres to sound was still in its early stages, the film actually arrived at many of those secondary venues in a silent version. On the other hand, Crafton's statement that The Jazz Singer "was in a distinct second or third tier of attractions compared to the most popular films of the day and even other Vitaphone talkies" is also incorrect.

In fact, the film was easily the biggest earner in Warner Bros. history, and would remain so until it was surpassed a year later by The Singing Fool, another Jolson feature. In the larger scope of Hollywood, among films originally released in 1927, available evidence suggests that The Jazz Singer was among the three biggest box office hits, trailing only Wings and, perhaps, The King of Kings.

According to Warner Bros. records, the film earned revenues of $1,974,000 in the United States and Canada, and $651,000 elsewhere, for a worldwide theatrical gross rental of approximately $2.6 million (the studio's share of the box office gross) and a profit of $1,196,750.

The Jazz Singer (1927) Complete Movie.

The Jazz Singer (1927) which Warner Bros. hail as a 'supreme triumph'.

The Jazz Singer (1927) Premiere 6 October 1927.

The Jazz Singer was heavily promoted y Warner Bros. who needed to recoup enormous expenses.

Scene from The Jazz Singer (1927) with Al Jolson singing 'My Mammy'.

Original song music performed by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (1927).

Al Jolson playing Jacob 'Jackie' Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), alonside Eugenie Besserer playing Sara Rabinowitz, his mother.