The Jazz Singer (1927) on Netflix
Jakie Rabinowitz sings jazz in a Manhattan beer garden, though his father, Cantor Rabinowitz, expects him to become a cantor. When Moisha Yudelson tells the cantor, he drags his son home.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.4/1012,057 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes78%
Trailer
Plot summary
Cantor Rabinowitz is the cantor at a synagogue on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and the men of his family have held that role for five generations. He expects his thirteen-year-old son, Jakie, to follow them, but the boy sings jazz and ragtime in a beer garden instead. Moisha Yudelson spots the performance and tells the father, who drags Jakie home and whips him. Jakie clings to his mother, Sara, and warns that another beating will send him away for good. He leaves as he promised, kissing her goodbye. On the night of Yom Kippur, Cantor Rabinowitz tells a fellow worshiper that he has no son to stand beside him and sing, and Jakie slips back into the house for a photograph of his mother.
Cast
- Yossele Rosenblattas Cantor Rosenblatt - Concert Recital
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Jazz Singer (1927)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- None of the four Warner brothers could attend the premiere: Sam Warner, the strongest advocate for Vitaphone among them, had died of pneumonia the previous day, and the surviving brothers had gone back to California for his funeral.
- While The Jazz Singer was in production, Harry Warner stopped taking a salary, pawned jewelry belonging to his wife and moved his family into a smaller apartment, such were the studio's financial straits.
- Jessel walked away from the lead after a first read of screenwriter Alfred A. Cohn's adaptation, which had the boy return to the Winter Garden as a blackface comedian instead of singing in the synagogue as in the play: 'I raised hell. Money or no money, I would not do this.'
- Before the 1st Academy Awards in May 1929, The Jazz Singer was ruled ineligible for the two top prizes, Outstanding Picture, Production and Unique and Artistic Production, on the basis that it would have been unfair competition for the silent pictures under consideration.
- In November 1918, at a gala concert celebrating the end of the First World War, Jolson ran onstage amid the applause for operatic tenor Enrico Caruso and exclaimed 'Folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet'; he recorded a song of that title the following year.
