"The Jazz Singer"; Or, When the "Silents" came to life- a true story

One Saturday night in 1970, after working a long shift as a pizza chef at Paissans, the old Paissans in the basement of Porta Bella, The Evansville Observer trudged up to the square in Madison to join a varied assortment of grad students who had been invited to a showing of the famous "Jazz Singer" film, starring Al Jolson. It was the very first "talkie."

Ah--the good old days--1970---These were the days when Paul Soglin was a hippie leader of the anti-war movement and the concrete for the Humanities building that is soon to be destroyed was just being poured, and Prof. Russell Merritt had just been hired to head up the film dept at UW.

One of the inner secrets of The Observer is that as a grad student at UW I had a special fondness for films and books of the 1920's and 1930's, the time when Evansville bloomed and also the time when the "talkies" came to life. I spent quite a bit of time going over the "silent movies" being shown all over Madison and also the early musicals of the 1930's--anyway----

When the lights dimmed that winter night in the Orpheum theatre, the Jazz Singer began. In the very first use of sound, the tracking of the films was off slightly and the sound quality was jerky on the dialogue but did not seem as bad on the straight music. Thus---the jazz singer had little dialogue and lots of music. In subsequent films there were dramatic improvements. The grad students also noticed that some vowel sounds were better than others and the dialogue was tailored around the words that came out best. There were some chuckles about the rudimentary script.

The trend had been extablished of musicals---- and America loved it. There were a lot of wonderful musicals in the next 20 years.

I had been used to reading subtitles in the silents----yes Lillian Gish and other actresses were great to watch, but I remember the gasp in the audience that night when the "silents" came to life. I could really understand the excitement that took over the movie biz, when movies were 5 cents or so, and movie mania took over America. That was the moment. The moment when "silents" came to life.