I don’t think I’ve ever gone into my weird Al Jolson thing on this blog, or on my prior one for that matter, even when I was pondering Warner’s controversial DVD release of The Jazz Singer a couple years back. I alluded to it here, but never really explained, say, just how I acquired it (which is part of what makes it weird). So no reason to do it now, except just to mention, as a way of partially explaining this post, that I have this weird Al Jolson thing. Which is to say that, beyond appreciating him in an objective/critical sense as a seminal,hugely influential, monumentally important figure in American popular culture (prior to Michael Jackson’s ascendence, he was pretty much unquestionably acknowledged as the biggest solo act in all of show business), I also actually enjoy watching and listening the guy. For the most part, I’m a fan.
And yes, that’s problematic, because a huge, impossible-to-ignore component of Jolson’s art was rooted in a form of minstrelsy that’s very ugly to behold today. Which is not, of course, to say that minstrelsy has ever really disappeared from our culture—I went into that a bit in my post on Singer—but it is true that we are now appalled by even the expectation that anyone should ever be entertained by a performer in generic blackface. (The exceptions the contemporary culture makes involve white performers “blacking up” to lampoon specific figures, and these are not in themselves entirely controversy-free, and many would argue that the distinction’s logistically convenient but hardly genuinely compelling.) This is why the three-disc DVD set of The Jazz Singer that Warner put out in 2007 was conceived and packaged as it was—as a cultural and historical artifact rather than something to be actually enjoyed.
It’s fascinating how different formats and markets determine the dissemination of certain cultural materials. In 1996, MGM/UA released an eight-movie Jolson collection, complete with a supplicant kneeling blackfaced Jolie on the front cover, on laserdisc, and there was scarcely a peep from any cultural gatekeeper of any stripe. That’s because, as highly bruited by mass-media mavens as it was, the laser disc format was always a cult item, a configuration for collectors and other such crazy people. Nothing released in it could achieve anything like a viral effect. DVD, as we know, is different.
At least up to a point. Smaller labels and on-demand services create material that circulates not-quite-like samizdat, but at least in such a way that proves a few points of long-tail theory economics. I never thought in a million trillion years that Warner Home Video proper would release a DVD of Lloyd Bacon’s 1934 Jolson vehicle Wonder Bar, for reasons that will become clear below. Except that the company just HAS, via the Warner Archive, their on-line order service that burns specific titles onto DVD-Rs on demand.
Wonder Bar’s a pretty peculiar picture. It’s scads more ambitious and, erm, cosmopolitan than such prior Jolson vehicles as Big Boy and Mammy, but despite its preponderance of interesting bits it doesn’t really get where it wants to go. One gets the impression that it wants to be Grand Hotel set in a nightclub. (It is perhaps no accident that both films’ scenarios are of Hungarian provenance.) Jolson plays Al Wonder, proprieter and chief entertainer at Paris’ celebrated Wonder Bar, presiding over bandleader Dick Powell and dancers Harry and Ynes, played by ersatz Latin lover Ricardo Cortez (née Jacob Krantz, older brother of cinematographer Stanley Cortez) and the Mexican-born Dolores del Rio respectively. Harry’s a worthless gigolo who’s romancing the wife of a prominent businessman (Kay Francis, looking swell), but Ynes is mad about the boy nonetheless, in spite of the fact that Jolson’s and Powell’s characters are both carrying huge torches for her. In the meantime, another high roller has lost it all and is intent on having a great night out at the Wonder Bar before killing himself. A couple of stuffy old American couples, embodied by Guy Kibbee, Hugh Herbert, Ruth Donnelly, and Louise Fazenda, are intent on cheating on each other, and arrange appointments with gigolos and gigolettes in anticipation of knocking their spouses out via powders and/or philtres before going their adulterous ways. And so on.
Jewelry goes missing, Dolores brings the crazy in a dance number involving a whip, a murder is covered up by bring folded into a suicide, everybody goes home, and nobody gets laid.
All this and musical numbers by Busby Berkeley, in less than 90 minutes. Crazy. And yet there’s something leaden about the whole thing. Jolson’s lead performance is one problem. When he’s actually trying to play lovelorn instead of doing schtick, he seems kind of bored.
The salient feature of the film, finally, is its ultimate musical number, the notorious “Going To Heaven On A Mule.” A few scenes prior to this, the heady ethnic stew from which Jolson concocted his varied performing personae is underscored in a bit where he exchanged patter with “Russian count” Michael Dalmatoff before launching into a quite credible (that is, suitably schmaltzy) rendition of “Ochi chyornye” (“Dark Eyes”). For “Mule,” Jolson’s in full blackface, with overalls and a straw hat, talking to his little girl (a white child, also in blackface) of his dying intentions. What follows is a thoroughly outrageous parade of racial stereotypes and caricatures of the afterlife—an orchard from which pork chops hang from trees! giant watermelons! non-stop crap games! in all-singing, all-dancing glory, accompanied by one of Harry Warren’s least infectious tunes. There’s one interlude where, emerging from an arrangement of giant watermelon slices (Berkeley would refine his huge-fruit tropes into something less overtly offensive in The Gang’s All Here, with Carmen Miranda presiding over scads of jumbo-sized Technicolor strawberries and bananas), famed “blackface dancer” (he’s got a top billing in the film) Hal Le Roy does a frantic tap dance, his bare legs in black makeup. But in a way, the hands-down most bizarre image of the entire sequence is a weird double-joke on ethnic identity, which see’s Jolson’s blackfaced share-cropper getting a shoe-shine while engrossed in the Hebrew-language newspaper The Forward.
What makes the number even more upsetting is its context, or lack thereof. The world of the film Mammy was in fact, a minstrel show; this film takes place in a Paris bar. Powell’s character introduces “Mule” by calling it “one of the characteristic numbers for which [Al Wonder] is famous.” Which, for a contemporary viewer, sends the message (as they say) that elaborate expressions of racial hostility were par for the course in café society entertainment for the time. What kind of world is this, one may ask, with good reason.
These questions get more knotty when one considers what Jolson was doing as a singer—ostensibly paying homage to African-American stylings and innovations. A few years after Wonder Bar, Jolson played a kind of version of himself in The Singing Kid, which opens with an extended medley of Jolson hits, sung both in and out of blackface, before presenting a duet between a Jolson in mufti and genuine African-American singer and bandleader Cab Calloway, who trade verses of “I Love To Sing‑a.” Is this somehow by way of apology? Not necessarily; Jolson treats Calloway with the respect of an equal, but goes on to black up anyway later in the picture. Nothing is renounced; the notion of blackface as an offensive cultural desecration isn’t considered. It’s just a showbiz tradition, according to the world
of these films.
Which is odd, and unsettling, and ought to be discussed. And is difficult to discuss without having the actual cultural artifacts at hand. And does having the actual cultural artifacts easily at hand give material comfort to contemporary racist forces? I couldn’t say what a rigorous survey of those who’ve bought Wonder Bar and The Singing Kid from the Warner Archives would uncover, but my gut says, “Not so much.” Which is not to say that we ought to expect, or even hope for, an official DVD release containing “Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarves” any time soon. And as for Song of the South, forget it.
UPDATE: My old friend Joseph Failla weighs in with some thoughts, starting with a reminiscence of the fellow who kick-started our mutual Jolson obsessions (Joe calls it “this Jolson thing of ours”) back in grammar school in Dumont, New Jersey, in the late ’60s-early ’70s. A fellow we’ll refer to here only as A. , an ace Jolson impersonator who used to rent 16mm prints of the likes of Mammy and Big Boy and screen them in the basement of the Dumont Public Library to not-quite-captive audiences of film nerds such as myself. He later did the Student Talent show at Dumont High in ’72 as Jolie in full blackface and, as Eno sang in a different context, “There was hardly a raised eyebrow.”
A. had a problematic home life. I recall once that he begged me, a latchkey kid, to let him borrow my house keys so he could play hookie and go to my place to watch Rose of Washington Square on WWOR Channel 9 one afternoon. Years later, when I lived in Lake Hopatcong, I and some pals drove to a friend’s house to watch A. do his Jolson act on the same WWOR Channel 9’s “The Joe Franklin Show,” but we never saw the bit, as our host’s dog pretty much chewed off the upper lip of one friend before the segment began. Like the song says, “Memories…”
Anyway, here’s Joe:
Going to Heaven on a Mule is on Youtube in two parts, for those who want to see what we’re talking about. Despite my obvious familiarity with films of the period I have to say it damn near gave me an aneurysm. I urge people to take a look, as nothing you read can fully prepare you for this one.
Part One:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWwAN0FsU0Y&feature=related
Part Two:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd2RwyMY7OY&feature=related
Other clips from the movie are available although I have yet to see it straight through. (Aside – I love Kay Francis as you know but she hated making this movie and I swear it shows. She looks pissed off in every shot, even in the publicity stills.)
Any classic movie fan could compile a quick list of cringe-inducing moments like this; the blackface number from Holiday Inn is undoubtedly why that movie never got the kind of TV-rerun immortality afforded the later White Christmas (which I prefer anyway for numerous reasons). It is interesting to me that it’s the MUSICAL numbers that seem to come in for special opprobrium. Somehow the singing/dancing/shuffling business makes you feel the bigotry that much more keenly. Perhaps because it’s taking the towering accomplishments of black musicians and infantilizing them.
Overall I find there’s an à la carte approach to which movies come in for heated criticism and which seem to get a pass. I am old enough to have seen Song of the South in one of its 1970s theatrical runs and I don’t recall its being nearly as bad as, say, the bartender and porters in The Palm Beach Story or the cook in Sullivan’s Travels. Certainly Song of the South is no worse than the crows in the immortal Dumbo.
But in any event, as a perpetual student of film history I have very strong feelings about erasing the racism from early movies, or burying it where it can’t be seen. Eventually that has the perverse effect of enabling people to forget what Hollywood was really like for blacks for such a long, long time. Case in point: George Clooney and his Oscar speech about Hollywood’s support for civil rights. WHAT was he talking about? He mentioned Hattie McDaniel, good heavens–yes, she is the heart of Gone with the Wind but it’s a mammy/maid role, her job to take care of the white folks, no interior life of her own at all, let alone any questioning of slavery. I venture to say she would not have won in 1939 for a role that challenged stereotypes. Hollywood was so courageous they didn’t even try to have her attend the première. Not to mention Sullivan’s Travels, which provided the title and basis for one of Clooney’s Coen outings…
I adore Clooney so I mean this nicely, but I would welcome the opportunity to screen Wonder Bar for him. And then we could have a nice quiet drink somewhere…but I digress.
P.S. I vividly remember your earlier Jazz Singer post, which was flat-out brilliant, and I hope people follow that link too.
Not too much to add to Glenn’s or the Siren’s astute comments, except to note that yes, the need to preserve and examine this aspect of film history will always clash with a present-day sense of decorum, and the undeniable talents of Jolson only complicate matters.
Indeed, certain movies get such a pass that the casual racism seems to be forgotten, over and over again, like a Freudian symptom, so that it endlessly shocks and wounds anew. I’m thinking of Groucho’s line in Duck Soup about the Headstrongs marrying the Armstrongs, “and that’s how the darkies were born.” Riotous screenings fall into dead silence, every damn time.
By the way, Ken Jacobs has incorporated the entire “Going to Heaven on a Mule” sequence into his avant-garde epic Star Spangled to Death.
If you haven’t read it, Where Dead Voices Gather – Nick Tosches’ peculiar, obsessive history of blackface minstrelsy via the life story of country/jazz vocalist Emmett Miller – is the most absorbing meditation I’ve come across on the way that racial pantomime is threaded into the creative imagination of America.
On the other hand, if you haven’t got the book, a listen to Miller’s blackface recording of Lovesick Blues, and the realisation that it was this weird, keening sound that birthed Hank Williams’ white soul vocalisations, will provide a remarkably similar experience.
A couple decades ago, they used to show HOLIDAY INN every Christmas on WNEW-TV NYC (Channel 5, before it was Rupertized) and I never knew there was a blackface scene–they cut the whole sequence, probably right out of their print. I still prefer it to WHITE CHRISTMAS, which, while it isn’t quite as ugly to look at as other Paramount color musicals of the early 50s, is still pretty horrid-looking in spots.
I have to say I love WONDER BAR, except, of course, for “Mule.” It’s so sleazy, even for the period.
I actually saw SONG OF THE SOUTH in the early nineties in 16mm (part of a double feature with APPLE DUMPLING GANG, at a weekend summer camp, if I recall correctly). And while I was a far less astute judge of racial stereotyping then than I am now– I was, after all, no older than ten or eleven, if that– I don’t recall it being as offensive as its reputation would imply.
And though I certainly understand Disney’s squeamishness, and I have no qualms about keeping (potentially) damaging stereotypes out of the reach of impressionable children, I do wish it was on DVD so that (1) I could see the damn thing again and see if it is as bad as they say, and (2), so that the “will it ever be released?” brouhaha comes, at last, to an end.
And, hey, the thing won two frickin’ Oscars. Including one for James Baskett– the first black man to win one. Even if it was packaged, like JAZZ SINGER, as “historically important but not meant to be actually enjoyed”.
@ mslc: I had forgotten about K. Jacobs’ incorporation of “Heaven” into “Star-Spangled.” I shall have to look into that again, although now that you bring it up it’s coming back to me and it makes SO much sense…
@ Paul: Yes. “Where Dead Voices Gather” is a seminal work, essential, possibly Tosches’ best book. Of course it extrapolates from ideas and anecdotes that were in his wonderful “Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll,” another fantastic exploration of the varied crossroads between black and white in American culture. Robert Christgau’s essay on Emmett Miller, which has the unfortunate distinction of having first appeared in “The Believer,” is also valuable, as are lager parts of John Strasbough’s “Black Like Us.”
Song of the South plays quite unapologetically on UK TV. I have a strange affection for it, because I saw it as a kid, when any political meaning was completely obscure to me. Said meaning is carried in a certain stereotyping, of course, which is simultaneously extreme and “gentle,” almost positive. And I swear when I saw it as a little un I had no awareness that Uncle Remus was black, or in any way different from other old gentlemen.
The real offensiveness is in the ahistorical portrayal of the south as a heavenly place where black folks may be poor, but they are treated with reverence by rich white folks. Which passes by kids completely – slavery and oppression of any kind other than economic are never mentioned, and poverty is made to look pretty nice, really. In a way it’s a sin of ommission rather than commission that’s the real problem.
Similarly, The Blue Bird has, if I recall, a scene in heaven featuring all the little children waiting to be born. And they’re all white. For me, that’s a lot more sinister than Goin’ To Heaven on a Mule.
As gobsmackingly, shockingly crass as Wonder Bar’s climactic moment is, I can’t help wonder what it’s actually intended to SAY, what the joke is. Is it, “Yeah, IF black people had a heaven, this is what it would be like?” Partially, but mainly I think it’s “If blackface mistrels had a heaven…” a far more absurd concept and one that potentially makes a good surreal joke. (This makes sense of the Yiddish newspaper, too.) The problem being (1) the image of blackface is offensive in itself and (2) it’s folded into all sorts of obnoxious, dumb-ass stereotypes which are about actual African-American people, not blackface entertainers.
When I made my film about clowns as an oppressed minority, we very nearly had a blackface clown in it (since that’s a significant part of the clowning tradition) but it seemed to open up too many avenues we couldn’t do justice to. Was this sensitivity on our side, or just chickenshit, I wonder.
Oh – actually, one of the worst things about Song of the South is that they gave the guy who played Uncle Remus a “special Oscar” of the kind they gave the little kids in The Kidnappers, and the guy with no hands in The Best Years of Their Lives. The assumption that he wasn’t fit to be nominated for a proper best actor or best supporting actor along with white performers is something George Clooney might have mentioned in his speech.
“Oh – actually, one of the worst things about Song of the South is that they gave the guy who played Uncle Remus a ‘special Oscar’ of the kind they gave the little kids in The Kidnappers, and the guy with no hands in The Best Years of Their Lives.”
And the kind they gave Walt Disney for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Not that I’m arguing with your basic point, which is well-taken, and my example might even be used to support it (i.e., Snow White wasn’t considered worthy of competing for a “real” Best Picture Oscar); at the same time, as fucked-up as it looks from today’s perspective, and as meaningless as the Academy is in the first place, they *were* trying to honour Mr. Baskett’s work in the film– which, IIRC, was very fine stuff indeed– and I wouldn’t take that achievement or that recognition away from him simply because it was a special Oscar, anymore than I’d say Chaplin’s special Oscar for CITY LIGHTS was any less meaningful than a “real” Oscar.
… And not to be a Nitpicking Nimrod, but that “guy with no hands”, Harold Russell, also won Best Supporting Actor that year in addition to the special Oscar. It wasn’t that he was considered unworthy of being in the running, but rather that the board thought he was a long shot at best; the special Oscar was awarded because they wanted to make sure his achievement did not go unrecognized.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Walt Disney personally campaign to the Board of Governors (or whoever the Powers That Be were at the time) to give Baskett that Oscar? It’s a little different than some group of people collectively deciding to patronize him with some kind of second-class prize.
For my money, by-the-by, Spike Lee’s film BAMBOOZLED is a great and deft examination of racism and modern forms of minstrelry in contemporary culture, the appropriation of black culture by whites– as well as the thorny problem of appreciating the great deal of technical and artistic skill of minstrel performers, both white and black, while still grappling with the noxious legacy of blackface and the attendent damaging stereotypes.
Those special Oscars were no doubt well-meant. But it’s still a little wrong-headed and patronizing. It’s nice that they wanted to honour these people, but the correct way, at least from a modern perspective, would be to allow them to compete with their peers – even if they wouldn’t have won. The fact that Russell was allowed to is great, but that makes the Special Oscar unnecessary and a little embarrassing, I think. And the fact that Baskett wasn’t nominated is really telling.
I’ve been going through a Busby Berkeley phase and always thought that WONDER BAR would be a film I never would be able to find. I’ve been meaning to get it from the Warner Archive since I saw it announced.
I was just watching another Warner Archive set, a collection of the MGM OUR GANG shorts. One, “Ye Olde Minstrels” had the OUR GANG cast in blackface, while Buckwheat was in whiteface!!
As for SONG OF THE SOUTH, having seen it on laserdisc, it really isn’t anything all that terrible today. GONE WITH THE WIND is far more insensitive. If Disney is afraid of releasing it, they should just license it to Criterion to place it in the proper historical context.
By coincidence, I was reading a book about Ghanaian popular culture last week and a considerable portion of the book was devoted to a discussion of how (black) Ghanaian performers used blackface in their stage work for decades; they drew directly on Al Jolson’s work, and frequently dressed like Jolson and sang his songs. It was fascinating to see how something deeply offensive to many in a US context had become entirely unremarkable in the Ghanaian context; when the book’s author questioned the (now retired) performers, they didn’t always understand what she was trying to get at, namely the offensive aspects of the original performance. (The book is “Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre,” Catherine M. Cole).
I’d recommend THE JOLSON STORY, the biopic starring Larry Parks, to anyone wondering what the orginal fuss about Jolson was all about. The film itself should be terrifically boring, and at times it is. It suffers from a standard biopic problem: an absence of a central conflict and the corresponding attempts to introduce none-too-convincing minor conflicts in every scene (JULIE AND JULIA is a recent film that suffers greatly from this). But – and this is a BIG but – probably half the film’s length is dedicated to Parks miming to one Jolson classic after another, with Jolie himself doing the singing. It is completely hypnotic, and I dare anyone to remain indifferent to Jolson’s amazing prowess as a vocal stylist.
The sequel, JOLSON SINGS AGAIN, which covers Jolie’s 1940s “comeback,” has a mind-boggling sequence where Parks-as-Jolson meets Parks-as-Parks-as-Jolson, in a scene that is supposed to depict Jolson visiting the set of THE JOLSON STORY. Otherwise the absence of real conflict is so profound that at times it achieves total, near-Warholian stasis – itself sort of compelling, if you’re a connoisseur of the bad and the boring.
In Jack Finney’s _From Time to Time_, Al Jolson appears in one of his previous incarnations, as a prizewinning dancer.
Pigmeat Markham reportedly felt that his comedy really lost something when he could no longer “cork up” to do it.
Larry Parks lost his career to the blacklist.
Over at Chez Sirene a few months back, Wonderbar and Jolson were taken to task for the outrageous climax – among other things. But for me the crowning atrocity of taste happened ten years later at the same studio (Warners, such is progress), where in the Dennis Morgan/Ann Sheridan vehicle “Shine On Harvest Moon”, the Four Step Brothers – one of black America’s best tap-dance teams, were forced to perform in… whiteface.
Yojimboen
It’s been great sharing your “weird Al Jolson thing”. There are more of us than you would think. Thanks to Youtube, modern audiences can experience the Jolson magic, cringe-worthy moments and all. Kudos to Warmers for re-issuing the movies.
Sorry I didn’t see this earlier–just got linked from Alan Sepinwall’s Mad Men commenters–because I’ve been an enthusiastic (and horrified) contributor to the Siren’s discussions on this film in the past.
And the part of the film that has always horrified me the most is just what you’ve emphasized: the moment that Jolson’s grinning face rises over the edge of the Forvert, like the White Queen’s face rising up nightmarishly over the edge of the soup tureen in the closing chapters of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Perhaps it’s because I’m a Jew myself–or maybe just because I’m a human being–his expression of knowing exemption is about as heinous as it gets. As far as blackface goes, it’s well-nigh impossible for a 21st-century viewer to have an adequate grasp of how objectionable it may or may not have been at the time, but that grin while reading the Yiddish news, putting paid to any sense of homage to the race he’s aping, just seems like it could never have been anything but vile.
My father has a complete collection of this man! Personally, he may mot be the best from his generation but he definitely made a mark!
I love the “Going to Heaven on a Mule” sequence. I love that it was a parody on the Broadway, all black, success “Green Pastures” … I love the fact that Jolson was a champion for the rights of black artists, composers and playrights. I love the fact that they were represented at Jolson’s funeral and I love the fact that blacks (for reasons stated above) did not consider Jolson a racist during his lifetime.