I imagine lots of people have compared the 3 versions of The Jazz Singer. Al Jolson's 1927 semi-talkie's hero became a vaudeville star who, although estranged from his old-country style father, kept up good relations with his mom and returned to the synagogue on the Eve of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) to sing the Aramaic hymn Kol Nidrei in time to let his dad die happy. Danny Thomas's 1952 remake made him (a Lebanese Christian) the son of a very upscale thoroughly Americanized (DAR qualified!) cantor (knowledgeable Jews in the audience can spot how the liturgy has been rearranged), who waffles between assisting in the synagogue and yearning to star in nightclub reviews, where his girlfriend is Jewish(!), returns in time ... and then gives a Sinatra-type nightclub show with his dad in the audience. (There was also a forgettable and forgotten 1959 TV version, for the Ford Lincoln Mercury Startime show, with Jerry Lewis and Anna Maria Alberghetti - and Eduard Franz as the father, which he had also done in the Danny Thomas film).

Neil Diamond's 1980 revision doesn't even mention the word Jazz nor is there any genuine jazz music (although there is a very cute "homage" to Jolson's original blackface routine), it's soft rock. Only one piece of Jewish liturgy in the entire film, namely one rendition of Kol Nidrei. In this version, the son not only leaves dad but also abandons his own (Jewish) wife, goes to Hollywood, goes Hollywood, dumps his gentile (pregnant) girlfriend (Luci Arnaz), comes back to reconcile with his dad (Laurence Olivier, maybe doing penance here for his televised Merchant of Venice, and here almost as thoroughly Americanized as the father in the Danny Thomas version) with his out-of-wedlock (gentile) baby and ends giving a rock concert with his dad in the audience.

But the story itself, although ostensibly a classic, has ALWAYS been revised. Contrary to popular myth, the 1927 movie was NOT inspired by Al Jolson's own life, even though Jolson was really the son of a cantor.* There had been a 1925 Broadway play, written by Samson Raphaelson (1894-1983) who was expanding on his 1922 magazine short story titled "Day of Atonement", in which Jakie Rabinowitz, as a NYC teenager, turns his back on his Jewish heritage and hits the vaudeville circuit as a "ragtime singer". He finally gets a role in a Broadway show that is to open on the beginning of Yom Kippur (the night of the Kol Nidrei service), but his father, the cantor of the Hester Street Synagogue, dies just hours before Kol Nidrei is to begin, and Jakie forgets all about Broadway and leads the services on Hester Street. His Broadway producer is determined to sack him but then finds out about his synagogue performance and is impressed enough to infuse new life into our hero's secular singing career. In the 1925 play, starring George Jessel (hard to imagine him as a vaudeville star instead of a banquet speaker), the ending was edgier: The hero is in his manager's office, being bullied by his (Irish) vaudeville manager to perform tonight, even though it's the eve of Yom Kippur and even though his dad is dying, or else his stage career is over, the manager even insults the hero's mom, then we get a phone call that the cantor has died, the hero quits showbiz and as the curtain falls on the empty office we can hear through the window Kol Nidrei being sung, presumably from a nearby synagogue and it cannot possibly be by our hero. So you can see even the original story was different from all the film versions.

- - - - - -
*NOTE: Years after this opinion was written, I came across the book, The Jazz Singer edited by Robert L. Carringer of the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana (1979, reprinted 2005), one of the University of Wisconsin's Warner Brothers Screenplay Series.
http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/1021.htm
This volume includes the script of the Jolson movie, articles about the sound technologies used, the 1922 Raphaelson magazine story, and an historical essay by the editor who noted that Raphaelson had seen Jolson perform in 1917, and even though Jolson was in blackface doing a vaudeville song, Raphaelson recognized from his style and nuances that he was trained as a cantor. Soon after Raphaelson's short story appeared in 1922, Jolson expressed an interest in dramatizing it - but the movie studios were not interested in a "Jewish story". Jolson then contacted Raphaelson about putting it on the New York stage - but it became clear that Jolson was simply thinking of using it as background for a musical review. At that point Raphaelson wrote it as a dramatic play (initially titled "Prayboy") and George Jessel cast as the lead, an imaginative stretch from his previous career as a vaudeville comedian. Jessel eagerly took the part and found that it actually motivated him to turn his life around spiritually.

When the play opened in September 1925 it was expected to run only a few months because of its ethnic themes, but it got such good publicity that it ran for more than seven months - a run that ended only because Jessel had been hired away to make movies in Hollywood. In 1927 Jessel was slated to star in the film version of The Jazz Singer when he was replaced by Jolson (possibly because Jessel was demanding too much money, while Jolson was willing to help finance the new sound technology for this movie). The film opened, in NYC, on October 6, 1927 - coincidentally the day after Sam Warner died, so none of the Warner Brothers came to the premiere. But Samson Raphaelson was in the audience and was appalled at how his story had been mutilated (among other things, the characters were a LOT less ethnic) and how badly Jolson acted (I imagine he must have gotten apoplectic at how Mayberry-American the cantor in the 1952 Danny Thomas film was). Raphaelson went on to write either the screenplays or the underlying stage plays for a lot of big movies including Suspicion, But Not for Me, Hilda Crane, Green Dolphin Street, The Harvey Girls, and The Shop Around the Corner (remade as You've Got Mail).
- - - - - - - -


But even the original Jazz Singer was a remake of a (nearly) true story ... that of the cantor of Vilna, Poland, Joel David Lebensohn-Strashunsky (1816-1850). He inherited the cantorial position from his father in 1830 and married very well, but (according to conflicting biographical sketches) he was lured by Poland's leading composer, Moniuszko, to leave the synagogue to sing in the Warsaw Grand Opera. He starred in the first version of the Polish classic grand opera Halka. Then something went wrong with his career, he stopped singing, apparently had a sort of nervous breakdown and  died at age 35 either (depending on your source) in a mental hospital or while wandering from town to town. There was a 1904 Yiddish play based on his story, and it was made into a 1940 Yiddish movie - which is available on videotape (with English subtitles) and can bought on the internet e.g., --
http://www.israel-music.com/cantor_moishe_oysher/overture_to_glory/dvd/
-- one of the very best and possibly the last major Yiddish movie. Titled in English, "Overture to Glory" (in Yiddish the title was The Vilna Town Cantor) it starred world-famous real cantor Moyshe Oysher and includes a lot of really well done Jewish liturgy. In this highly fictionalized film, gentile talent scouts crash the Yom Kippur services to hear the cantor (he does the opening of the Yom Kippur mussaf service), he soon leaves his wife and child to go to Warsaw and we hear snatches of operatic music, six months later he yearns for "the comforting warmth of the prayer shawl" and walks anonymously into a strange synagogue to lead a weekday evening service with a quality that amazes the congregants, and, later, after his nervous breakdown, at the very end, broken and feverish he staggers into a town and into the only open door to get out of the rain and dark - it turns out to be his old Vilna synagogue on the Eve of Yom Kippur just as the new cantor (Manfred Lewandowski, also world class) is about to begin Kol Nidre. Strashunsky picks up the singing after the first verse, out of a sort of feverish habituation, is recognized, led to the front, a prayer shawl put around his shoulders, and he does a knock-out rendition of Kol Nidre (this bit can be found on YouTube) - and drops dead.  Your study of the Jazz Singer is not complete without seeing this historical inspiration for Samson Raphaelson's vaudeville character. I do not know for a fact if Raphaelson knew this (well-known) story about Strashunsky but in his 1922 short story the hero is the decedent of the line of "Vilna cantors".   The significant difference is that, for Strashunsky, Kol Nidre and the commencement of the Day of Atonement is the bitter end of a life of "assimilation", while in the Jazz Singer, the hero is able to both assimilate and (eventually) please his family and congregation.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older