The Jolson Story (Columbia) is a fine, noisy celebration of Hollywood's two decades of talking movies. To the embarrassment of Warner Bros., currently whooping up the 20th anniversary of sound (which they started) with some none-too-skillful pictures, this splashy, expert piece of entertainment was made by a rival studio.
A Technicolor biography of Al Jolson, with all the nostalgic music plugged in, might easily have turned out to be an unpalatable mixture of chestnuts and corn. This movie succeeds in blending the inevitable flavors so smoothly that very young cinemagoers who never heard Jolson —and oldsters who were never enthusiastic about him—may now understand why he was one of America's favorite entertainers during the frenzied '20s.
A combination of biography and backstage musical, the picture demonstrates conclusively that box-office silk can be made out of dog-eared formulas. It is loud, costly ($2½ million), overlong, occasionally trite, lushly sentimental and pretty as new brass. More important than anything else, it is uncommonly entertaining.
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The Jolson Story is the first production job of an amateur: bantam-sized (5 ft. 2 in.) Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky. While insisting that journalism is his profession, Skolsky has dabbled in picture-making for years, occasionally walking through bit parts as a gag or tossing out a helpful suggestion to studio executives.
After a six-month tryout as a Warner assistant producer, Skolsky was asked if he had any picture ideas. "Yes," said Skolsky, "the life of Al Jolson." Jack Warner, not believing his ears, cried, "The life of Al Jolson? We've done that." (Warner's 1927 The Jazz Singer, starring Jolson in the first talkie, was a thinly disguised Jolson biography.) "Nobody," Warner decided, "wants to see or hear Jolson any more."
Skolsky, in his stubborn, amateur way, explained his idea to Columbia: "I want to use the Jolson voice, but I want it to come out of a young man's face." The result is as clever a synchronization job as Hollywood ever turned out. Jolson himself sang the sound track, but the camera watched a 30-year-old actor named Larry Parks, who pored over old Jolson records and films until he could reproduce every gesture, genuflection and grimace.
The plot gave Skolsky some trouble. The logical love interest for a sweetened-up biography was Jolson's third wife, Ruby Keeler, ex-cinemactress and Ziegfeld star who long since divorced him, remarried and retired from show business. Skolsky admits, "It was tough. We had to please Al, Ruby and ourselves. In a mild way, we tried to psychoanalyze Al and Ruby . . . and make ourselves believe it could have happened." Ruby was cooperative, accepted $25,000 but insisted that her name be kept out of it.