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13 unusual facts about The Jazz Singer


1928 in Australia

29 December – The Jazz Singer becomes the first sound film screened in Australia.

A Khasene in Shtetl

The play was one of several Old World counterparts to Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer.

A Plantation Act

The restored version has been issued as a bonus feature on the DVD release of The Jazz Singer.

This film was thought to be lost since 1933, and its unavailability fueled the misconception that the first commercial sound film made was Jolson's subsequent film The Jazz Singer.

Beggars of Life

This is Paramount's first feature with dialogue on the soundtrack and the first time Beery's distinctive voice was recorded for a film, although the talking is extremely limited, similar to Warner Bros.'s The Jazz Singer the previous year.

Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka

In 1927, the The Jazz Singer was released in the United States as the first talkie film, and Japanese film companies began working on creating them as well.

Cowley International College

George Groves, sound engineer, important in the early use of sound in films - he recorded the sound of The Jazz Singer, and later won three Academy Awards

Henryk Gold

When silent movies in Poland lost popularity following the arrival of Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer, (known in Yiddish as The Singing Buffoon), thousands of Polish musicians who'd played in the movie theaters lost their livelihood; they began to create large and small orchestras playing dance music and jazz.

My Mammy

Jolson recorded this song twice and performed it in films, including The Jazz Singer (1927), The Singing Fool (1928) and Rose of Washington Square (1939).

Renée Houston

It was produced by Lee De Forest, whose process, Phonofilm, enabled a soundtrack to be played alongside the film (a year before The Jazz Singer).

The Private Life of Helen of Troy

That same year, the first "talkie", The Jazz Singer, received an honorary award for introducing sound to film, and the category for which The Private Life of Helen of Troy was nominated was dropped by the second Academy Awards.

Under the Roofs of Paris

In 1927, even before The Jazz Singer had been shown in Paris, René Clair wrote: "It is not without a shudder that one learns that some American manufacturers, among the most dangerous, see in the talking picture the entertainment of the future, and that they are already working to bring about this dreadful prophecy".

Yossele Rosenblatt

Rosenblatt's fame extended beyond the Jewish world earning him large concert fees, a singing role in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, and the sobriquet "The Jewish Caruso".


One Summer: America 1927

The events include the nonstop transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh; the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927; the amazing season played by Babe Ruth and the rest of the 1927 New York Yankees; the transition from the Ford Model T to the new Model A; the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti; and the advent of the talking-picture era with the release of The Jazz Singer.