Starring Al Jolson, Marian Nixon, Davey Lee, and Holmes Herbert
Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Music by Ray Henderson; Lyrics by Buddy G. DeSylva and Lew Brown
Al Jolson was American cinema's first true musical film star. He appeared in the one often considered to be the first film musical, The Jazz Singer, and it was his vehicle The Singing Fool that codified the success of sound film and musicals. Those films were only part-talkies, silent films with anywhere from a few minutes to an hour of sound added. This was Jolson's first all-sound, all-music film. How does this melodrama with songs look today? Let's head to the radio station where Joe Lane (Jolson) is preparing for his show and find out...
The Story: Lane loves his wife Kathrine (Nixon) and his son Little Pal (Lee), but she's frustrated with his being out all night and gambling. Even so, she avoids the advances of radio station manager Arthur Phillips (Kenneth Thompson), who claims he'll advance Joe's career if she does favors for him. His temper gets the better of him when she tells him, and he beats the man in a parked car. After Phillips dies from his injuries, Joe is sentenced to prison for manslaughter.
While Joe's in prison, Katherine takes a job as a nurse for Dr. Robert Merrill (Herbert) in order to pay for her son living at school. The moment Joe gets out, he visits his son on the schoolgrounds. The boy is so desperate for him to stay, he follows him into town and gets hit by a car. After the accident leaves the child paralyzed from the waist down and mute, Joe tries to find someone who can save him...someone besides Dr. Merrill, who is in love with his wife. He may have to finally put aside his feelings for his wife when he learns that Merrill, no matter how he feels about his nurse, is the only one who can save his beloved "Little Pal."
The Song and Dance: Jolson takes full advantage of the sound to perform no less than seven songs, including the big ballad to his son "Little Pal." When he does his radio shows, he's in his element, happily performing for all those swell folks out there. This is also one of only two movies where he doesn't appear in blackface; the radio setting thankfully eliminated the need for it. Lee actually isn't bad as the "Little Pal" whose parents adore him - watch him listening to his daddy on the radio early-on. Thompson is also good as the smarmy manager who tries to put the moves on Katherine.
Favorite Number: We open with a medley of radio performers before eventually bringing on Al. He performs the boisterous and fun "I'm In Seventh Heaven" before singing "Little Pal" for his own little boy. "Little Pal" comes up again several times, including a dream sequence where the boy imagines his father singing to him in his arms.
Trivia: Jolson originally had even more to sing. Two numbers, "Back In Your Own Backyard" and "I'm Ka-razy About You" were cut from the movie. They're now considered to be lost, though the Vitaphone sound discs exist.
While not an out-and-out flop, this wasn't nearly the blockbuster hit that Jolson's earlier part-talkie The Singing Fool was.
What I Don't Like: Hoooo boy. Does this one ladle on the melodrama! Name a cliché from any family drama made in the past 100 years, and it likely turns up here. So many choice bits of soppiness can be found on this overheated buffet! There's the kid accidentally testifying against his father. Or perhaps you'd prefer Jolson singing the soggy cheer-up song "Why Can't You?" to his fellow inmates. Or him singing on the radio, in prison, at Christmas. Not to mention, there's Lee somehow managing to follow his father half-way across town before getting unconvincingly hit by a car.
The acting manages to be worse than the script. Jolson way overdoes it, even for him. If he's not screaming at Nixon because he thinks she'd be better off without him, he's sobbing and wailing over the kid. By comparison, Nixon is so dull, she melts into the woodwork, too timid to stand up to Jolson's teeth-gnashing histrionics. No wonder this didn't do nearly as well at the box office as his earlier films. Even audiences at the time could tell this was too much.
The Big Finale: Too melodramatic and silly to be for anyone but the most ardent fans of Jolson or historians of the early talkie era.
Home Media: Most of Jolson's Warners pictures are pretty easy to find on streaming and on Warner Archives DVD, including this one.
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