The Migration of Musical Film

Desirée J. Garcia

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813574271
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

 Movie musicals are among the most quintessentially American art forms, often celebrating mobility, self-expression, and the pursuit of one’s dreams. But like America itself, the Hollywood musical draws from many distinct ethnic traditions. In this illuminating new study, Desirée J. Garcia examines the lesser-known folk musicals from early African American, Yiddish, and Mexican filmmakers, revealing how these were essential ingredients in the melting pot of the Hollywood musical. The Migration of Musical Film shows how the folk musical was rooted in the challenges faced by immigrants and migrants who had to adapt to new environments, balancing American individualism with family values and cultural traditions.  Uncovering fresh material from film industry archives, Garcia considers how folk musicals were initially marginal productions, designed to appeal to specific minority audiences, and yet introduced themes that were gradually assimilated into the Hollywood mainstream.No other book offers a comparative historical study of the folk musical, from the first sound films in the 1920s to the genre’s resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s. Using an illustrative rather than comprehensive approach, Garcia focuses on significant moments in the sub-genre and rarely studied films such as Allá en el Rancho Grande along with familiar favorites that drew inspiration from earlier folk musicals—everything from The Wizard of Oz to Zoot Suit. If you think of movie musicals simply as escapist mainstream entertainment, The Migration of Musical Film is sure to leave you singing a different tune.

1

The Shtetls, Shund, and Shows of Musicals

In its publicity for The Jazz Singer (1927), Warner Bros. described the film as “a play for all the young who dream of far fields—and for the old, who remember!” Based on Samuel Raphaelson’s short story, itself largely drawn from the life of entertainer Al Jolson, the film tells of an immigrant son who dreams of being a success on the American stage. The narrative moves through two seemingly opposed worlds. The first is the Jewish immigrant ghetto of the Lower East Side and the Rabinowitz family home, wherein religion and tradition reign supreme. The second is the world of American popular entertainment, which, though potentially hostile, rewards talent and hard work.

The film and its promotional materials emphasize the duality of American life by juxtaposing the spaces of home/stage and ghetto/Broadway. Jakie (Jolson), the immigrant, bridges these two worlds by journeying between them and shifting his identity accordingly. In this way, the narrative hinges on both geographical and social mobility as symbolized by migration. The relative stability and historical continuity of the Lower East Side represents the immigrant’s point of origin. The world of jazz, however, offers dynamic, syncopated rhythms and cultural heterogeneity. Jakie, the immigrant, must grapple with this foreign land, its sights and sounds forming what Raphaelson termed “the vital chaos of America’s soul.” Immigrants themselves, the film’s producers hoped that this story would make Americanized children and immigrant parents “each more tolerant of the other” as they undertake the inevitable journey away from the home and into the world.1

Raphaelson believed the immigrant Jew was uniquely positioned to develop and give voice to jazz music. In his preface to the film’s souvenir program, he states that “the Jews are determining the nature and scope of jazz more than any other race—more than the negroes, from whom they have taken jazz and given it a new color and meaning.” Popular Jewish artists, he maintains, owe their ability to express “the nature of our chaos today” to their “roots in the synagogue.” As others have argued, the performance of “jazz” in The Jazz Singer is one that denies African Americans their role in creating and shaping this music.2 The film’s use of jazz, however, is in keeping with most Americans’ understanding of it in the 1920s, which was associated with Jewish musicians like Jolson and Irving Berlin and white bandleaders such as Paul Whiteman.3 For Raphaelson and the Warners, the plight of the Jewish immigrant and Jolson’s ability to lend it emotional expression were critical to the translation and popularity of jazz music.

Although The Jazz Singer has received attention for its self-conscious story of Jewish assimilation, it has not been sufficiently contextualized as one of the earliest examples of what would become the American film musical.4 To be sure, advertisements for the film do not use any of the terms or phrases that would later be ascribed to the genre, such as “all talking—all singing—all dancing.”5 Nevertheless, the film’s promotional materials visually allude to moments of musical performance. The pressbook and souvenir program depict dancing chorus girls and scenes of Jakie performing onstage, serenading his mother at home, and singing as a cantor.6

These visual renderings of musical moments in the film also illustrate the spatial conflicts in the narrative. Marketing “catchlines” from the pressbook concisely communicate the two worlds that Jakie must reconcile: “East Side Meets West Side”; “Sparkle and Glitter of Broadway—Sombre Shadows of the East Side!”; “Shall the Show Go On—Or the Dying Father Be Comforted?”; and “Mammy Songs or the Solemn Wistful ‘Kol Nidre’?” Such promotional phrases reveal the different types of musical performance in terms of tone (“sparkle and glitter” versus “sombre shadows”) and form (“mammy songs” versus Jewish chants). The correlation between the spatial realms of the story and their respective musical qualities is no coincidence. The film narratively and musically explores the dynamics of a journey taken or rejected—to stay home and preserve one’s family group or leave home in order to pursue individual success. As one reviewer put it, Jakie’s is the “conflict between filial duty and ambition.” Even though Jakie eventually finds companionship on the stage, it does not replace the filial relationships that harness him to his past.7

The Jazz Singer is in many ways the earliest example of the show or backstage musical film in which an unknown becomes a star on the American stage (The Broadway Melody, 1929; Gold Diggers of 1933; Stage Struck, 1936). The process by which Jakie goes from outsider to insider, immigrant to American, is integral to the film’s formal structure, which moves between musical sequences, recorded with the Vitaphone sound system, and silent narrative sequences that are explained with intertitle cards. The musical sequences establish his talent, whereas the narrative sequences explore the conflict with his parents and his relationship with a Gentile girl. The addition of sound makes the performance sequences all the more vivid and persuasive. When he sings, Jakie makes overt pleas to his audience for acceptance, reaching out with his arms in a way that begs for approval. Each performance begins before an audience that moves from anticipation to approbation, effectively demonstrating his transformation.

The film also incorporates qualities and values related to the other dominant strain in the genre, the folk musical. The focus on Jakie’s relationship to home, and especially to his mother, indicates that the rise to fame is not an uncomplicated one. Subsequent show musicals do not explore intergenerational dynamics or the places of origin of the chorines on the stage. Rather, the success of their romantic relationships is tied to the success of the “show” that provides the finale of the film. Rick Altman has explored how the “dual-focus narrative” of the show musical renders a parallel conflict between the realization of the show and the happiness of the romantic couple.8 The Jazz Singer’s emphasis on home and family dynamics, especially those set within an ethnic, immigrant context, is more akin to the folk musical’s idyllic structure that privileges historical continuity, rituals and holidays, and cyclical time. We see the folk musical being developed in the silent sequences that reinforce an association with the past. Just as silent cinema was associated with a passing era, so too are the traditional immigrant household and the rigidity of the cantor’s religious beliefs.

The show musical, with its privileging of the individual, and the folk musical, with its preservation of the collective, fight for dominance in Jakie’s struggle between home and Broadway, Jewish chants and jazz. He must journey between both realms in order to find happiness. The film represents a formative moment for the musical film in that it anticipates the genre’s preoccupation with migration. Historically specific in its spatiotemporal places of origin and destination, The Jazz Singer portrays migration musically and dramatically as a choice between the material spaces of individual and communal expression.

In order to explore fully the evolution of the musical film as it represented Jews and Jewish immigration, it is necessary to look beyond The Jazz Singer and, indeed, outside of Hollywood. Produced in New York and Poland for a transnational audience of Jewish immigrants, Yiddish-language cinema engaged with the topics of immigration, assimilation, and intergenerational conflict more directly and consistently than did Hollywood. Its musicals did not revolve around stage performance, but rather focused on the organic musical expressions that defined Jewish home and family life. The first of these, Mayne Yiddishe Mame (My Jewish Mother, 1930), vehemently warns children not to stray from the home and seek pleasure over filial duty. This film and the many that followed offer a celebratory vision of resilient families and tradition to an audience that faced the pressures of assimilation daily. Yiddish musicals use song and dance not as a show of talent, but as an organic, emotional expression of a community. When Yiddish musicals do venture into the world of the stage, as in Dem Khazns Zundl (The Cantor’s Son, 1937), a film that J. Hoberman has called the “anti–Jazz Singer,” the purpose is to illustrate the perils of an immigrant son’s search for fame.9 A comparison of these Yiddish films and The Jazz Singer reveals the parallels and divergences of musical film production as it related to the issue of Jewish immigration and assimilation in this formative moment for the genre.

“They Are Not American”

Despite their success on the stage and in the movies, Jewish immigrants and Jewish Americans occupied a precarious position in 1920s American society. One obvious piece of evidence is provided by the frequent diatribes aimed against them by the celebrated American industrial giant Henry Ford. In 1921 he vented his anti-Semitic prejudices via his weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, by attacking what he considered to be the most dire menace to America: the movies. Ford found the Jewish origins of the majority of moviemakers in California and of their financial partners in New York to be a serious threat to the American way of life. In his view, their religion and their race rendered the Jews of Hollywood unfit to entertain the masses.10

Ford’s position was particularly virulent for early 1920s America, but his message was not uncommon. The Red Scare of 1919–1920 targeted Jewish intellectuals as a domestic threat, and the first immigration quota acts limited the entry of those considered undesirable. The 1924 act, which David Roediger and James R. Barrett call a “triumph of racism,” targeted the Jews of Eastern Europe, 1.5 million of whom had emigrated to the United States since the late nineteenth century. Jews, like other immigrants from Europe in this period, were an “in-between people”: whiteness was denied them on the basis of certain identity markers, such as skin color, religion, class, language, and culture.11 This outsider status was a social stigma to which Raphaelson, the Warners, and the makers of Yiddish cinema responded for their respective audiences.

The pervasiveness of new forms of popular entertainment like jazz and the movies was visible particularly in urban centers such as New York and Chicago, where large populations of recent immigrants had settled. Many of these immigrants constituted the first audiences for the earliest movies.12 Ford and others conflated immigrants and immigration with the perceived breakdown of social mores that they observed in new forms of entertainment. Jews such as Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and the Warners of Hollywood influenced the direction of popular culture as songwriters, entertainers, and showmen. In response, Ford openly attacked them for willfully destroying what was good and decent about America. “There lies the whole secret of the movies’ failure,” Ford insisted, “they are not American and their producers are racially unqualified to reproduce the American atmosphere.” Pointing to the “falsity, artificiality, criminality and jazz” in current movie fare, Ford concluded that Jewish producers’ racial inferiority was inherently linked to the moral laxity of their films.13

Apart from direct anti-Semitic attacks, threats of legal censorship plagued the studio heads. Indeed, motion pictures had been attacked by culture critics from the beginning due to their earliest associations with immigrants and the urban slums of major American cities. Many special interest groups fought for censorship, asserting that the movies were “corrupting” the moral standards of the country and spoiling the minds of children. The Jewish background of many motion picture distributors and exhibitors influenced social reformers’ perceptions of the movies as a potentially dangerous form of mass entertainment.14

Hollywood producers were mindful of the arguments against them. As Michael Rogin has explained, Jews in positions of cultural power experienced pressure to suppress their ethnicity in the interest of becoming American. Blackface and the songs of Tin Pan Alley were two theatrical forms through which Jews allowed themselves expressive outlet as a marginalized people and as aspiring Americans.15 More subtly, mainstream films can harbor immigrant and ethnic anxieties, as Ella Shohat and Mark Winokur have shown, at the levels of costume or set design or in modes of comedic address.16

With its self-conscious subject matter, The Jazz Singer provides a rare insight into how the Jews of Hollywood identified themselves. “In the story of America’s accomplishments,” the film’s souvenir program states, “the Jewish race has written many chapters.” Lauding the contributions of Jews to American culture, most directly linked to Al Jolson, but also to the Warners themselves, the studio draws a direct parallel between the “humble Jewish homes ordered by the precepts of orthodoxy” and the “talents of boys who were later to become international celebrities—great playwrights, great musicians, great actors.”17

Harry Warner, the eldest brother, was vocal about his Jewishness in ways that other movie executives were not. His commentary in The American Hebrew, a prominent weekly magazine for upwardly mobile Jews, demonstrates how Jewish producers positioned themselves in American society and culture. Labeling himself and his brothers as the “new ambassadors of good-will,” Warner explained that he made The Jazz Singer because it showed “the sharp and cutting contrast between the new and the old—, and that both are right.” He insisted that the film told a pathetic tale about both immigrant parents and children in America. “I find it impossible,” Warner stated, “to believe that anybody seeing the ‘Jazz Singer’ could fail to clearly understand and sympathize with the religious and mental attitude of the Jews of the older generation.” No doubt referring to the pressures he and his brothers felt as businessmen in America, he observed, “I also feel that an orthodox Jew must surely learn through this picture some of the problems of the younger generation who are thrown into constant business and social contact with Christians every day of their lives.”18

Some scholars have criticized The Jazz Singer for focusing on the intolerance of Jews rather than American anti-Semitism.19 To be sure, the film focuses on acts of cultural bias by Jews and not Gentiles. It is also important to note, however, that The Jazz Singer was not unique in this respect. Themes of intergenerational conflict were common in the literature, theater, and films of the immigrant generation. Moreover, the hostility experienced by Jews in American society, though not overt, is manifest in the structure of the film’s musical sequences.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

The form chosen by the makers of The Jazz Singer is essential to communicating the different challenges experienced by older immigrants and their children. Its narrative takes place in two distinct realms: the Old World as it is preserved in the Rabinowitz household, with its adherence to custom and prayer, and the outside world of 1920s America, a bustling, syncopated, and secular place. Motivated by his loyalty to his family and his ambition to be a star on the stage, Jakie bridges both worlds through music. An analysis of specific sequences from the film reveals how both the show and the folk musical were being developed in the context of this story about Jewish immigration.

In its fascination with the Lower East Side, The Jaz...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: There’s No Place Like Home
• Chapter 1. The Shtetls, Shund, and Shows of Musicals
• Chapter 2. The Musicals of Black Folk: Race Cinema and the Black-Cast Musicals of 1929
• Chapter 3. “Not a Musical in Any Sense of the Word”: Allá en el Rancho Grande Crosses the Border
• Chapter 4. “Our Home Town”: The Hollywood Folk Musical
• Chapter 5. “Tahiti, Rome, and Mason City, Iowa”: Musical Migrants in the Postwar Era
• Chapter 6. “Ease on Down the Road”: Folk Musicals of the Ethnic Revival
• Chapter 7. Home Is Where the Audience Is: The Sing-Along
• Conclusion: Beyond the Rainbow
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author