Lessons in 20th-Century History

By DAVE KEHR

Mammy

Simultaneously one of the most significant and most embarrassing show business figures of the 20th century, Al Jolson was a ferociously charismatic entertainer, among the first to realize that creating an intimate, emotional bond with his public was more important to his success than his considerable technical abilities as a singer.

Brazenly sentimental and shamelessly self-dramatizing, with a complementary gift for taking his audience into his confidence with seemingly spontaneous comic asides, Jolson helped to invent pop stardom as we know it today. But if he is less widely remembered than later “personality singers” like Bing Crosby, it’s in large part because of Jolson’s strong association with the minstrel tradition, the 19th-century theatrical form that allowed white performers to escape the oppressive decorum of the concert stage by painting themselves in blackface. What once seemed progressive — a way of introducing African-American music to a wider public — now seems anything but.

Minstrelsy is central to “Mammy,” a 1930 Jolson vehicle that has recently been released in a handsome new edition through the burn-on-demand Warner Archive Collection. Playing, as usual, a barely fictionalized version of himself, Jolson stars as Al Fuller, the irrepressible “end man” (the lead solo singer or comic) of Meadow’s Merry Minstrels. This down-at-the-heels outfit is first presented as an anachronism, playing to half-empty houses in tank towns. By the second act, though, the company has inexplicably returned to Broadway glory, at which point the film bursts into eye-popping two-color Technicolor for a series of elaborate production numbers.

The Technicolor sequences, discovered in the Netherlands Filmmuseum and now digitally reintegrated with a black-and-white print restored by the University of California, Los Angeles, have a bright, busy, carnavalesque look appropriate for numbers like “Yes, We Have No Bananas” and the ribald “Night Boat to Albany.”

But the film tactfully returns to monochrome for more dramatic moments, like Jolson’s performance of the title song — “I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles” — for his character’s white-haired mother (Louise Dresser). The director, Michael Curtiz, even manages a lovely little camera movement to underline the emotion of the scene, no mean feat at a time when film technique was still severely circumscribed by the encumbrances of early sound recording. (Warner Archive Collection, warnerarchive.com, $19.95, not rated)

Warner Home Video

Al Jolson plays a barely fictionalized version of himself in “Mammy”, directed by Michael Curtiz.