The Jazz Singer (1980)

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Musical and religious highjinks await when a Cantor follows his dream of becoming what he thinks is a rocker.

 

[whippoorwill]

Is this the one with Neil Diamond

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Yep

[whippoorwill]

I remember my sister in law going Gaga over this film. She was a Neil Diamond fan!

 

I was too but not his looks, just some of his songs. 

[Benjamin Grimm]

Has this movie been "canceled" yet? I remember there was a scene where Neil Diamond performed in blackface, obviously a tribute to the Al Jolson original, but not the kind of thing that gets tolerated at all today.

Diamond's movie was actually the second remake of the 1927 movie (the very first talkie, by the way). There was also a version with Danny Thomas. It was the first one that I watched, when I was a kid. It was a "Million Dollar Movie" on Channel 9, during a Mets rain delay.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Yeah I was going to write about that as one of many things that was wrong about this movie. I will say the blackface bit was probably the best musical performance of the show and it was right at the beginning.

Beyond that the movie never developed any momentum even tracing a trip to "stardom." There were lots of difficult to believe parts such as how a 30-piece orchestra is assembled and rehearsed in time to accompany a guy making a last minute appearance, where his stage clothes came from, why he's obviously too old to be playing this part etc. It was fun to drop in on 1980 again.

[Edgy MD]

Neil didn't like doing the movie (or so he reported), and didn't appear in another acting role (or maybe they just stopped coming) until 1999, when he played himself in Lost & Found, and 2001, when he did the same thing in Saving Silverman.

Not a pair of Oscar candidates, there.