From the Archives, 1928: The first talkie opens in Sydney
From the Archives, 1928: The first talkie opens in Sydney
The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson - the first sound film to be screened in Australia - premiered at the Lyceum Theatre. The Herald attended an advance screening.
By Staff reporter
Normal text size THE JAZZ SINGER. TALKIES AT LYCEUM.
The Jazz Singer, the Warner Bros. Vitaphone talkies production at the Lyceum Theatre, was shown at an advanced screening last night. It will be the principal attraction at this theatre, commencing from this morning s session.
Ain t heard nothing yet: Al Jolson introduces his wife (Josephine Dunn) to the patrons of the cabaret, in the 1928 film The Jazz Singer
Now streaming on: Lucky Number Slevin is too clever by half. It s the worst kind of con: It tells us it s a con, so we don t even have the consolation of being led down the garden path. The rug of reality is jerked out from under us in the opening scenes, and before long the floor is being dismantled. Crouched in the dark, I am resentful. Since the plot is irrelevant and the dialogue too mannered to be taken seriously, all I m left with are the performances and the production design.
The performances, to be sure, are juicy. A team of A-list actors do their specialty numbers, and it s fun to see pros at work. The movie begins with a man in a wheelchair (Bruce Willis) telling an inexplicable story to a stranger in an airport lounge. An empty lounge, which immediately labels the scene as dubious at best, fantasy at worst. The story involves the story of a fixed horse race, and there is mention of the Kansas City Shuffle. It is not clear exactly what the Kansas City Shuffle is, but W
Merry Melodies ×
Celebrating Hollywood’s Top Movie Musicals Of The 1950s.
By David Cohea, ReMIND Magazine
It was the decade of the American dream. World war and the Depression were fading in the rearview mirror. The future looked bright. The age of television was just dawning, but there was still something special about movies that kept theaters filled: singing and dancing and a good time for all, in Technicolor and VistaVision.
Hollywood movie musicals promised a vintage world of imagination, magic and toe-tapping pizzazz.
Sometimes there was polish to these movie musicals: tuxedoes and ball gowns, shiny shoes dancing on glittery floors. Other times they took us to distant places like Paris or the South Pacific, or into the golden past, be it a frontier farm out West, an old South riverboat floating down the Mississippi or a cab up Broadway in the Roaring ’20s.
If someone is described as a ‘Houdini’ today, it usually means that person is adept at getting out of difficult situations. In a sense, that is what ‘Harry Houdini’ – born Ehrich Weiss to an impoverished rabbi and his wife in Budapest –sought to achieve when, as a young man, he emigrated to the United States. Like many Jewish immigrants, he tried to find his place through assimilation into American society. He transformed from Ehrich to Ehrie to Harry, his impetus to make the big time emerging from dire poverty. After one of his brothers died at 12 of tuberculosis Houdini literally ran away to join the circus as a trapeze artist, appearing as ‘Ehrich, the Prince of the Air’.
Renee Ghert-Zand is a reporter and feature writer for The Times of Israel.
The Moorish Zionist Temple, Harlem, NY, 1929 (James Van Der Zee/The Folklore Research Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem via the National Library of Israel Digital Collection)
Early 1920s newspaper ads for the blockbuster New York Yiddish stage shows
Yente Telebende (Loquacious Battle‐Ax), featured a Black artist among the spotlighted performers. This was Thomas LaRue, a Yiddish-speaking singer widely known in the interwar period as
der schvartzer khazan (The Black Cantor).
Although long-forgotten now, LaRue (who sometimes used the surname Jones) was among the favorites of Yiddish theater and cantorial music. Reportedly raised in Newark, New Jersey, by a single mother who was drawn to Judaism, he even drew interest from beyond the US.