I'm shocked so many consider THE SINGING FOOL an improvement on THE JAZZ SINGER. In terms of visual storytelling, this is certainly so, at least during the silent sequences, which only take up a quarter of the film (if THE JAZZ SINGER was best described as a silent film with musical interludes, then THE SINGING FOOL is best considered a talkie with random silent sequences). However, I found this movie took all of the flaws of its spiritual predecessor and made them a hundred times worse.
For one thing, the movie doesn't so much have a story as a series of incidents that go nowhere. There's rarely anything like suspense and certainly no real character arc for Al Stone, issues shared with THE JAZZ SINGER. The protagonist stumbles onto success, gets depressed when his cartoonishly mean wife leaves him and takes their angelic child, regains success easily after moping around, then the kid dies just when things are looking up. Of course, the dramatic dying leads to a show-stopping number in blackface-- once again, not unlike THE JAZZ SINGER. And it all ends with the protagonist expiating his sorrow onstage, comforted by the applause of the audience and the love of a good woman.
I like a good deal of silent melodramas, but this movie is just so unbearable with it, going overboard with the tear-wringing moments-- and it doesn't help that Jolson was not a strong dramatic actor. He struggled with the dramatic scenes in THE JAZZ SINGER, but here those scenes are piled on much thicker and his acting goes beyond wooden, making that flaw all the more apparent.
However, I have to give credit where it's due: the "Sonny Boy" song is very moving, even if it is unabashedly sentimental. And as in THE JAZZ SINGER, Jolson shines best in the musical and comedic scenes, where he's being purely an entertainer and not a thespian. You can see why he was such a big music star in the 1910s and 1920s. Unfortunately, like THE JAZZ SINGER, THE SINGING FOOL is only of historical interest for movie geeks.
For one thing, the movie doesn't so much have a story as a series of incidents that go nowhere. There's rarely anything like suspense and certainly no real character arc for Al Stone, issues shared with THE JAZZ SINGER. The protagonist stumbles onto success, gets depressed when his cartoonishly mean wife leaves him and takes their angelic child, regains success easily after moping around, then the kid dies just when things are looking up. Of course, the dramatic dying leads to a show-stopping number in blackface-- once again, not unlike THE JAZZ SINGER. And it all ends with the protagonist expiating his sorrow onstage, comforted by the applause of the audience and the love of a good woman.
I like a good deal of silent melodramas, but this movie is just so unbearable with it, going overboard with the tear-wringing moments-- and it doesn't help that Jolson was not a strong dramatic actor. He struggled with the dramatic scenes in THE JAZZ SINGER, but here those scenes are piled on much thicker and his acting goes beyond wooden, making that flaw all the more apparent.
However, I have to give credit where it's due: the "Sonny Boy" song is very moving, even if it is unabashedly sentimental. And as in THE JAZZ SINGER, Jolson shines best in the musical and comedic scenes, where he's being purely an entertainer and not a thespian. You can see why he was such a big music star in the 1910s and 1920s. Unfortunately, like THE JAZZ SINGER, THE SINGING FOOL is only of historical interest for movie geeks.