The Singing Fool is of course only a part talkie, and because it still has its roots in the silent cinema it never becomes as static as the musicals of a year later. The opening reel is even so moving-camera-crazy that one half expects a film as bizarre as Fejos’ Broadway. But on its own, it is a sad commentary on what talkies - and the Jolson personality - had reduced the art of the cinema to. Among the press-shows that same week in September of 1928 were two great silents, von Sternberg's Docks of New York and Keaton's The Cameraman -- and Fejos' lovely, creative part-talkie Lonesome. Yet the great silents are regarded as hangovers from yesterday, Lonesome is pushed aside as an experiment, and The Singing Fool is lauded by The Film Daily as "...a complete vindication for the advocates of sound pictures…the finest example of sound pictures made to date."

Despite the greater emphasis on dialogue scenes, which become more frequent as the film progresses, The Singing Fool is a far lesser film than The Jazz Singer which preceded it. To call the story maudlin is an understatement, but its major defect is Jolson himself, who is allowed to slobber and emote and hoke it up without any kind of discipline at all. Some of it is so out of control -- the telephone call at the New Year’s party for example -- as to seem downright hilarious. Honest sentiment -- the sentiment of Jolson's later Hallelujah I'm a Bum -- is rare on the screen today, and we miss it. But it is not honest sentiment that flaws The Singing Fool; it is blatantly dishonest contrived pathos, which is so syrupy and clinging that you can almost see it on the screen. (This effect is heightened by the partially decomposed and hypoed print, which seems to hit back by disintegrating just as Jolson becomes most unbearable!) All that is really lacking in some scenes is for Al to have a little white puppy dog run under a steam-roller.

It will be seen that The Singing Fool is not to be taken too seriously, but it does have a certain academic interest. The musical score, badly mixed and often drowning out the dialogue, has a certain charm and shows a determined effort on somebody’s part to display musical knowledge. The classics are intermingled with popular melodies, and on at least once occasion "Pagliacci" and "Laugh Clown Laugh" are sawing away in competition when Al is feeling really low. The camera speeds vary somewhat, but on the whole the photography is good; bear in mind that this print is obviously duped from a fast-fading original. When Warners used excerpts from The Singing Fool in shorts in the 40’s, their original material was in much better shape. Titles are sometimes used illegitimately, as they rarely were in full silents, to cover huge gaps in continuity and to present as fait-accompli events that could never logically have been shown. The songs include a number of standards, including "Rainbow Round my Shoulder," "Sitting on Top of the World" and of course "Sonny Boy," done three times and once - quite incongruously - in black-face. (The later Sonny Boy movie with Davy Lee and Betty Bronson was not a Jolson vehicle). We asked Betty Bronson for her recollections of the film, and she sent along many pages of notes, most of them generalisations about the problems of making early sound films which will be too familiar to most of you to need repetition here. She did comment too though that this film, far more than The Jazz Singer or Lights of New York, really sold Warners on sound and convinced them that their faith had been justified. On Jolson, while respecting him as a performer, she is somewhat less than enthusiastic. He made it a point to see that dialogue to players other than himself was severely rationed, and indeed most players in dialogue scenes merely have a word or at most a sentence to bounce off Al and provide more raison-d'être for another burst of bombast from him. He was also most demanding about billing - on the film and in advertising - had the two women's roles cut down far more than in the original script, and was far from pleasant to work with. Lloyd Bacon she recalls as a director who had a pleasant sense of humour, and kidded with the cast; Jolson's wont was to make fun of them, and one of his favorite tricks was to watch them rehearse a scene or a bit of business and then squash them with "Is that supposed to be good?" Obviously director Bacon, who did such an impressive job on 42nd Street and other backstage musicals, is better with plots and fast-pacing than with star vehicles, and seemed to be somewhat under Jolson's thumb here. Still, there are signs that he knew what he was up against -- some of Jolson's most potentially unbearable scenes are fortunately played silent (though they may not have been shot that way!). On the whole, Miss Bronson has much happier memories of working with Jack Benny ("very nice, modest, not a pusher") the following year in The Medicine Man. Though limited in The Singing Fool, she is most charming -- and after seeing that lovely face, dialogue-less, in the earlier scenes, it is rather a shock when Jolson is forced to let her talk in the latter half of the film. Not that there is anything wrong with her voice -- but she was just one of those graceful, purely visual creatures who was perennially Peter Pan, and from whom any voice and contact with reality seemed wrong.