YMMV / The Jazz Singer

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• Condemned by History: The movie was a massive phenomenon when it came out, but now that its then-revolutionary synchronized dialogue techniques have become commonplace, it's hard to find anyone who has a good word to say about it. As Tim Brayton puts it:
  It's as close as I can think of to a film whose appeal is almost solely historical, for a multitude of reasons: the unfathomable gap between the way that Jolson performs and the way anybody more modern than he by even just a few years does, including the dreadful fact of blackface; the drawling tedium of the hopelessly overbaked melodramatic plot, a silly and hokey thing even by the standards of backstage biopics; the incredible limitations of early sound filmmaking...
• Dancing Bear: The movie's appeal came primarily from being the first feature-length film to include sound dialogue.
• Jerkass Woobie: Cantor Rabinowitz, a jerkass for how he violently rejects his son's lifestyle, and a woobie for having his own way of life — and years of tutoring — rejected by his son. And then he becomes terminally ill.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: An otherwise important milestone in the history of sound in film, and the details that receive the most attention are the moments in which Jack dons the blackface. The context in which it's used — that Jack is a Jewish performer invoking this trope — further invites discussion on the film's themes of race.^note In his review of the film with Lady Jess, The Rap Critic, even after being forced to hold his tongue for the entirety of the movie so as to judge it on its own merits, outright said that he didn't care about any of the film's positives that he acknowledged, he still hated it because he doesn't believe that there's any justification for blackface.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Myrna Loy is briefly glimpsed as a chorus girl in the original version. She has a single line of dialog: "He hasn't a chance with Mary."
  • Ernie Hudson is the heckler in the 1980 version.
• Signature Scene: "Toot, toot, Tootsie, goodbye!"
  • The over the top I Have No Son! scene from the 1980 version.
  • And of course, My Mammy, best known today for the many parodies in the cartoons of the time and for being a representative of a rather unfortunate vaudeville practice: blackface.
• So Bad, It's Good: The 1980 remake, with a script that tries to update the old-fashioned Melodrama of the original to The '80s, and doesn't really succeed. Add to it Neil Diamond, who is game but ultimately lacks the proper charisma for the lead, and a Large Ham performance by Laurence Olivier. Thankfully, Diamond contributed some memorable songs, including three of his biggest hits: "America", "Love on the Rocks", and "Hello Again".
• Values Dissonance: The Blackface. Dear lord, the Blackface:
  • Needless to say, in the 1927 version when it was common, the notorious blackface performance hasn't aged well at all.
  • The mere fact they included blackface in the 1980 version. The screenplay attempts a novel context for it (the soul band Jess writes songs for needs someone to fill in on short notice), but it's way too Narmy to work.

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