After crooning “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,” Jack Robin (né Jakie Rabinowitz) turns to his audience in a scruffy cabaret called Coffee Dan's. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin’ yet,” he says. “Wait a minute, I tell ya. You ain't heard nothin’.” It is a metafictional moment early in The Jazz Singer (1927), as Al Jolson, playing Jack and breaking through the fourth wall, signals a revolution in the history of cinema. In the Œrst feature film with synchronized sound, the theater audience is now able to hear something.
Jolson deserves to be remembered as the star
