“It’s terrible”: Martin Scorsese’s lifelong hatred of the most important movie in cinema history
Few people in the industry, or outside of it for that matter, adore and appreciate the art of cinema more than Martin Scorsese, which makes it so bizarre that he hates the most important movie ever made.
That’s not an exaggeration, either, with the acclaimed auteur and iconic director having spent most of his life operating under the assumption that it is, in fact, shit. This being Scorsese, he can appreciate what it meant to the profession he’s called home for the last six decades, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it.
In addition to being one of the best to ever step behind the camera, the Academy Award-winning icon is also a staunch defender and vocal proponent of preserving history at all costs. His Film Foundation has restored or preserved hundreds of pictures that were in danger of being lost forever, and he’s as precious about cinema’s past as he is concerned about its future.
However, just because he’s been obsessed with the moving image since he was a kid, he’s mastered the medium by helming a succession of all-time classics, and he’s one of the most knowledgeable people in Hollywood when it comes to generations past, he refused to fawn over the single most transformative feature ever committed to celluloid, simply because it literally changed everything.
In October 1927, things would never be the same again when director Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer arrived in cinemas, with audiences witnessing history when Al Jolson ushered in the age of the talkies. Using synchronised music, singing, and speech for the first time in a feature-length production, it was a watershed moment that toppled the first domino to the movies as we still know them today.
You’d think that someone with Scorsese’s reputation would have a soft spot for the film that laid the template for his entire career, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, when in conversation with Richard Schickel, the subject came up, and the Taxi Driver mastermind was nothing if not honest: “I dislike The Jazz Singer.”
When Schickel agreed, calling it “an awful movie,” Scorsese concurred. “It’s terrible,” he stated. “But my mother and father loved it. They loved it because they identified with the family, the breaking of tradition. My father was feeling that we were losing the tradition of the family, the Sicilian family. And here were the Jewish people, who lived nearby, sticking to their family.”
As it turned out, young Marty was the only member of the Scorsese household who couldn’t stand The Jazz Singer, with his old man, Charles, readily identifying with Warner Oland’s Cantor Rabinowitz, who’d much prefer if his son, Jakie, abandoned his dreams of succeeding in ragtime by following in the family footsteps at the local church.
He wouldn’t dare suggest that the movie doesn’t deserve its unique position in the annals of cinema history, with The Jazz Singer rewriting the rulebook and adding new chapters that are still being followed almost a century later, but he’s still allowed to think that as a work of cinema, it’s crap.
