The “offensively narcissistic” movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “So many things wrong with it”
It’s all too easy for a passion project to become a vanity project, with unruly egos and egregious back-slapping capable of turning a movie with good intentions into a self-serving bore. Roger Ebert suffered through a few of them, but one in particular pushed his buttons more than the rest.
While it’s true that remakes have become a scourge on modern cinema, it’s not as if they’re a relatively new thing. Stories have been told and retold almost since the dawn of the moving image, but there are far too many that have failed to justify their existence beyond capitalising on a well-known title.
Was there really any need for anyone to adapt a play that had already been brought to the big screen twice and been adapted again for television? Maybe, but only if there was anything new or worthwhile to bring to the table. Unfortunately for Ebert, Richard Fleischer’s 1980 version of The Jazz Singer seemingly existed for no other reason than to give Neil Diamond the splashiest acting debut possible.
Alan Crosland’s 1927 iteration starring Al Jolson was a watershed moment in motion picture history, effectively ushering in the age of the talkies as the first feature to synchronise music and dialogue, rendering silent films irrelevant. The fourth attempt at telling the same tale? Not so much.
“The Jazz Singer has so many things wrong with it that a review threatens to become a list,” Ebert began his savage one-star review. “Let me start with the most obvious: This movie is about a man who is at least 20 years too old for such things to be happening to him. The Jazz Singer looks ridiculous, giving us Neil Diamond going through an adolescent crisis.”
He despised the film in general but reserved special scorn for its first-time leading man. Continuing to pile on, Ebert said, “Diamond’s whole presence in this movie is offensively narcissistic,” describing his contributions to the soundtrack as “melodramatic, interchangeable, self-aggrandising groans and anguished shouts, backed protectively by expensive and cloying instrumentation.”
Furthering his attempt to kick Diamond when he was already down, the critic suggested that his acting may have been so woeful because “nobody was willing to risk offending him by asking him to seem involved, caring, and engaged.” Was he done there? Absolutely not. Instead, Ebert went scorched earth on the bestselling singer and songwriter’s maiden attempt at silver-screen stardom.
“It’s not just that he can’t act, it’s that he sends out creepy vibes,” he raged. “He seems self-absorbed, closed off, grandiose, and out of touch with his immediate surroundings.” To be fair, Ebert did lambast many other elements of the film, including the script and the staging, but it was Diamond who took the brunt of the tongue-lashing for what was an inexplicably stunted and wooden turn.
Curiously, opinion was split on his performance. After all, Diamond was both nominated for a Golden Globe in the ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’ category and won a Razzie for ‘Worst Actor’ to underline how divisive his performance was, even if it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which side of the fence Ebert stood on.
