Big Boy

In the splendid menagerie of players, archetypes, stereotypes and shtars who toiled before the cameras at Warner Bros./First National in the first blush of economic depression, none is more difficult or wears less well with time than Al Jolson. He was a man of undeniable talent, yes; and a star of such immense proportion that his name – unlike that of say, George Arliss – is still somewhat known, even to this doggedly amnesiac society. Hopelessly addicted to the approval of an audience, any audience, it has long been said that he could be mesmerizing on stage (“To sit and feel the lift of Jolson’s personality,” gushed Robert Benchley in his review of the 1925 Broadway hit Big Boy, “is to know what the coiners of the word ‘personality’ meant. Unimpressive as the comparison may be to Mr. Jolson, we should say that John the Baptist was the last man to possess such a power.”), but within the more intimate confines of a 78rpm recording or, more to the point, a motion picture, Jolson could be downright monstrous: an insatiable, chronically insecure, burnt-cork gorgon; eyes aflame; barreling heedless through every note, every step, every gesture; as if he were the primal ooze of showmanship itself. And while each picture he made for Warners in that period falls hostage in varying degrees to the man’s over-amplified brio, 1930’s Big Boy, adapted from the aforementioned stage success, carries the added burden of having Al Jolson, for almost the entirety of its 68 minute running time, playing the role of a stableboy in purebred, mainstream American blackface. You can forget about the plot – a textbook set of Musical Comedy contrivances involving crooked gamblers, a faithful servant, Reconstruction-era flashbacks and the honor of the Kentucky Derby – or even the film’s merits (of which there are unsurprisingly few), Jolson’s extended appearance ‘neath the burnt cork of Antebellum-era modernity has delivered this film to what small notoriety it enjoys (if that’s the word for it) to this day. Whatever it may have been then, it stands now as a cultural curio; the kind of film latter-day viewers, pretending to a sophistication as moored to reality as the trappings of minstrelsy, dismiss with a chuckle, maybe a shudder, maybe a stock banality or two on the less-evolved attitudes of the period it reflects (as if ours were an arcadia of human tolerance). It’s too debased to be classified as maudit; and it barely breathes in the 21st century consciousness.

by Tom Sutpen