General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

The Jolson Story

The Jolson Story is a 1946 American biographical musical film from Columbia Pictures, a fictionalized account of the life of singer Al Jolson, with Larry Parks playing Jolson and Jolson himself singing the soundtrack.¹^•² With Alfred E. Green directing and Joseph H. Lewis handling the musical numbers, the film had its debut at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on October 10, 1946, exactly 19 years and four days after Jolson's The Jazz Singer had opened as the first feature-length talking picture.³ The film was a major commercial success, became Columbia's highest-grossing film up to that point, and won Academy Awards for Musical Scoring and Sound Recording.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	Radio City Music Hall, New York, October 10, 1946; general release January 1947³^•⁵
Lead performance	Larry Parks, a "B" movie actor then aged 30, plays Al Jolson; Jolson sings all the songs on the soundtrack¹
Cost and gross	Filmed in Technicolor; the Sony Pictures Museum gives the cost as $2,800,000, while TIME and TCM put it at about $2.5 million; TCM reports a gross of almost $8 million⁶^•⁷^•¹
Academy Awards	Six nominations; won Best Musical Scoring (Morris Stoloff) and Best Sound Recording (John Livadary)⁵^•³
Box-office standing	Columbia Pictures' highest-grossing film up to that point⁴
Songs	25 Jolson songs, including "My Mammy," "You Made Me Love You," and "Swanee"³
Sequel	Jolson Sings Again, re-teaming Larry Parks and William Demarest, released in 1949⁴

Spoilers

Story and liberties with the facts

The film traces Asa Yoelson from boyhood in Washington, D.C., as the son of a cantor who forbids him to sing outside the synagogue, through vaudeville and blackface minstrel work, to stardom on Broadway and in the new talking pictures.⁵^•⁹

The love interest is the film's largest departure from fact. Jolson's real third wife, the singer and dancer Ruby Keeler, objected to the use of her name because she wanted nothing to do with her ex-husband; she demanded and received a payment of $25,000 from Columbia to have her likeness portrayed, and her screen name was changed to "Julie Benson."¹ A contemporary review in the New Zealand Listener noted that the film implies Jolson was first married around the time of The Jazz Singer (1927), when in reality his 1928 marriage to Keeler was his third, and that the couple had divorced in 1940, six years before the film was made.¹⁰^•⁹ The film also omits Jolson's origins in Lithuania, his emigration to the United States, his siblings, and his mother's death in his boyhood; in the film his mother remains alive into his retirement.¹¹

Sequel and later releases

The success produced a sequel, Jolson Sings Again, re-teaming Parks and Demarest, released in 1949.⁴ Parks's participation followed a contract dispute with Columbia: he had signed a seven-year contract under pressure before the first film, sued when Columbia refused to raise his salary from $750 a week, and a judge ruled he had to honor the contract but could work elsewhere, which forced Columbia to give him a raise.¹ Parks also portrayed Jolson in a Lux Radio Theatre dramatization of The Jolson Story broadcast on February 16, 1948.⁵

The film was re-released several times. It had grossed $8,000,000 by August 1953, and in 1954 it was re-released in wide-screen format with stereophonic sound, with four minutes cut from the original. A 70mm re-issue began roadshow engagements in London on August 14, 1969, with its American premiere in August 1975, and further 70mm engagements followed through 1981.⁵^•¹³

Production and casting

The project began with Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, who produced the film in his first production job. According to a 1946 TIME report, after a six-month tryout as a Warner assistant producer he was asked for picture ideas and proposed "the life of Al Jolson." Jack Warner rejected the idea, saying nobody wanted to see or hear Jolson anymore, and the film went to Columbia, whose chief Harry Cohn had idolized Jolson since his early days as a song-plugger.⁷^•⁶ Hollywood insiders, skeptical of the project, nicknamed it "Cohn's Folly."¹

Casting the lead became the film's central problem. Jolson, then nearly 60, wanted to play himself, and Cohn talked him out of it, though Jolson retained a say in the process. He wanted James Cagney, but Cagney was not interested in another musical biopic after Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). After dozens of screen tests, Cohn and Jolson reviewed the tests and concluded that the first actor they had auditioned, Larry Parks, was excellent. Parks had appeared in almost three dozen Columbia films since 1941.¹

The supporting cast included William Demarest, borrowed from Paramount, as "Steve Martin," a fictional composite of several of Jolson's friends; Evelyn Keyes as Jolson's wife; Ludwig Donath and Tamara Shayne as his parents; Bill Goodwin; and Scotty Beckett as the young Jolson.¹^•³ Keyes lobbied hard for the role, later recalling that she sent Cohn telegrams every day and phoned him several times a day.¹

The soundtrack and Parks's performance

It was decided early that Jolson's real voice would be heard singing every song, so Parks had to mouth them convincingly. He did so not by silent lip-synching but by singing at full volume while the cameras rolled, so that it was obvious he was actually singing even though the final film carried Jolson's voice. Parks later described the difficulty: Jolson sang every song at full volume as if he were going to drop dead at the end of it, and Parks had to act out different emotions against that full-pitch voice.¹

Parks had never seen Jolson perform live and was unfamiliar with his early Warner Brothers films; Jack L. Warner refused to loan prints to Columbia. When Jolson learned this, he put on an impromptu show for the actor. According to Parks's widow Betty Garrett, Jolson taught him some signature body movements but resented that the "kid" was playing him, and his access to the set was eventually restricted.¹

For the "Swanee" number, in which the character dances down the runway at the Winter Garden theater, Jolson found Parks's re-enactment unsatisfactory and persuaded Cohn to let him play himself. The sequence was filmed in long shot so the substitution would not be obvious.¹^•⁶ Columbia made repeated recordings of Jolson singing his most popular songs to get the best possible versions, according to a September 1946 Cue article cited by the AFI Catalog.⁸

One song was written for the film and became a hit: "The Anniversary Song." The biographer Michael Freedland reports that the number was composed in roughly six hours for a scene showing the wedding anniversary of Jolson's parents; it drew on an old Viennese melody that had long been in the public domain, and Saul Chaplin supplied the words. It was named the number one song on Billboard magazine's 1947 Honor Roll of Hits.¹^•⁸

Reception and awards

The film was a box-office phenomenon. The line at Radio City Music Hall went around the block on opening day.³ Jolson biographer Michael Freedland wrote that not since Gone with the Wind (1939) had there been such enthusiasm for a movie.¹ TIME called it "a fine, noisy celebration of Hollywood's two decades of talking movies" and judged it uncommonly entertaining, while noting it was loud, costly, overlong, and lushly sentimental.⁷ The New Yorker's 1946 review was harsher, describing the film as hagiography in which Jolson's life is "singularly devoid of anything resembling dramatic conflict."¹²

At the Academy Awards the film received six nominations and won two Oscars: Best Musical Scoring for Morris Stoloff and Best Sound Recording for John Livadary. It was also nominated for Best Actor (Parks), Best Supporting Actor (Demarest), Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing.⁵^•³

The commercial results transformed Jolson's standing. His career, which had flagged, was revitalized: he received half the film's profits plus an additional $25,000 for recording the songs, and he and Cohn made a deal with Decca for an album of eight songs from the movie, an innovative idea at the time; within a month of the album's release Jolson had earned royalties of $400,000. He also gained a radio show, made new records, and won over a new generation of fans.¹ The film remained Columbia's top-grossing picture for many years.⁶

Assessment

The film's relationship to its subject's life has been a recurring point of criticism. Reviewers have described it as accurate "only in the Hollywood sense," a sanitized and fictionalized biography that omits most of the difficult facts of Jolson's life.⁹^•¹¹ At the same time, the fusion of Jolson's authentic voice with Parks's recreation of the singer's mannerisms, the rhythmic rocking, the strut, the rolling eyes, and the drop to one knee, has been credited with giving the film an aura of authenticity and with enhancing Jolson's image as a singer.¹⁴ The soundtrack itself sold several million copies.¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Biographical films of musicians, artists, and writers › Biographical films about visual and performing artists

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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