"Say it with lengthy-dialogue-and-bizzare-script-writing-that-takes-a-really-long-time-to-get-into-the-swing-of-things-and-ends-really-weirdly" might be a more appropriate title for this 1929 feature film portending to be a musical. Richard Barrios writes that early movie musicals are "strange and amusing and often maddening." Say it With Songs is most definitely all of these things. The script writing is strange, the child is amusing, and the film as a whole is utterly maddening. Another star vehicle for Al Jolson, Say It With Songs follows a rather unlikeable singer, Joe Lane, who lies, gambles, lands himself in jail, kidnaps his paralyzed son, and still ends up with the girl. The dialogue is long and stultifying, Jolson is the only actor that sings, and there is zero dancing. 

Watching Say it With Songs I had quite a bit of deja vu... haven't I already seen an Al Jolson film about a devoted dad who is trapped by the demands of show business whose son ends up in hospital? Yep. Say It With Songs was directed by Lloyd Bacon, who also directed The Singing Fool. Even the adorable Davey Lee features again as Joe Lane's tragi-comic son. Unfortunately, Say it With Songs doesn't have nearly half the magic of its predecessor, despite more skill in utilizing this sound gimmick being evident. The entire film is actually spoken, there are no title cards in sight, and there is even a diagetic song moment!  

People often tell me they don't like musicals because people just break out into song (well then, don't watch musicals!). It is immensely amusing to me then, that the first integrated song in the film, (where a character sings because he has no other way of expressing himself, and not because he is performing a show within a show), occurs in a prison. Joe Lane, sitting in the mess hall surrounded by a hundred prisoners, suddenly breaks out into a wistful tune, inspiring his cellmates to imagine life being better despite their current situation. It is utterly bizzare, and out of sync with the rest of the film. Yet, as a modern day viewer yearning for something that looks more like a post-Oklahoma musical (i.e. integrated book and score... oh for the days!), it is strangely satisfying. If not hilarious. 

Spoiler alert (though I truly wonder how many people reading this blog will actually go and watch the film... still. Important to warn the curious!)! The ending. It's happy, and I don't like it. I've just sat through nearly two torturous hours of Joe Lane making one awful decision after the other, destroying lives around him, and finally he walks desolately across the Brooklyn Bridge, superimposed over images of wife and son, (a rather effective piece of editing) and I thought, "Yay! Here's my cathartic and tragic ending!" But no. Suddenly we cut to smiling Joe with wife and son and a new hit single, "7th Heaven". There is no justice.