Sound in movies is something that we’ve long taken for granted. It’s easy to forget just how much we depend on an actor’s inflection and tone to convey emotions, and sound mixing has become a vital — if grossly underappreciated — part of the film-making process. I’d guess that at least 90 percent of filmgoers don’t know the difference between sound editing and sound mixing. Even among Academy voters — the supposed cream of Hollywood — the sound categories at the Oscars aren’t much more than popularity contests.

Fortunately, there’s a very easy way to personally witness just how important sound has become to cinema: Watch a silent movie. It might be difficult for modern viewers, since they usually have to stop for a title card every 45 seconds and quite a few silent films are loaded with overly broad pantomiming as well as grotesque stereotypes. I expect the stereotypes will be especially hard for modern viewers, but 1)these were all made in a slightly less enlightened time, and 2)these are the kind of emotional shortcuts that had to be taken in the absence of dialogue. Which brings me to today’s movie.

I know that The Jazz Singer was the movie to make talking pictures mainstream, much as Avatar recently did for 3D. In spite of this, however, The Jazz Singer is very much a silent movie. Pretty much all of the story is told through title cards, pantomiming and Jewish stereotypes, and the story is quite honestly pathetic. This is the tale of Jakie Rabinowitz, son of an uber-Jewish household. His father is a fifth-generation Jewish Cantor who’s been training his son to follow in the family occupation. Young Jakie, however, has other plans. He runs off to be a jazz singer and changes his name to Jack Robin while his father disowns him. Several years later, Jack gets his big Broadway debut just as his father lay dying.

It’s a cheesy story that was worn to death even when this movie filmed it in 1927. That wouldn’t be such a big deal if it was presented well, but no such luck here. Case in point: When Jack’s mom comes to his dress rehearsal trying to convince him to come home, she hears him sing. This convinces her that his place is in the theater and that it wouldn’t be right forcing Jack to give his big debut up. Roughly ten minutes later, Jack is in his family’s living room, arguing with his manager about how badly he needs to be in two places at once. Sorry, but didn’t that crisis get averted just a few scenes ago? Though to be fair, Jack is hardly the only one acting irrational: His manager threatens to blackball him from Broadway if Jack misses the premiere. This leads me to wonder why they don’t have an understudy or why this man is showing zero compassion to a colleague whose father is on his deathbed.

What’s more, this film is given a huge amount of padding in the effort to get this threadbare premise to 90 minutes. There are long stretches of this movie that are just boring. Hell, the first twenty minutes of the film were nothing more than a prologue filled with two-dimensional characters and predictable storytelling, in addition to the title cards and pantomiming that I’d see in any silent film. Sure, there was a bit of music, but it was obviously out of sync. We got a few sound effects as well (applause, namely), though that hardly blew my hair back.

But then… there was “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” (I can’t find a YouTube link to that particular number, so I’ll link to the encore instead). And suddenly, I completely understood Al Jolson when he uttered that iconic line, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”

I can’t begin to describe the change that overcame the movie when Jolson started singing. Suddenly, the music was perfectly synched with the actor and the sound was crystal clear. The picture looked crisper. The whole film seemed so much more fun and energetic. But more than that, it’s like I was literally watching the film industry go from one era to the next as quickly as a switch being flipped.

Alas, those first two musical numbers were made even more amazing by comparison against the drudgery of what had come before. Even worse, the movie went right back to the silent presentation of our awful story when Jolson stopped singing. There were other musical numbers and they were all amazing, but even those started to tarnish upon the realization that Jolson was the only one with any audible lines in this movie. Sure, his mom gets a couple of brief lines, but they’re barely audible and he talks right over her anyway. Jolson does a valiant effort to maintain variety with only his voice to work with, but it just isn’t enough.

There have been a few attempts to remake The Jazz Singer: The Michael Curtiz-directed attempt in 1952, a television remake in 1959 starring Jerry Lewis, and the 1980 Neil Diamond vehicle. They all failed and for a simple reason: The original movie was clearly built as a showcase for the “talkie” innovation. Everything about the movie — from the cliched narrative to the jazz-focused story to Al Jolson’s voice — was centered around proving the potential of talking pictures. Now that the potential’s been realized, any remake would have nothing to focus on except a story we’ve all seen hundreds of times.

My interest in The Jazz Singer is strictly academic. I completely understand why this film was such a game-changer and I’m grateful beyond words for the changes it brought upon film-making. However, I can say without hesitation that we’ve outgrown this movie. By today’s standards — hell, by any standards — the story is paper-thin and tedious to sit through.

I’m really not sure I’d recommend this as a starter for the world of silent movies. Better to go with Steamboat Willie instead or better yet, Metropolis. However, I would still consider this mandatory viewing for anyone interested in movie history. For all the film’s faults, I’m still very glad to have seen the film that brought sound to cinema.