Preceded by: Gregory Ratoff in "For Sale," directed by Bryan Foy (1929, 6 mins, B&W, 35mm). Lou Holtz in "Idle Chatter" (1929, 9 mins, B&W, 35mm). The film that brought critical acceptance to the Vitaphone process-and spurred the public's demand for sound films, prompting the wholesale conversion to "talkies"-also represents the birth of a new genre, the film musical. Al Jolson, in his best remembered performance, plays Jack Robin né Jakie Rabinowitz, the descendant of a long line of cantors who forsakes his father, his faith and the Lower East Side for a show business career. If ever a film were of a precise moment in time, The Jazz Singer is it, both in subject-dealing as it does with the conflicts facing the first-generation Jew in America-and form. Apart from the songs (which alone make a case for assimilation), Jolson talks. "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" might have been the film's, and Vitaphone's, message. But as Richard Koszarski writes, "What is so striking about The Jazz Singer was not talk, singing, or Al Jolson, per se, but the use of a potent melodramatic narrative to provide a structure for it all." That structure uses silence brilliantly, too. When Jolson's rendition of "Blue Skies," sung for his mother, is cut off by his father (Warner Oland)'s "STOP!," the film is once again plunged into silence. Audiences were jarred. As critic Robert E. Sherwood wrote, "(I) suddenly realized that the end of the silent drama (was) in sight."