Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • Young Man with a Horn

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Curtiz (1950)

    Young Man with a Horn is based on the life of Bix Beiderbecke, who died at the age of twenty-eight.  Not the least pleasure of watching this musical melodrama sixty-two years after it was made is that all three of its stars – Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall and Doris Day – are still in the land of the living.  (Douglas has just turned ninety-six;  Bacall and Day are eighty-eight.)   The film has a beautiful texture and a soundtrack that includes all too brief excerpts from many great songs but it wouldn’t work as well as it does without Kirk Douglas in the lead.  As the obsessively talented trumpeter Rick Martin, he is an amazing physical presence, brimming with emotional energy.  Miming to music supplied by the famous Harry James, Douglas’s trumpet-playing is excessively forceful yet his overpowering dynamism realises Rick’s spiralling determination to hit a note that no one has ever managed to play.  Douglas had had a major success as the boxer protagonist of Champion the year before and Rick Martin’s approach to his music is increasingly pugilistic:  although sensitive to the artistry of his mentor Art Hazzard (Juano Hernandez), Rick wants his own jazz to knock people (including himself) out, to be undisputed champion of the musical world.

    There are two women in his life – a good influence and a bad influence – and the actresses in these roles are perfect contrasts.  Doris Day is a club singer called Jo Jordan:  morally irreproachable, she loyally carries a torch for Rick and reaps the benefits of virtue – she ends up with him, as well as with success as a recording artist.  Lauren Bacall is Amy North, a self-hating psychiatrist and a red-hot bluestocking.  It’s Amy’s cleverness that makes her malign – and her own life, and Rick’s affair and short-lived marriage to her, a frazzled misery.  Amy has a rather worrying white cockatoo in her nastily sophisticated apartment and is finally damned with the implication that she may be a lesbian. As Rick’s friend Smoke Willoughby, a piano player, Hoagy Carmichael, who introduces the story, draws you in with charming ease.  The presence of Carmichael, who knew Bix Beiderbecke well, supplies a link to the real thing but there’s a basic disjunction between the source material and what Warner Bros may have required of the filmmakers – that Rick Martin should rise and fall and rise again.  After his disastrous relationship with Amy, Rick becomes an alcoholic and a down-and-out:  he physically destroys his trumpet (Kirk Douglas’s forcefulness pays off here too).   But with the help of Smoke he regains his love of music and realises his love for Jo.  This contradicts what happened not only to Beiderbecke but to the Rick Martin character in the Dorothy Baker novel on which Carl Foreman and Edmund North’s lively but sketchy screenplay is based.  It’s hard to ignore the double entendre of the title but it’s more appropriate to the material than the movie’s original name, the strangely generic ‘Young Man With Music’.

    5 December 2012

     

  • Young at Heart

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gordon Douglas (1954)

    In many respects ridiculous, in nearly every respect enjoyable.   It’s a romantic comedy musical, interrupted by a shot of grim melodrama before the happy family conclusion.   A main part of the enjoyment is the songs – although not the ones original to the movie.  ‘Young at Heart’ (music by Johnny Richards, words by Carolyn Leigh) was a million-selling hit for Frank Sinatra the year before the film was made and he sings it over the opening and closing credits.   (There’s no other good reason for the picture’s title.)   His role here – he’s Barney Sloan, a jaded musical arranger who earns a few bob as a club singer-pianist – also gives Sinatra the chance to perform standards including ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’, ‘It’s Alright With Me’ and ‘One For My Baby’.  The best of the mediocre numbers written for the film, which provided Sinatra’s co-star Doris Day with a big hit, is ‘Ready, Willing and Able’ (by Floyd Huddleston, Dick Gleason, and Al Rinker).  Barney Sloan comes into the lives of the Tuttle family – the widowed father (Robert Keith), a music professor; and his three daughters Amy (Elisabeth Fraser), Fran (Dorothy Malone) and Laurie (Day) – through his acquaintance with Alex Burke (Gig Young), Tuttle’s former student and now a successful Broadway songwriter.   On a trip back to Strafford, Connecticut, Alex makes himself at home with the Tuttles and all three daughters fall in love – or think they fall in love – with him, even though Fran’s boyfriend Bob (Alan Hale Jr) hopes she’s already spoken for, and Amy is being tentatively courted by a handyman called Ernie (Lonny Chapman).  The treatment of Ernie is one of the few jarring notes in the movie, particularly when Laurie refers to Amy’s beau as ‘the romantic plumber’, as if that were an oxymoron.

    The whole cast is good but what takes Young at Heart well beyond the limits of the material are Sinatra and Gig Young – and, in spite of the determined sunniness of the story and its resolution, the theme of half-loaves and disappointments in love.  Only one of the three sisters doesn’t settle for second best; and Alex leaves town professionally in demand but romantically thwarted.  Gig Young has a charming spark and humour – it makes perfect sense that the whole household, which also includes a shrewder-than-she-looks maiden aunt (Ethel Barrymore) – takes a fancy to him.  Yet as soon as Frank Sinatra appears the dynamic changes – you feel it in a conversation between the two men, let alone in Barney’s first meeting with Laurie – and Sinatra’s appearance, after we’ve heard his voice at the start of the film, is delayed very effectively.  Barney is primed for failure and Sinatra’s connection with the audience makes this clichéd character gripping.  He’s effortlessly witty whether the words he delivers are spoken (the screenplay is by Julius J Epstein and Lenore Coffee, adapted from a 1938 film called Four Daughters) or sung.  In her own, overwhelmingly wholesome way, Doris Day’s proficiency, both as an actress and a singer, is electric too.  As screen personalities, she and Sinatra are hardly made for each other but that’s almost more entertaining than conventional chemistry.  He’s romantically desolate, she’s determined to get a gold star for everything – although, to be fair to Day, she shows glimpses of vulnerability at least until she starts to sing.  Thanks to Sinatra’s genius and Doris Day’s conscientiousness, the happy ending feels almost hard won.

    Postscript:   Watching this film was one of the most purely pleasurable experiences I’ve had in the cinema this year but there was a sting in the tail.  The movie’s setting of Strafford, Connecticut is a fictional place – unlike Newtown, Connecticut, which was dominating the news twenty-four hours after I saw Young at Heart.

    13 December 2012

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