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
