the
sound of brass
by Douglas Messerli
Carl Foreman and Edmund
H. North (screenplay, based on the novel by Dorothy Baker), Michael Curtiz
(director) Young Man with a Horn / 1950
There are a great many
works of art that require a “willing suspension of disbelief,” but thankfully
only a small number that require a “willing suspension of attention” to provide
the viewer or reader anything of value. Such a work is the 1950 film Young
Man with a Horn, directed by the esteemed Michael Curtiz, who created such
classics as Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, and White Christmas.
With a story-line that is loosely based on the life of jazz trumpeter Bix
Beiderbecke and with notable actors Hoagy Carmichael, Kurt Douglas, Lauren
Bacall, and Doris Day, it’s hard to imagine that this film might not be a huge
success. Alas, it’s a long haul before you get a few lovely witty moments
previous to sinking into long scenes with Douglas playing trumpeter Rick Martin
stumbling through the streets of lower Manhattan and Harlem until, in its last
20 seconds, the narrator, Willy “Smoke” Willoughby (Carmichael) announces that
the film’s fallen hero reformed himself and became a famous musician—far from
the tragic end Beiderbecke and even author Dorothy Baker’s character faced.
Beiderbecke died of alcohol-induced pneumonia at the age of 26.
It’s not that there aren’t a few
pleasurable moments in the first half of this film. Although most of it is
simply devoted to laying out the structure of the plot, the young Rick played
by Orley Lindgren is a real blond charmer as slipping out of his sister’s
apartment he discovers music at a local Salvation Army mission and listens in
to jazz concerts headed by famed black trumpeter Art Hazzard (Juano Hernández).
When Orley finally gets enough money to
buy his trumpet and take free lessons from Hazzard, growing up to be Kirk
Douglas, there’s some wonderful solo riffs dubbed by Harry James. And even if
you’re not a fan of jazz coronet, composer, singer, and early jazz pianist
Carmichael—who actually performed with Beiderbecke, introduced him to Louis
Armstrong, and wrote music for him—tickles the ivories very nicely. In one of
her finest roles, Doris Day isn’t required to be endlessly sweet and
perky—although she generally remains so throughout this movie—and gets the
opportunity to show off her quite formidable singing talents as Jo Jordon, the
singer under the baton of Jack Chandler’s (Walter Reed) strictly-by-the-score
orchestral renditions. She’s got such a beautiful voice, but you can’t but wish
that someone might have taught her how to actually “interpret” music. She purrs
out her anthems so sweetly, however, that we hardly notice that she can’t
express any other emotion.
The rapport between Douglas and Hernández
is enjoyable. But unfortunately, as a character “married to his trumpet”
Douglas isn’t given a significant range in which to express the acting talents
we witness in other works. He mutes his trumpet to the shuffle of dancers’ feet
before going on to play the music he really loves in his room alone. Even when
he moves on to New York, now featured in Phil Morrison’s (Jerome Cowan) band,
the only time he gets to say anything is a few one-liners during afterhours at
Louis Galba’s (Nestor Paiva) village nightclub where he helps his old mentor
Hazzard keep his job by showing up each night to entertain the after-hours
crowd. As great of a writer as Carl Foreman was, he was hardly given an
opportunity to pen a line until Lauren Bacall walks into Galba’s club.
It is at that very moment that Young
Man with a Horn finally wakes up. Jo (Day) has taken her to club which she
frequents, and after a few minutes with Amy North (Bacall’s character), we have
to wonder what on earth is Jo doing with this queer figure. And this time I
mean that in every sense. As Rick, whom she alone insistently calls Richard,
this sexy woman in something incomprehensible. As flat as Rick’s character is—a
stereotypically possessed jazz musician who wants nothing but to hit a note
that’s never been played before—Amy is a doll blown-up to such enormous
proportions that she almost literally floats above all the other film’s
figures. She and Rick are the perfect Yin and Yang, opposites who attract one
another, but in this case merely out of curiosity. As she puts it soon after
meeting the man with a horn under his arm, “I envy you Richard but I don’t
quite understand you.” His reply says it all: “That goes double for me.” A
misunderstanding of enormous proportions is just what intrigues them and almost
ends up destroying them both.
Yet Amy is quite clear about her oddities
from the very first moment they meet. She hates jazz and has come to the club
only to study the people—she’s studying to be a psychologist at the
university*—since she believes that “jazz is a cheap, mass-produced narcotic.”
A second later she quite openly
reveals—at least to anyone who can read the alphabet backwards—exactly where
she sexually stands. In the longest monologue the script permits her, Bacall
taps out a cigarette, looks over at Day who’s just begun singing, and with a
well-tuned oily alto pretense of adulation voices: “Jo’s wonderful, isn’t
she? So simple and uncomplicated. It
must be wonderful to wake up in the morning and know just which door you’re
going to walk through. She’s so terribly normal.”
Yes, this is slightly coded language, but
just in case you didn’t get it, in the very next scene she invites Rick back to
her penthouse apartment, pours him a drink, and suddenly recalls that since
she’s got an early class the next morning she has to hit the sack. This is not
coded language. She encourages him to finish his drink but not to forget to
turn out the lights, before promptly entering her bedroom and slamming the door
shut.
In a follow-up scene she weasels her way
into Rick’s rickety flat, where, when she refuses a drink, he finally figures
out its time to make his move. He hugs and kisses her, only to have her pull
away, gasping “No. It’s not you,” followed up with what, self-admittedly, is
the most honest line that writers Foreman and North have put in her mouth:
“Instead of being angry, you should be grateful. You think you’re falling in
love with me. Well don’t. Don’t take any chances with me. ...I feel a half
dozen things at the same time.” Code for, “I’m so confused about my sexuality.”
Again she leaves him standing cold in the
dark as the elevator speedily takes her down to the lobby. The only reason,
after pausing at the front desk, that she makes a U-turn to Rick’s place is to
wipe the smirks off the faces of the clerk and the elevator boy.
The two marry, without Rick even knowing
it, for another of her psychological experiments, an attempt, after a life
lived “like an intellectual mountain goat, jumping from crag to crag, trying
everything,” to see if the musician’s absolutely grounded vision might help her
to return to the normality of settling on a single rock.
Almost the moment they’ve signed the
marriage license, however, she has become determined to return to her studies,
and given her day-time classroom requirements and his late-night performances,
the two hardly ever again get the opportunity to see one another.
When they do pause for a word or two,
she admits that she has failed her courses and suggests that she has met a
woman artist with whom she might travel to Paris.
If Rick and Amy have forgotten why
they even married, so has Curtiz forgotten most of his previous characters, and
now quickly brings up the fact that Rick hasn’t played at Galba’s for months,
probably costing his old friend Hazzard his job. And Jo, now a renowned singer,
who warned him that Amy was a “strange girl,” is suffering from her motherly
instincts in her worries over Rick.
But by this time Rick has forgotten
the old cast as well, and he’s suffering so deeply about the fact that Amy has
utterly rejected him that even Douglas’ dimple is quivering in pain. Smoke’s
words don’t move him away from the bar and even a visit by his mentor makes him
explode in anger. A moment later the elderly black trumpeter is hit and killed
by a passing car.
Only then does Rick briefly return to
sanity, taking in Hazzard’s funeral and blowing off a little steam by
performing a tribute to his remarkable teacher on his horn. He returns to the
get-together Amy has pleaded with him to attend just as the party’s over, even
her guests admonishing him on their way for having missed the event.
As he goes to open the door, his wife
appears with her artist girlfriend Marge (Mary Beth Hughes), commenting “I’m
dying to see the rest of your sketches,” to which Marge replies, “We’ll have
dinner out and go back to my place.” In case you live you live on Pluto, I’ll
remind you that “come up and see my sketches sometime” is a campy quip that
translates into an invitation for gay boys to get together for a little fun.
Even the whisky-headed cornetist
finally puts two-and-two together: if he’s married to his horn, Amy has chosen
a woman of tuck under her arm. It’s amazing how hard the film’s creators had to
work during the good-old-Hays days to wink to the audience that Amy was a
lesbian, who, as she puts it in the next few frames, is “sick of [her husband]
trying to touch [her].”
She’s equally sick of “the sound of
brass,” and destroys his rare collection of jazz recordings to prove the fact.
It’s almost funny, but so awfully sad,
that to protect themselves the director and his writers are now required to
describe the only fascinating figure in their film through Rick’s last words to
her: “You’re a sick girl, Amy. You need to see a doctor.” At least they didn’t
literally kill her off. But they might as well have, for we never see her
again, and their film falls apart for that very reason. Ironically, a few
minutes earlier Amy shouted at Rick: “I’d like to kill you,” to which Rick
replied, “You almost
did.”
I’d argue she succeeded. For the rest
of the film we watch only a dead man, as I mention in first paragraph, trudging
the New York City streets in a drunken stupor. He purposely buys a trumpet from
a pawnshop clerk—unlike the beautiful instrument he bought as a boy—that’s
broken and will no longer play, as if the filmmakers were openly commenting on
the rest of their movie.
Despite Smoke saving his
pneumonia-stricken friend from dying, and Jo rushing to his bedside to buck up
with the man with whom she’s not so secretly in love with her sunny predictions
for his future life, Rick and the story never quite roll back into action. We
hear the good news of his recovery second hand, and we don’t believe it for the
moment before the screen announces The End.
If nothing else, Young Man with a
Horn proves queers make things happen. Everything else, as good as it is,
is just theme music. Maybe Smoke is right, young kids want the lyrics not the
music.
*Quite ridiculously, the
university at which Amy is attending classes is UCLA. At one point, from the
dark streets of New York, she and Rick are seen heading up the brick stairs to
Royce Hall, outside of which they stand for a few moments while she describes
her father’s role as a doctor and her lover of her mother. I’ve taught a couple
of courses in that beautiful building and attended many a concert in its
auditorium. And I’d recognize those steps leading to it any day, since I once
fell down them one dark night in search of my temporarily lost car.
Los Angeles, March 16,
2021
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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