You know the story: Lonely orphan boy, Rick Martin, discovers he has an ear for music and learns to play a pawn-shop trumpet with the help of jazzman, Art Hazzard (the great Juano Hernandez). He grows up to be Kirk Douglas and a famous jazzman in his own right only to have it all fall to pieces thanks to booze and a bad marriage. Adoring girl singer, Jo Jordan (Doris Day), waits it out and saves him from himself. 

Young Man with a Horn is the film adaption of the best-selling novel of the same name by Dorothy Baker. The book is loosely based on the "music, not the life" of Bix Beiderbecke, the great jazz cornetist whose personal story took a less redemptive trajectory than did Rick Martin's in the film. Beiderbecke was indeed a musical genius and prodigy, but he managed to drink himself to death before the age of 30.

Rick Martin, on the other hand, is a single-minded perfectionist who has little time for anything else in his life but music. He drinks milk, mostly, and his one friend, "Smoke" Willoughby (Hoagy Carmichael) helps him navigate social situations and show up for work. Halfway through the picture, however, girl singer Jo introduces Rick to her smoldering, cynical friend Amy North (Lauren Bacall), an aspiring psychologist. Amy doesn't like the sound of jazz, she's just in it for the faces (whatever that's supposed to mean). She also likes to size people up, analyze them, and say things deliberately to put them off.  She envies and disdain's her friend Jo's simple niceness and declares Rick "interesting" and decides to call him "Richard," which he doesn't particularly like, but Amy is so very beautiful. She also has a lavish apartment and a silent cockatoo. She's hot, she's cold. She's bait. She's switch. She's an unhappy dilettante: too rich and unloved with too much time to dwell on her shortcomings.

Naturally, they get married, much to Jo's distress. Not because Jo loves Rick (which she does), but because Amy is strange and unhappy and Really Wrong for Rick. They have so little in common: remember, Amy doesn't like jazz and jazz is Rick (sorry, "Richard')'s life. She stops going to medical school, then tries to go back once she gets bored with married life. She flunks her exams, which complicates some of her more serious self-esteem issues. They grow distant pretty quickly. Rick starts to drink for real and gets mean to his friends, particularly his old friend Art Hazzard, with whom he has harsh words just in time for Art to get hit by a car and die.

After he learns of Art's death, Rick goes home to maybe get a little consolation from his wife. There he finds Amy at the piano, playing the one song she knows how to play (after expensive lessons). It's a wonderful scene: she plays haltingly, without emotion, finally pounding the keys in frustration. When she realizes he's watching, she's mean to him -- because he plays music beautifully, full of emotion. Later, she's even meaner, if honest about their incompatibility and her own inadequacies, which consume her. There is even a hint that her next adventure will involve a beautiful woman painter. But it won't involve him.

Grief and impending divorce drive Rick deep into drink. He loses his cushy nightclub job, which he kind of hates anyway: that music isn't his music. He actually winds up in a skid row sanitarium with pneumonia and is rescued by Smoke and Jo, his true friends. 

Rick makes it at the end of the picture, which may have been bittersweet for Hoagy Carmichael, who has been narrating this story and who was Bix Beiderbecke's pal in real life. Carmichael, as Smoke, tells us Rick's struggle was to learn how to be a human being first and an artist second, and that maybe the struggle to hit that perfect note isn't something to ruin your life over. 

Personally, I've never completely bought into the idea that one has to be tortured to be a true artist. As Lauren Bacall demonstrates pretty well in this movie, you can be pretty tortured and contribute nothing beautiful to the world, just be "an intellectual mountain goat, leaping from crag to crag, trying everything." Not that there's anything wrong with that; just don't torment people along the way.

If you haven't seen this film in a while, I recommend giving it another look. There's something about Hoagy Carmichael and Doris Day that always put me in such a good place, and it is a surprisingly nuanced picture for 1950. The race stuff isn't overdrawn: Art, Rick's father figure, is a Black guy whom he treats with respect and admiration from boyhood; Amy's intellectualism isn't the thing that makes her neurotic or what makes her a bad woman -- she's just not nice. And Lauren Bacall is very good at striking this balance for such a young thing of 24.

This post is my contribution to The Lauren Bacall Blogathon, sponsored by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.

Please visit Crystal's site to read the other entries detailing aspects of this lovely woman's life and career.

p.s. For the record, Bix Beiderbecke played the cornet and Harry James, the Marni Nixon to Kirk Douglas's horn in this film, is playing the trumpet. I'm not sure I could tell the difference on a recording, but it turns out there is one:

One forgets that there were only three Doris Day/Rock Hudson/Tony Randall films, so good was their chemistry. Send Me No Flowers is the last of them, and unlike the other two, Rock and Doris start out married and very well-acquainted with each other. 

George (Rock) and Judy (Doris) Kimball have everything: a lovely home in the suburbs with the world's largest medicine cabinet (this is important), the latest model car, a gossipy milkman, and best friend, Arnold (Tony Randall), living right next door. George is a platinum-level hypochondriac who takes pills for everything. He's also a health nut by 1964 standards; a hipster by ours. He drinks carrot juice, wheat tea, eats organic foods with no animal fats, but takes sleeping pills because he's so anxious.

Or at least he thinks they're sleeping pills. Judy has been replacing the Seconal in each capsule with white sugar for the last five years, knowing George will sleep like a baby.

One day, George visits his long-suffering physician, Dr. Morrisey (veteran character actor, Edward Andrews), to get something for his chest pains (indigestion) and asks about the cardiogram he made the doctor do a couple weeks before. While in the office, he overhears the doctor receiving very bad results of another patient's cardiogram and thinks the results are his. Dr. Morrisey tells the consulting physician over the phone that he won't tell the patient that he has only two weeks to live, because, well, why upset the guy? George thinks Doc Morrisey is talking about him and now his worst fears have been realized.

The rest of the film is about George and Arnold trying to find Judy a suitable husband to take care of her after he shuffles this mortal coil in roughly two weeks. There's a dream about Judy and the groovy young delivery boy, some window shopping for likely candidates at the country club, until finally they find the friends land on Bert (Clint Walker), a millionaire who happens to be Judy's old boyfriend. Judy starts to get suspicious at George's constantly throwing Bert in her way.

The situation is further complicated by the plight of the Kimballs' neighbors, the Bullards, who are getting a divorce. We don't ever see Mr. Bullard, but Linda Bullard (Patricia Barry) is an attractive redhead who is about to be pounced on by George's skeevy wolf pal, Winnie Burr (Hal March). Judy happens upon George trying to warn Linda of Winnie's intentions and gets the wrong idea when she sees Linda kiss George in thanks.

Guess what? It all works out in the end, and along the way we get great friend business between George and Arnold (the way Tony Randall sizes up Bert is hilarious); some beautiful righteous indignation from Judy (which no one does that better or cuter than Doris Day), and Paul Lynde as an enthusiastic funeral director,


If there had been an Oscar for reaction shots, Tony Randall would have won it every time.

When you looked up "strapping" in Webster's dictionary cerca 1960, was it James Garner's picture you saw? If not it should have been. Oklahoma-born James Garner had that all-American, non-douchey-jock good looks and likability, bestowing those traits on some of my favorite television men: Bret Maverick, Jim Rockford, and Mariette Hartley's "husband" on those awesome Polaroid commercials of the 1970s and 80s..

The youngest of three boys, James was born to a carpet layer father and part-Cherokee mother. His mother died when he was five years old, and James and his older brothers were sent to live with relatives until their father remarried in 1934. The new Mrs. Bumgarner was a horrible woman who beat and humiliated the children at every opportunity. A final terrible fight with 14-year-old James finally broke up the marriage. James went into the merchant marine at age 16 and his father moved to Los Angeles, where James joined him to finish school at Hollywood High School.

After a brief stint modeling bathing suits (um...eBay ad collectors?Anyone?), Garner joined the National Guard and served in the army during the Korean war, where he was wounded twice. A friend from high school suggested he should try his hand at acting, which he did, first on Broadway, then in television commercials, small TV roles, then his breakout starring role in the excellent Western series, Maverick.

Throughout the 1960s, Garner had solid leading man roles in both dramas and comedies, though frankly, I prefer him in the latter, especially with Doris Day. I came to know him as Doris Day's "other" husband (the anti-Rock) and to adore him through The Rockford Files, which my mother, sister, and I watched every Friday at 9:00 p.m. until it was stupidly taken off the air.

Garner has been acting steadily and constantly on small screens and large for the thirty-odd years since the end of Jim Rockford. My favorite thing about him, though, is that he met his wife, Lois, at an Adlai Stevenson rally in 1956, married her two weeks later, and has been married to her ever since. 

What a man!

Happy 86th Mr. Garner.

[Repeat of last year's greeting, but...] Doris Day was born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff 90 years ago today. Hard to believe, isn't it? I don't know what more I could add to the great body of information there is out there about her (including Doris Day: Her Own Story), except to express my admiration for her talent and perseverance in the face of stupid marital and professional choices.

I think she's a lovely human being with a beautiful voice who has had to navigate complicated roles and a messy personal life for at least six decades. I could listen to late 1940s Doris for hours. She just melts my heart.

I used to sing this song to my son when he was a baby, just like Doris did to her little guy in My Dream Is Yours (1949).

Enjoy "Someone Like You."