Mildred's Fatburgers
  • Home
  • The Blog
  • Clips & Quotes
  • Blogathon Archive
  • Contact

One Way for Money...One Way for Himself

9/16/2015

4 Comments

 
Young Man with a Horn
English: "Put down your trumpet, Jazzman - I'm in the mood for love!"

Young Man with a Horn, Belgian movie poster
French: Young Madman has a Trumpet Dutch bit: Music in the blood

Young Man with a Horn (1950)

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.

Lauren Bacall Blogathon, In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood
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:
Picture
4 Comments

Hypochondria Took a Lot More Effort Before WebMD

6/26/2014

3 Comments

 
Send Me No Flowers
I wanna see this movie in French

Paul Lynde, Rock Hudson, Send Me No Flowers
Sort of a Levittown of the Hereafter

Send Me No Flowers (1964)

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 the friends land on Bert (Clint Walker), a millionaire who happens to be Judy's old boyfriend. Judy starts to get suspicious with George continually 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.
Send Me No Flowers
Best poster ever. You can see Doris Day's freckles!!
3 Comments

Birthday of the Week: James Garner

4/7/2014

0 Comments

 
James Garner
James Scott Bumgarner, April 7, 1928

Memoir

The Garner File, James Garner Memoir
The Garner Files: A Memoir
By James Garner and Jon Winokur, Simon & Schuster, 2011

A Pretty, Funny Guy

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.

Favorite Five

  • Maverick  (1957-1962)
  • The Great Escape  (1963)
  • The Thrill of It All  and Move Over Darling  (1963)
    (Not really the same movie, but they're kind of the same movie)
  • Support Your Local Sheriff!  (1969)
  • The Rockford Files  (1974-1980)

May You Enjoy Your Upcoming YouTube Binge

Synthesizer + Harmonica = Awesome Theme Song

0 Comments

Happy 90th Birthday, Doris Day

4/3/2014

0 Comments

 
Doris Day, 90th Birthday
A Beautiful Person

Many Happy Returns to a Fine Human Being

[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."
0 Comments

    About Mildred

    I'll do just about anything a movie tells me to do. Unless it tells me wrong...

    Then I get cranky.

    But go ahead, like me on Facebook.

    RSS Feed

    Visit Mildred's profile on Pinterest.

    Proud Member Of

    Picture
    Classic Movie Blog Hub Member

    Archives

    May 2019
    December 2017
    October 2017
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013

    Categories

    All
    Agnes Moorehead
    Akira Kurosawa
    Alan Mowbray
    Albert Salmi
    Alice Terry
    Aline MacMahon
    Allen Jenkins
    Alloy Orchestra
    Anna Massey
    Ann Dvorak
    Anne Bancroft
    Anne Baxter
    Anne Revere
    Anne Shirley
    Ann Miller
    Ann Sothern
    Anthony Quinn
    Anton Walbrook
    Arthur Penn
    Art Linkletter
    Arturo De Cordova
    Audrey Hepburn
    Baby Peggy
    Barbara Bel Geddes
    Barbara Stanwyck
    Barton MacLane
    Basil Rathbone
    Bea Benadaret
    Beatrice Straight
    Bette Davis
    Beulah Bondi
    Billie Burke
    Bill Scott
    Billy Wilder
    Birthday Of The Week
    Bob Newhart
    Bonita Granville
    Boris Karloff
    Brian Aherne
    Bugs Bunny
    Burt Lancaster
    Busby Berkeley
    Butterfly Mcqueen
    Carl Boehm
    Carl Theodor Dreyer
    Carol Haney
    Cary Grant
    Charles Boyer
    Charlton Heston
    Chester Morris
    Christopher Morley
    Claire Bloom
    Claire Trevor
    Clark Gable
    Claude Rains
    Claudette Colbert
    Cliff Robertson
    Cloris Leachman
    Connie Gilchrist
    Conrad Veidt
    Constance Bennett
    Cybill Shepherd
    Dana Andrews
    Dana Delany
    Dan Duryea
    David Niven
    Dean Stockwell
    Deborah Kerr
    Dennis Morgan
    Diana Lynn
    Diana Wynyard
    Dick Moore
    Dick Powell
    Donald Sutherland
    Donna Reed
    Doris Day
    Dustin Hoffman
    D.W. Griffith
    Eddie Albert
    Edie Adams
    Edith Fellows
    Edward Arnold
    Edward Everett Horton
    Elaine May
    Elissa Landi
    Elizabeth Taylor
    Ella Raines
    Ellen Burstyn
    Elvis Presley
    Emilio Fernandez
    Ernest Borgnine
    Ernst Lubitsch
    Errol-flynn
    Ethel Barrymore
    Eugene-pallette
    Eve-arden
    Evelyn Varden
    Fay-bainter
    Fay-bainter
    Firesign-theater
    Frank Hurley
    Frank McHugh
    Frank Morgan
    Frank Sinatra
    Freddie Bartholomew
    Frederic March
    Fredi Washington
    Fred MacMurray
    Fritz Lang
    Friz Freleng
    Gabriel Figueroa
    Gary Cooper
    Gary Merrill
    George Brent
    George Murphy
    Geraldine-fitzgerald
    Ginger Rogers
    Gladys Cooper
    Glenda Farrell
    Gloria Jean
    Government Cheese
    G.W. Billy Bitzer
    Hal E. Chester
    Hal Roach
    Harold Lloyd
    Hedda Hopper
    Henry Fonda
    Herbert Marshall
    Howard DaSilva
    Howard Hawks
    Howard Hughes
    Howard Keel
    Hume Cronyn
    Humphrey Bogart
    Inga Swenson
    Ingrid Bergman
    Irene Dunne
    Jackie Butch Jenkins
    Jackie-coogan
    Jackie Cooper
    Jack Lemmon
    Jacques Tourneur
    James Craig
    James-garner
    James Gleason
    James Mason
    James-stewart
    James Whitmore
    Jane Darwell
    Jane-powell
    Jane-withers
    Jane-wyman
    Jay Ward
    Jean Dixon
    Jeanette-macdonald
    Jean Harlow
    Jean Simmons
    Joan Blondell
    Joan Crawford
    Joan-fontaine
    John Carradine
    John Ford
    John Hurt
    Joseph Cotten
    Juano Hernandez
    June Foray
    Karin-swanstrom
    Karl-malden
    Katharine Hepburn
    Kathleen Byron
    Kathryn Grayson
    Keenan Wynn
    Kevin Mccarthy
    Kirk Douglas
    Lauren Bacall
    Lee J. Cobb
    Leif Erickson
    Leila Hyams
    Leonard Nimoy
    Letitia-palma
    Lew Ayres
    Lewis Stone
    Lillian Gish
    Lillian-roth
    Lizabeth-scott
    Loretta Young
    Louise-beavers
    Lucille Ball
    Lurene-tuttle
    Lyle Talbot
    Maggie-smith
    Marcia Mae Jones
    Margaret Sullavan
    Maria Schell
    Marie-dressler
    Marjorie-main
    Marni-nixon
    Marsha Hunt
    Marx-brothers
    Mary-boland
    Maxine-audley
    Max-linder
    Max Ophuls
    Mel Blanc
    Mercedes McCambridge
    Mia Farrow
    Michael Powell
    Mickey Rooney
    Mike-mazurki
    Mike Nichols
    Miles-mander
    Miriam Hopkins
    Moira Shearer
    Montgomery Clift
    Movie-theatres
    Ned Sparks
    Niall Macginnis
    Nicholas Ray
    Nigel Hawthoren
    Ninon Sevilla
    Norma-shearer
    Orson Welles
    Pamela Franklin
    Patsy Kelly
    Patty Duke
    Patty McCormack
    Paulette Goddard
    Paul Henreid
    Paul Lynde
    Peggy Cummins
    Percy Kilbride
    Peter Bogdanovich
    Peter Breck
    Peter Falk
    Peter Lorre
    Peter Ustinov
    Preston Foster
    Ralph Bellamy
    Ramon Novarro
    Renee Falconetti
    Rex Ingram
    Ricardo Montalban
    Richard Barthelmess
    Richard Basehart
    Richard Briers
    Richard Mulligan
    Rita Hayworth
    Robert Benchley
    Robert Ryan
    Robert Wagner
    Rock Hudson
    Rodolfo Acosta
    Roger Livesey
    Roland Young
    Rosalind Russell
    Royal Dano
    Rudolf Valentino
    Sabu
    Sam Fuller
    Sandra Dee
    Shelley Winters
    Shirley MacLaine
    Shirley Temple
    Skippy/Asta
    Soyuzmultfilm
    Spencer Tracy
    Spring Byington
    Sterling Hayden
    Susan Hayward
    Sydney Greenstreet
    Takashi Shimura
    Teri Garr
    Tim Holt
    Tod Browning
    Tommy Kirk
    Tony Randall
    Toshiro Mifune
    Una Merkel
    Van Johnson
    Veronica Cartwright
    Victor Buono
    Victor McLaglen
    Virginia Weidler
    Walter Huston
    Walter Matthau
    Walter Tetley
    Warren William
    Wednesdays Child
    Wendy Hiller
    William Demarest
    William Powell
    William Shatner
    William Wyler
    W.S. Van Dyke
    Yasujiro Ozu
    Zero Mostel

    More

    Upcoming Blogathons

    Picture
    Rhoda Penmark flaunts some norms in THE BAD SEED (1956)

    Blogathons Gone By

    Great Breening Blogathon
    NIGHT NURSE (1931)
    Picture
    THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
    Nature's Fury Blogathon
    THE GRAPES OF WRATH
    Reel Infatuation Blogathon
    Sugarpuss O'Shea changes my life in BALL OF FIRE (1941)
    Great Villain Blogathon 2016
    Charlotte Vale's Mean Mom in NOW VOYAGER (1942)
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.