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:

The Visit is a quiet little masterpiece of a revenge picture: kind of a cross between The Count of Monte Cristo and The Lottery with just a hint of one of those human vs. mob episodes of The Twilight Zone. It is the story of a fabulously wealthy woman who comes back to her hometown after having left it in disgrace some twenty years before. The town welcomes her with open arms, hoping she'll let bygones be bygones and fork over some much needed cash.

When just a girl of seventeen, Karla Zachanassian (Ingrid Bergman) had a love affair with a boy called Serge Miller (Anthony Quinn). When Karla became pregnant, not only did Serge desert her, he hired two jerks to testify at the paternity hearing that she had slept with them as well, thereby making her case impossible to prove. Branded a tramp, Karla was forced to give up her child (who later died) and was drummed out of town by all the respectable people. 

Serge, meanwhile, married a shopkeeper's daughter (Valentina Cortese) and got on with his life. Karla, with no other options, became a prostitute. While on the job she met and somehow married a millionaire, spending the time thereafter observing people and market forces and plotting her revenge.

The town itself, a vaguely Slavic berg, had fallen on hard times over the years. With the news of the now famously rich Karla's impending visit, they pull out all the stops. Everyone knows the backstory and people are worried that she will not have forgiven Serge. They tell him to be cool and maybe not bring his wife along, in case she's still holding a grudge.

But Karla arrives all smiles and sophistication, bedecked in furs, entourage in tow, several Asian chefs, assorted servants and a pet leopard, obviously. She confides in Serge that she has every intention of being generous, a fact he reveals at the town council meeting on whose board he sits. They think it'll be a few hundred thousand of their vaguely Slavic currency, which would have been swell, so imagine their delight when she announces at dinner that she intends to dish out a total of 2 million: one million to the town, and the other to be split evenly among its citizens.

On one condition: to collect, Serge must be put to death.

The town is shocked, SHOCKED at that proposal. Why, the death penalty is barbaric and was abolished ages ago! How could she even suggest such a thing? It's unthinkable! That is, until they start thinking about it. 

A handful of people start buying things on credit from Serge's store. Then more and more, until there's no more left to buy. His friends seem to be smiling a little too broadly at him lately. When all kinds of shiny new cars and luxury items are shipped into town and made available for no money down, Serge becomes so wigged out he tries to leave town, but is prevented by a mob of his "friends." It's creepy! Eventually, the council decides it's time to revisit their criminal code.

Because this picture is available streaming on Amazon, I am not going to tell you how the situation plays out. Suffice it to say that The Visit is a surprisingly effective expose of the collective conscience. As a co-production of France, German, Italy, and the United States, everybody in it -- English speakers included -- seems to have been heavily dubbed, but this is a fascinating political morality tale very well told with moments of great tension and not a little humor. 

Plus great clothes. 

Ingrid Bergman is even more luminous than usual in this picture. Maybe it's the embers of slow-burning hatred, maybe it's the leopard, I don't know, but I like vengeful Bergman very much indeed.

This post is my contribution to The Wonderful Ingrid Bergman Blogathon, hosted by The Wonderful World of Cinema. 

Please take a moment to peruse the other reviews and essays celebrating this lovely woman's life and career.

Let me just start by saying that I've never been a huge fan of Loretta Young. I know she had a hard time balancing romance and Faith throughout her life (see this disturbing story about her "love" child with Clark Gable), but Young's particular brand of star quality never quite clicked for me. Her performance in The Farmer's Daughter, for which she won the Academy Award, is charming in the Loretta Young way, but the real beauty and light in that picture is Ethel Barrymore's.  In less capable hands, the part of an aging political matriarch in a comedy could devolve into caricature, but Barrymore plays her like a real human being -- a quietly funny human being, but one you wouldn't want to mess with.

The Story
Young plays Katie Holstrom, the tirelessly cheerful daughter of a Swedish-American Midwestern farmer and sister to three strapping young men (two of whom turn out to be James Arness and Lex Barker). She cooks for all of them, cleans their clothes, helps their mother feed all the farmhands, and still finds time to milk cows and pitch in during harvest or whatever. The movie begins with Katie about to make an understandable break for it to Capitol City to start a comparatively less strenuous career in nursing.

Because Katie is a thrifty girl, she tries to save a few bucks on bus fare by accepting a ride to the City with a local sign painter called Adolph (Rhys Williams), a name which, in my opinion, should have been a big red flag in 1947. Along the way, Adolph gets drunk and cracks up the car, forcing them to spend the night at a motel (separate rooms, naturally) while the car gets repaired -- using up all of Katie's nursing school money. After Adolph strands her the next morning, resourceful Katie hitchhikes to Capitol City, tracks him down, and demands her money. He refuses, threatening to tell her family and the whole town that she spent the night with him at a motel* instead of getting on the bus like a good girl. Katie knows when she's licked and heads for the nearest employment office where she lands a job as a maid in the home of young Congressman Glenn Morley (Joseph Cotten) and his mother, political kingmaker, Agatha (Ethel Barrymore).

Katie soon becomes indispensable to the household, what with her hard working, girl-of-the-people, plainspoken wholesomeness and all. The butler, Clancy (Charles Bickford), sees a certain special something of a political nature in her and starts mentoring her in the ways of party politics. Glenn sees a certain something else about Katie and Agatha sees that Glenn sees a certain something about Katie too. She approves.

Meanwhile, the sudden death of a congressman in the Morley's party causes the local bosses to get together to pick a replacement. However, the person they pick, Anders Finley, is someone Katie dislikes. When she and Clancy attend Finley's rally, she gets up and asks him some difficult policy questions, which attracts the attention of the opposition leaders. Katie is then asked to run against Finley in the upcoming election, because she's pretty, smart, honest, foreign-ish (but not too foreign) and a lady: a shoo-in.

But she can't stay at the Morleys' anymore and Agatha, as the queen of the party, is going to have to pull out all the stops to win, no hard feelings. Glenn begins to help Katie with her campaign while Finley decides to play dirty. He finds nurse-money-thieving, drunken-lecher Adolf and pays him to spread the story about staying in that motel with Katie (if you know what I mean). Humiliated, Katie goes back to the farm where Glenn finds her, hoping to convince her to a) marry him and b) stay in the race and fight.

Speaking of fight, Agatha and Clancy dig up dirt of their own on Finley. Turns out he's a white supremacist and a bit of a drinker, so they liquor him up and get him to spill the beans not only about paying Adolf, but also cop to where he's hiding, whereupon Katie's three farm-fed brothers head right on over to beat the crap out of the painter. Happy that her son is finally going to marry Katie and not wanting to back a creep like Finley, Agatha throws her support behind her future daughter-in-law, who probably wins. We don't know; the picture's over.

The sweetest relationship in the film is Agatha and Clancy's, but don't take my word for it. Watch The Farmer's Daughter streaming here!

* ADOLF

This post is my contribution to the Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon, hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. 

Happy 136th, Miss Ethel!

This post is my contribution to The Great Katharine Hepburn Blogathon, sponsored by the great Margaret Perry.

Please take a moment to read through the other entries, and wish Miss Hepburn a very happy 108th while you're at it.

Fans of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies know of the famous "Termite Terrace," the workspace for Warner Bros.'s brilliant short subject animators, so named for the dilapidated condition of their original back lot studio. Even after the artists moved to grander quarters, they kept the nickname and the irreverence until members of the group moved on to different studios or television. The output from Termite Terrace -- particularly from 1938 to 1949 -- include some of the best cartoons ever made, in my opinion (which is correct). 

From the beginning, Warner Bros. cartoons were known for caricaturing Hollywood stars, satirizing current events, and making musical and anecdotal references to pop culture. That attention to what consumed the popular imagination continued throughout WWII, mixing in soft lampoons of real-life anxieties, like the draft, rationing, and espionage, with overt (occasionally racist) propaganda.

I picked two wartime beauties for this Blogathon, because I like to imagine myself sitting in the balcony of the Castro Theatre in 1944, waiting to see Arsenic and Old Lace after my shift at one of the Bay Area shipyards in among my friends and neighbors --  a newsreel, the coming attractions, then Bugs Bunny (Mel Blanc) giving some jerk his come-uppance. I imagine it would have felt remarkably comforting.

Bugs Bunny is hanging out at an airbase reading a book that describes how Gremlins (which are an actual mythological Thing, apparently) sabotage airplanes. As he is mocking the idea, a real life gremlin walks by and begins to wreak havoc. Bugs tries to best the creature and is hilariously frustrated until nearly the end.

There's many a great gag in this picture, made all the better by director Bob Clampett, that dark genius, who was also responsible for Russian Rhapsody, another gremlin-themed short starring Hitler (best Hitler EVER) beset by tiny Russian saboteurs.

The angry rabbit is my favorite rabbit.

Bespectacled Bobby Soxer, Red Riding Hood, is taking Bugs Bunny to grandmas (ta HAVE, see?), but the Big Bad Wolf has other plans. Red is grating, grandma is out working the swing shift at Lockheed, and (spoiler) Bugs is not eaten by the wolf.

Soooo many references in this short that I didn't get until much older, especially in the music: "Five O'Clock Whistle," about a factory worker who doesn't know when to quit; "They're Either Too Young or Too Old," a woman's lament that all the good men are away at war [which is (sorta) sung by Bette Davis in Warner's Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)]

The great radio and television actress Bea Benadaret. known best as George & Gracie's neighbor in The Burns and Allen Show, provides the unforgettable voice of Red Riding Hood. I defy you not to incorporate some of the things she says in your regular life after watching this. Billy Bletcher provides the voice of the Big Bad Wolf, which is extra funny, because he was the voice Disney's wolf about a decade earlier in The Three Little Pigs.

This is a weird one, but a good one.

Wouldn't you much rather see a cartoon or two instead of 20 minutes of Coke ads and 12 minutes of previews? 

Me too.

This post is my contribution to the Shorts! Blogathon, hosted by Movies, Silently

Please take a moment to peruse the many excellent entries in yet another fab-themed event.

This post is another contribution to The Pre-Code Blogathon, hosted by Shadows and Satin and Pre-Code.com. Read 'em all, why doncha?

This post is one contribution to The Pre-Code Blogathon, hosted by Shadows and Satin and Pre-Code.com. Read 'em all, why doncha?

Episode 1: "Raksha"
Shere Khan (Scott McNeil) attacks an Indian village, causing toddler Mowgli to wander into a wolf den, where he is adopted by Raksha, a mother wolf who has just had cubs. The black leopard, Bagheera and Baloo (Cam Lane) defend Mowgli against Shere Khan, who vows revenge.

Episode 2: "The Kidnapping"
Now a young boy, Mowgli (Cathy Weseluck) leans how to move about the jungle as the animals do and how to show respect ("We are of one blood, you and I.") His cleverness and opposable thumbs make him popular among the animals, particularly the Bandar-Log, a pack of irritating monkeys, who kidnap him to make him their king.

Episode 3: "Akela's Last Hunt"
The great python Kaa (Sam Elliot) helps grown Mowgli (Ian James Corlett) prepare for the inevitable fight against Shere Kan by showing him the treasures of the abandoned city, particularly the "iron tooth," a bejewelled dagger. Shere Khan plots to topple pack leader, Akela (David Kaye), and Mowgli uses his new power (and fire) to help his adopted wolf father. 

Episode 4: "The Fight"
A giant pack of wild dogs with Australian accents threaten the animals of the jungle. Akela prepares the pack to fight to the death. Mowgli and his friends help defeat them by enlisting an angry mob of bees. Mowgli becomes leader of the pack. (This one's kind of scary and sad.)

Episode 5: "Return to Mankind"
Drought threatens the jungle. Shere Khan and Mowgli finally face off and Bagheera realizes its time for Mowgli to join his people. Sniff.

Maugli (a.k.a. Adventures of Mowgli) is a Soviet animated classic produced by the creative geniuses at the Soyuzmultfilm studio. The films were originally released between 1967 and 1971 as five, 20-minute shorts that were later combined into one full-length feature in 1973. The somewhat controversial distributor, Films by Jove, made a straight-to-video English version in 1996, with Charlton Heston as the narrator and Dana Delany as Bagheera (an excellent choice). 

Each episode follows the progression of Rudyard Kipling's original stories about Mowgli and his life among the animals in The Jungle Book. Bagheera is transformed by Russian grammar (I think) into a female, which totally works for me, even though it's the biggest departure from the book. As a work of animation, Maugli's level of place detail and observation of animal movement and behavior are astonishing, yet it maintains a hearty appeal for younger kids, with its occasionally goofy characters and catchy tunes.

This post was supposed to be another contribution to the the Russia in Classic Film Blogathon, hosted by Movies Silently and sponsored by Flicker Alley.

But I got sidetracked.

Please take a moment to look at all entries, arranged, as usual, in an entertaining index.

The entire Miss Mend series is available from Flicker Alley on a beautifully scored and rendered 2-disc DVD remastered from a 35 mm print. 

The thing I did not expect over the course of four-ish hours of excellent thrill-packed, sci-fi, proletarian action (with acrobatic slapstick on the side), was a quick refresher on German Expressionism interspersed with loving nods to the Soviet montage. Miss Mend is a three-part adventure serial set in an American "everytown" featuring an intrepid labor-activist and her three plucky admirers, all of whom get into 100 kinds of international, life-threatening mishegas.

Vivian Mend (Natalya Glan) works as a typist at a typical American cork factory, this one run by Rocfeller (sic) & Co. She is mooned over by an affable, chubby coworker called Tom Hopkins played by Igor Ilyinsky, a sweet-faced and charming comic actor. On the day of the big strike, the local paper sends its ace reporter, Barnet (Boris Barnet, also the series director and future husband of Miss Glan), to cover the story along with his photographer friend Vogel (Vladimir Fogel). They arrive just in time to see an incensed Miss Mend fling herself out of an office window to beat up a police officer who had just shot down one of the protesters. It's love at first sight for both of them, and the two join Tom as Miss Mend's moonstruck adventure posse for the duration.

What starts out as a straightforward story of honest working people overcoming excessive capitalist greed (a narrative, I might add, completely intelligible to American audiences of the day) quickly turns into a criminal conspiracy picture, complete with cadaverous evil genius with dreams of global domination. That's where the Murnau creeps in. The connection between these two themes is made in a moment of slapstick choreography when Miss Mend, on the run from the coppers, jumps into the speeding car of handsome young Arthur Stern (Ivan Koval-Samborsky), who happens to be the son of the factory owner, a fact he does not reveal for some time. Arthur is no fool.

Said factory owner, Gordon Stern, has just been murdered (or HAS he?) by the aforementioned cadaverous genius, Chiche (Sergey Komarov), who pins the blame for the elder Stern's death publicly on the Bolsheviks, claiming those treacherous communists were unhappy about a financial negotiation and just moidered him dead, those godless bastards. Young Arthur vows to take his revenge.

Which brings me to fascinating, pretty spot-on American stereotype number one: How anti-communists talk about communists -- godless, scheming, conspiratorial, root of all discontent. There's another earlier trope about how the rules for rich people are different for the poor, but everyone knows that. 

Stern's widow, Arthur's stepmother, is in on the racket. She is tediously in love with the unsmiling, corpse-like Chiche, and conspires with him to have her husband's fortune diverted to funding "The Organization," a sort of International Banking operation run by gentiles. This is achieved through some wonderful chase sequences and document switcheroos, which includes one of the best train vs. car crashes I've ever seen in my life. The contesting of Stern's will leads to another plot offshoot, in which Miss Mend (remember her?) reveals that her sister was raped by Gordon Stern, the result of which is the little five-year-old nephew for whom she's been caring.

While that's  going on, we learn that Chiche has enlisted a team of evil scientists -- one of whom is a woman, thank you -- to develop a biological weapon that looks like your average electrical insulator, but instead delivers a massive dose of Plague. Chiche wants to sell this weapon to the highest bidder (the birth of a pretty well-established Russian stereotype: international supervillain?), but first will demonstrate its power on the unsuspecting Soviet people. Two birds; one plague.

At this juncture, the entire series moves to Russia. It's always been there, of course, but now the production team can relax a bit from trying to make Soviet towns look like American towns. Thus far, they've achieved it by putting up signs in English, filling the streets with automobile traffic and fast-moving pedestrians, and adding a couple of black people. Incidentally, one of those black people serves as a shocking plot prop during a confrontation between armed thugs and a bunch of workers and sailors in a bar. The guy appears out of nowhere only to be killed by one of the thugs (a disguised Chiche who was trying to recover a letter from Tom, but never mind). When the police come, an officer looks at the man and says "No big deal, he's black" and leaves. 

Did I mention this is 1926? I don't believe I've ever seen a throwaway line illustrating institutional racism in an American film ever. At least not in a movie that wasn't about or satirizing racism. Just saying.

The final episode depicts the gang thwarting Chiche's evil scheme and mostly ties up the looser plot threads.  Along the way there are some grand boat sequences, one of which includes a plague ship; a couple of bare-knuckle bouts of fisticuffs; about two too many enema gags; an attempted rape; a blossoming romance (not the same guy*); some spectacular car chases; a little jazz music; industrious Soviet street urchins; more trains; horse chase; snow fight; stair fight; fist fight; race against time; and a very satisfying denouement. 

There is a lot to appreciate in Miss Mend, not the least of which is its humor. The film's depiction of America's vices and virtues is also instructive and fascinating, but to me, the most endearing feature of the series is its obvious affection for the cinema of its time, both as popular entertainment and as an art form. 

In other words: Plot schmot; this is a winner.

This post is another entry for the Russia in Classic Film Blogathon, hosted by Movies Silently and sponsored by Flicker Alley, which kindly provided a screener for this review.

Please take a moment to look at everyone's entries, arranged, as usual, in an entertaining index.