An engaging and tragic, commercially oriented semi-biography of Bix Beiderbecke.
Kirk Douglas is Rick Martin, a poor kid in the Midwest who has no friends and no relatives who care for him. When he's about twelve years old he falls in with the modest jazz band of Art Hazard (Juano Hernandez). Hazard teaches him to play the trumpet and the horn becomes the naive Douglas's only love, though he becomes close to a singer (Doris Day) and a piano player (Hoagy Carmichael).
Douglas rises to the top and is the featured soloist with a dance band in New York. In these kinds of biographical movies, it's always a bad sign when the protagonist rises to the top. There is, after all, nowhere else for the movie to take him but down.
And Douglas accordingly goes down for the count. He becomes involved with, and then married to, Lauren Bacall, who is a rich, intellectual neurotic envious of Douglas' achievements and celebrity. No -- more than that. She envies the apparent love that bonds Douglas and his trumpet together. Possessed by his own problems Douglas shuns his beloved mentor Art Hazard who then dies.
Bacall destroys Douglas's marriage and runs off to Europe (with another woman), leaving Douglas to drink, then flame up brightly like a light bulb burning its filament, until his trumpet, too, fails him. He smashes it and then he's a raving alcoholic wandering the streets of New York alone and broke. These circumstances tend to be depressing, as I can attest.
In the end, Douglas winds up in an alcoholic ward where he is rediscovered by his friends Day and Carmichael. Inspired by the siren of an ambulance, Douglas conquers his demons and Diplococcus pneumoniae and goes on to marry Doris Day and she sings in the band and Hoagy Carmichael is the pianist and Kirk Douglas plays the kind of music he wants and everybody lives happily ever after. The film's score ends on a triumphant major chord. Not really. That happy ending is only implied, and to those who can see beyond Hollywood's demand for happy endings, Douglas must die with his eyes blazing, the way Bix did.
Douglas is fine in the lead. He suffers grandiloquently, his features twisted in amazed disbelief. He's very good at it. He's even better at self-serving chicanery but he doesn't get a chance to exercise that skill here. Juano Hernandez is good at what he does too -- the servile but dignified Negro. Once in a while, as in "Intruder in the Dust", he gets a chance to be less noble, even a little truculent. Hoagy Carmichael may not be much of an actor -- he's a piano player who in real life was a friend of Beiderbecke's -- but he's so likable that his presence is almost always welcome. Doris Day deserves a movie of her own. Born Doris Kappelhoff in the German enclave of Cincinatti, she was about 27 when this was filmed. Like Carmichael she first became known in a field other than acting. She became a singer with various bands during the war years. Here, she's pert, cute, expressive, and sexy as hell, a natural talent. She looks like the high school girl that all the boys in her class salivated over.
It's a decent film but, as another reviewer advised, don't mix it up with Bix Beiderbecke. Douglas's trumpet is dubbed by Harry James, one of the most famous swing orchestra leaders and trumpet players. He was a fine instrumentalist too. I heard him in Las Vegas years later, still hitting notes that seemed impossibly high. But his style was that of a big-band soloist and the genre was sweet pop tunes. By the time this film was released, big bands were on an extinction curve and being replaced by dumb vocals with lyrics like, "Someone turned the moon upside down/ Now I have to turn it right-side up". That's what Smoke meant when he said the kids buy records to learn the words. Instrumental and compositional innovations were limited to be-bop and cool jazz, which had been influenced by the original Bix Beiderbecke. (Irony.) James' music in this film is user friendly, in no way demanding of the audience. That's the sort of thing that makes this movie "commercial." Not to denigrate it. In the house of Euterpe, there are many mansions.
The story is tragic, but with that happy Hollywood coda, it shouldn't leave anyone moanin' low.
Kirk Douglas is Rick Martin, a poor kid in the Midwest who has no friends and no relatives who care for him. When he's about twelve years old he falls in with the modest jazz band of Art Hazard (Juano Hernandez). Hazard teaches him to play the trumpet and the horn becomes the naive Douglas's only love, though he becomes close to a singer (Doris Day) and a piano player (Hoagy Carmichael).
Douglas rises to the top and is the featured soloist with a dance band in New York. In these kinds of biographical movies, it's always a bad sign when the protagonist rises to the top. There is, after all, nowhere else for the movie to take him but down.
And Douglas accordingly goes down for the count. He becomes involved with, and then married to, Lauren Bacall, who is a rich, intellectual neurotic envious of Douglas' achievements and celebrity. No -- more than that. She envies the apparent love that bonds Douglas and his trumpet together. Possessed by his own problems Douglas shuns his beloved mentor Art Hazard who then dies.
Bacall destroys Douglas's marriage and runs off to Europe (with another woman), leaving Douglas to drink, then flame up brightly like a light bulb burning its filament, until his trumpet, too, fails him. He smashes it and then he's a raving alcoholic wandering the streets of New York alone and broke. These circumstances tend to be depressing, as I can attest.
In the end, Douglas winds up in an alcoholic ward where he is rediscovered by his friends Day and Carmichael. Inspired by the siren of an ambulance, Douglas conquers his demons and Diplococcus pneumoniae and goes on to marry Doris Day and she sings in the band and Hoagy Carmichael is the pianist and Kirk Douglas plays the kind of music he wants and everybody lives happily ever after. The film's score ends on a triumphant major chord. Not really. That happy ending is only implied, and to those who can see beyond Hollywood's demand for happy endings, Douglas must die with his eyes blazing, the way Bix did.
Douglas is fine in the lead. He suffers grandiloquently, his features twisted in amazed disbelief. He's very good at it. He's even better at self-serving chicanery but he doesn't get a chance to exercise that skill here. Juano Hernandez is good at what he does too -- the servile but dignified Negro. Once in a while, as in "Intruder in the Dust", he gets a chance to be less noble, even a little truculent. Hoagy Carmichael may not be much of an actor -- he's a piano player who in real life was a friend of Beiderbecke's -- but he's so likable that his presence is almost always welcome. Doris Day deserves a movie of her own. Born Doris Kappelhoff in the German enclave of Cincinatti, she was about 27 when this was filmed. Like Carmichael she first became known in a field other than acting. She became a singer with various bands during the war years. Here, she's pert, cute, expressive, and sexy as hell, a natural talent. She looks like the high school girl that all the boys in her class salivated over.
It's a decent film but, as another reviewer advised, don't mix it up with Bix Beiderbecke. Douglas's trumpet is dubbed by Harry James, one of the most famous swing orchestra leaders and trumpet players. He was a fine instrumentalist too. I heard him in Las Vegas years later, still hitting notes that seemed impossibly high. But his style was that of a big-band soloist and the genre was sweet pop tunes. By the time this film was released, big bands were on an extinction curve and being replaced by dumb vocals with lyrics like, "Someone turned the moon upside down/ Now I have to turn it right-side up". That's what Smoke meant when he said the kids buy records to learn the words. Instrumental and compositional innovations were limited to be-bop and cool jazz, which had been influenced by the original Bix Beiderbecke. (Irony.) James' music in this film is user friendly, in no way demanding of the audience. That's the sort of thing that makes this movie "commercial." Not to denigrate it. In the house of Euterpe, there are many mansions.
The story is tragic, but with that happy Hollywood coda, it shouldn't leave anyone moanin' low.