Word: bix
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Bix Beiderbeeke must be writhing in his grave. This Warner Brothers picture is allegedly based on the novel by Dorothy Baker which was inspired by the life and music of the first superlative white jazz trumpeter...
Kirk Douglas, still looking more like a Champion than a genius, plays the musician, Rick Martin. For the behind-the-scenes trumpet they could have picked Bobby Hackett, the last fine musician of the Bix school. They could have selected any one of a number of good young California trumpeters who worship Beiderbecke's records. So they chose Harry James. This only adds to the public illusion that jazz was discovered in New Orleans by Larry Parks, that it was brought up to Chicago on the riverboats by Arturo de Cordoya, and that every great jazz trumpeter must have sounded...
Hoagy Carmichael and Doris Day play the two faithful friends who bring the great man back to health again. Carmichael, an old friend of Bix's, plays his "lifelike" role in a deathlike way, muttering monosyllables through a haze of cigarette smoke. Miss Day is extremely pretty and sings very well--but it isn't close to jazz...
Young Man with a Horn (Warner), which starts out to adapt the bestselling story of a jazz musician's integrity, winds up badly in need of some integrity of its own. Suggested vaguely by the career of the late great Bix Beiderbecke, Dorothy Baker's 1938 novel told the story of a hot trumpet virtuoso who is driven and destroyed by the monomania of a jazz perfectionist. The film makes the hero (Kirk Douglas) largely the victim of a bad woman (Lauren Bacall). He is saved by the love of a good one (Doris Day) in time...