Word: trumpeter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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 for a happy ending that...
Enough of the book has stuck to the picture to point up the lost opportunities. The film begins promisingly with the trumpeter as an unloved, unhappy kid (well played by Orley Lindgren) who first discovers music in a mission house piano and musicians in a nightclub's Negro band, then starts to pour his soul into a pawnshop horn. Grown up into a hot trumpet man under the tutelage of the Negro bandleader (Juano Hernandez), he knocks around gin mills and boardinghouses in the sleazy insecurity which hounds all small-time musicians devoted to an unpopular cult. But just...
...share of jarring notes; ex-Marxist Burnham can be too pedantic and doctrinaire, sometimes sounds too pleased with his own conspiratorial cunning. Perhaps his most hopeful and least convincing thesis lies in his book's eye-catching title. He argues that it is necessary to believe in and trumpet the coming defeat of Communism-in order to give heart to the anti-Communist Resistance everywhere and to counter the myth of inevitable Red victory. Yet, while believing in the inevitability of its own victory, the Western world must not become complacent; i.e., it must act as though its victory...
From that point on, the joke is obvious. Here is no seal clumsily tooting a trumpet and waving a flag in a sawdust ring, but a seal suddenly released into a tank of water -lithe, graceful, confident and effortless. Subtly and with never a false move, Carol's whole expressive body flows with the rhythm of the music. As she sings, every motive in Lorelei's predacious little soul becomes hilariously clear. At the end of her first chorus, both Carol and Lorelei Lee belong to the audience forever. What Author Loos wrote between the lines and accented...
...play shows a middle-aged Julius Caesar championing a young Cleopatra against her brother in a squabble over the Egyptian throne, and barely winning out by force of arms. But what most playwrights would turn into gaudy love feasts and drum & trumpet heroics is a chance for Shaw to explore the ancient world, contrast youth with age, servant with master, Egypt with Rome, Caesar with Caesarism...