Young Man with a Horn (film)

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Young Man with a Horn
Young Man with a Horn movie poster
Directed by	Michael Curtiz
Produced by	Jerry Wald
Written by	Dorothy Baker (novel) Carl Foreman Edmund H. North
Starring	Kirk Douglas Lauren Bacall Doris Day Hoagy Carmichael
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	February 9, 1950 (U.S. release)
Running time	112 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

Young Man with a Horn is a 1950 film, based on a biographical novel of the same name, based on the life of Bix Beiderbecke. It is one of the first big-budget jazz-themed films in Hollywood history. It stars Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas and Doris Day.

1 Trivia
2 External links
3 See also

The book was made into a movie by Jerry Wald (producer) and Michael Curtiz (director), and Carl Foreman & Edmund H. North doing the screenplay. By today, the movie has surpassed the book in terms of fame.

The film is considered to be the first contemporary big-budget jazz film, a genre that became common not shortly after the release of the movie. Furthermore, it is regarded as one of the first major Hollywood productions to present a wife (or any woman perhaps) with strongly implied lesbian tendencies as suggested by Bacall's occasionally frigid character Amy's unaccounted overnight absence from her husband at the same time she is talking of moving to Europe with a female artist. We later meet that artist, Miss Carson, to whom Amy gushes, "I'm dying to see the rest of your sketches!"

Kirk Douglas plays the lead character, Rick Martin, who is likely to be based on Bix Beiderbecke. Lauren Bacall performs the second lead, Martin's "mixed up" love interest named Amy North. This was one of the few scripts accepted by Bacall, who was famous for her habit of turning down projects she wasn't interested in, and it has later become one of her defining roles, even though she admitted in her autobiography that she didn't think highly of the part.

The rest of the cast includes Hoagy Carmichael and Juano Hernandez. Douglas's horn playing is dubbed by Harry James.

[edit] Trivia

Because of its controversial subject matter, lesbian love, the film was banned in many countries until it was released worldwide in 1962. However, ironically enough, the US, the movie industry of which was still controlled by Will Hays, was happy to show the movie to a wide audience when it was released. Some film critics have suggested that this may have been because the Hays Office felt that the film demonstrated the "immorality" of lesbianism and warned "normal" women to return to the kitchen.