Word: film
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Along the way to this clumsy denouement, Stromboli offers some well-shot scenery, a volcanic eruption and an exciting tuna-fishing sequence. Virtually nothing suggests the Rossellini who directed Open City and Paisan. Though he has disowned the film as RKO's tampered version, much of the blame is clearly...
...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 is as off-key as a leaky cornet...
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...
...Douglas gives plenty of vitality to the central role, but he is called on to repeat a good deal of what he did in Champion; one scene, in which he bangs a trumpet to pieces and breaks into sobs, is almost a remake of the climax of his earlier film. Having discovered what Actor Douglas does best, Hollywood apparently is determined to work him to death...
...very successful film versions of operas which have been sent over here recently from Italy--"Before Him All Rome Trembled" (La Tosea) and "The Lost One" (La Traviata)--have made some concessions to the customs of moviegoers. Each had talented and handsome actors, opera-type histrionics were minimized, the scenery was clean and smoothly pressed, and--most of all--the plot was made as plausible as a reasonable person should expect. In short, the producers were making a movie, not filming an opera...