What might have been a standard studio weepie is alchemised into a genuinely poetic-realist epic by Jean Negulesco’s brilliant filmmaking and the archly committed performances of John Garfield and Joan Crawford.
You know the jazz: young man works hard to become champion violinist/boxer/bullfighter/apiarist, falls in love with no-good society queen in a tryst from which no good can come. Except that Negulesco paints this with the lightest dusting of haute-expressionist chic that makes the fullest use possible of the classical music backdrop in providing an grandiose score for a grandiose tale.
Garfield is Paul Boray, the son of an immigrant grocer (J. Carroll Naish) who commits himself body and soul (sorry) to becoming a violin virtuoso, but finds he can only break into the kind of concert career he desires with the help of a patron – enter Crawford’s Helen Wright, a drunken, acerbic, secretly ardent society hostess, who helps launch Paul and soon enough commences a volatile affair with him.
The screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold, from Fannie Hurst’s story, sports highly familiar characters, including the wise if brittle momma (Ruth Nelson) and the forlornly ignored gal-pal (Joan Chandler), who stick around to remind Paul of his contract with planet Earth, but the dialogue is remarkably intricate and the characters full-bodied and voluble in their oversized impulses and yearnings. It also encompasses telling portraits of anxiety over social mobility for immigrant children, and, more quietly, sexism and the politics of success. But of course, in the end, it’s all about the effervescent thrill of watching beautiful creatures suffer and die.
Perhaps only an imfamous witch-queen like Crawford could play a character such as Helen with such self-immolating intensity. The film sports perhaps a few too many musical sequences that stretch its running time excessively, as if to repeatedly show off the cleverness of the faking of Garfield’s prodigious talent (and, admittedly, let us hear Isaac Stern’s marvellous playing), and likewise works Oscar Levant’s wondrous drollery a bit too hard to offset the spiralling craziness. Like the equally overwrought, stylised, and subtly hysterical Bette Davis vehicle, Now Voyager (1942), however, Humoresque is an ideal of the ‘40s melodrama, which, curiously enough, treated their characters far more seriously and empathetically than any modern equivalents can manage.
And it’s perhaps too little recognised what strange, lustrously artful creations they are – like Now, Voyager’s Irving Rapper, Negulesco never made as good a film, his work here littered with lush lighting effects and dreamy dissolves that corrode the normally hard-bitten boundaries of the old studio form and stray into a realm of the dreamlike. Negulesco cuts loose with filmmaking that takes the idea of melody and drama being entwined to rare heights, including a brilliant montage that links Paul’s labours with the workaday rhythms of the city, and the epic finale which intercuts Paul playing a version of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde with Helen’s succumbing to suicidal impulse and marching into the sea.
As the film progresses, the naturalistic sense of New York’s street life and the mundane corner store melts away, until all that’s left is a kind of gothic-moderne world of iconographic posters, dwarfing theatres, swanky apartments, and shadow-crammed night-spots, as Paul ascends into delirious realms of artistry, cash, and passion, and Helen descends into the briny deep. In some scenes, Negulesco predicts some of the operatic morbidity of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Oh, and yes, that is Robert Blake playing the young Paul.
