(2 of 3)
Yet, for all the skill that has obviously gone into it, Producer-Scripter Nunnally Johnson's Three Came Home ought to be better than it is. The title itself eliminates any long-sustained suspense, and reduces the story largely to a string of loosely connected episodes, e.g., an attempted rape, the machine-gunning of out-of-bounds prisoners. Director Jean (Johnny Belinda) Negulesco works so hard at building up the tension each time that the picture verges at times on old-fashioned melodramatics.
At the same time he passes up the chance to document the small, disagreeable details of prison life. Notable exception: a chilling little scene in which Actress Colbert gobbles a messy stew filched out of the officers' garbage, while speculating cheerfully over what she is eating.
The forced breakup and final reunion of-families gives the movie an emotional core that is undeniably affecting. But tearful farewells can pall when protracted and repeated as they are in this script, and Director Negulesco's treatment of emotional scenes, notably at the picture's end, is so contrived to wring the last tear from the audience that it comes perilously close to cheapening them.
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 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 when Trumpeter Douglas begins to approach the'top, the film starts on its way down.
Actress Bacall proves to be the turning point of both. Cast as a frustrated intellectual, a part as pretentiously obscure as anything the screen has produced since it learned to talk like a psychoanalyst, she marries Trumpeter Douglas and spreads the frustration around until he hits the bottle and the skids. Before Douglas' artily photographed descent into the Bowery, the picture drags in a sequence killing off the old Negro musician whom it has patronized all along.
Musically, Young Man will offend jazz purists, however it may send the jukebox set. Most of the trumpet work, dubbed by Harry James while Douglas goes skillfully through the motions, is badly out of character. It has all of James's technical finesse but it is often nearly as commercial as the kind of music that Trumpeter Douglas rails against. Jazz fans will also be surprised to learn that a Greenwich Village jazz haunt's customers all wear impeccable evening dress.