HUMORESQUE: Blu-ray (Warner Bros., 1946) Warner Archive

Odd to consider Joan Crawford hitting the zenith of her second career over at Warner Bros. with Jean Negulesco’s Humoresque (1946)…odd, first, because she had only begun this ascend to Oscar-winning glory the year before in Mildred Pierce, and, curiouser still, as Crawford isn’t even in the first third of Humoresque. Actually, it’s really co-star, John Garfield, cast as temperamental concert violinist, Paul Boray whose story screenwriters, Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold are telling here, Crawford entering the scene, and thereafter chewing up the scenery as married cougar, Helen Wright. It is tragic what the advancing years can do to a seemingly indestructible diva of the silver screen. In the late silent era, a little-known contract player named Lucille LeSueur was magically transformed by MGM’s dream factory into that wide-eyed confection of fantasy loveliness, rechristened Joan Crawford, thereupon answering Shakespeare’s time-honored query “what’s in a name?” with “plenty.” As that alter ego, LeSueur was to quickly ascend from playing bit parts and Norma Shearer’s double to becoming Shearer’s biggest rival on the backlot, and finally, to outlast and eclipse Shearer’s reign as a screen goddess of the highest order.

But by 1940, L.B. Mayer’s interests in advancing Crawford’s career had decidedly cooled. Worse, Crawford, along with a slew of other stars in Hollywood’s firmament was branded ‘box office poison’ – a moniker that stuck and forced Crawford to renew her studio contract at a greatly reduced salary, just to keep working. It wasn’t Crawford’s stardom that had faded – not yet. But Mayer saw this as a golden opportunity to put Crawford on notice, and, in some ‘less than compelling’ pictures to hasten her decline. He also eventually saw to it Crawford left the studio quietly – given the heave-ho along with the old home guard cultivated under the late Irving G. Thalberg. Metro’s loss, Warner Brothers’ gain. Jack Warner viewed the hiring of Crawford as a way to keep his own home-grown diva, Bette Davis, in check. But Crawford was not about to let her following slip away as the subservient, accepting Davis’ sloppy seconds. And thus, she remained unemployed for nearly 2 years after signing on the dotted line, not until precisely the right script came along. Crawford’s Oscar win for Mildred Pierce (1945), her Warner Bros. debut, was not only confirmation that her gravitational pull at the box office was as magnetic as ever, but a cause célèbre to alert Davis there was a new diva in town – and, for the briefest wrinkle in time, one going straight to the top, even as Bette’s own prospects at Warner Bros. were in steep decline.

Humoresque is the recipient of one of Crawford’s most mesmeric performances and it remains a fascinating study of mad/passionate love, of a woman so completely obsessed with a man, she would sacrifice not merely her happiness – but ultimately, her life – merely to illustrate this epic point of compulsion. As for the man, he is so eternally driven by his creative muse, his romance with a violin, he is oblivious to her martyrdom…until it’s too late. That the woman, near-sighted socialite, Helen Wright also happens to be an entrenched alcoholic and the man, violinist, Paul Boray is self-absorbed, brash and teeming with rage against the establishment (Wright just so happens to embody) are mere complications factored into the Odets/Gold screenplay, based on a short story by celebrated novelist, Fanny Hurst.  At the crux of Humoresque there remains an elixir of the damned: sexual frustrations, grinding down two immovable objects, the narrative stifled from going completely over the edge into masochism by its utterly magnificent backdrop of sublimely orchestrated classical music, the peerless plucking of Boray’s Stradivarius recorded by Isaac Stern after virtuoso, Jascha Heifetz asked for too much money. The fingering and bow in the movie utilize Stern’s hands literally wrapped around John Garfield’s body (with Garfield’s hands taped behind his back), ingeniously photographed by Ernest Haller. 

Humoresque is a not a tale of love, but obsession – its unconquerable highs, and more astutely perceived, perilous lows extol the ultimate price that must be paid for giving everything to one’s art. The movie’s penultimate line, “Nothing comes for free…one way or another you pay for what you are,” is a very bleak realization, at last to strike its chord in Boray only after he has lost the two women in his life who ever meant anything at all to him. Or perhaps this is misrepresenting the two women to whom Paul has meant the world – youthful sweetheart, Gina Romney (Joan Chandler) and aging sexpot, Helen Wright. It all could have come across as schmaltz, or maudlin and forlorn… except Negulesco has placed a certain emphasis on the one true love in Paul’s life – his music. Humoresque features an extraordinary repertoire of time-honored classical music, perhaps the only time in modern screen history where the likes of Antonín Dvorák, Frédéric Chopin and Georges Bizet have roomed under the same roof with Arthur Dietz, Howard Schwartz, Cole Porter and George Gershwin – all subservient to the bravura baton of resident composer/conductor/arranger, Franz Waxman.

Given that Humoresque stars Crawford (officially embarking on her ‘crazy lady’ period at Warner Brothers), it’s ballsy to withhold her arrival until a solid 26-minutes into this film’s run-time, the plot instead centering on Paul Boray (played as a boy by Robert Blake) and his not terribly difficult upbringing during the Great Depression. The story opens on an even more ominous precursor, the tone of Humoresque decidedly anything but light and airy - the cancellation of a major concert and return of a very gloomy Paul to his apartment, accompanied by best friend, Sidney Jeffers (Oscar Levant, who never ages throughout a story spanning some twenty years). Broadway booking agent, Bauer (Richard Gaines) goads and chides Paul for his refusal to perform. But the reason for Paul’s morose behavior is even more fraught with cryptic references made by the brooding virtuoso, as in the line “All my life I wanted to do the right thing but it never worked out. I'm outside always looking in. Feeling all the time I'm far away from home and where home is, I don't know. I can't get back to the simple happy kid I used to be.” From here, we regress to Paul’s childhood – the true beginning of the end for our angst-ridden musical protégée.

Doted on by his mother, Esther (Ruth Nelson) and chided, however lovingly, by his father, green grocer, Rudy (J. Carroll Naish), Paul is reared alongside brother, Phil (Tom D’Andrea) and sister, Florence (Peggy Knudsen). Given the closeness of the family, the willful Paul seems ever more spirited away by his muse into isolation after a chance encounter with Sidney, and the $8.00 fiddle his father absolutely refuses to buy him for his seventh birthday, but that his mother immediately runs out to acquire with dreams of someday having a musician in the family. Phil had been the first to show a musical interest, however fleeting. Now, it’s Paul. Weeks of practice turns into months, then years; Negulesco, fast-tracking us through Paul’s formative years, and, just enough to whet our appetite, illustrating for the audience how hopeless the innocent romance with doe-eyed Gina (whom he doesn’t really love) will remain and furthermore, to eventually showcase Paul’s poisonous affair with Helen that will ultimately taint his entire career.

Paul is inadvertently introduced to Helen by Sid at one of her lavish house parties where a fair-weather flock of sycophants has gathered to drink and laugh at the absurdities of all their collected wealth. Such is the vanity and the folly of affluence, at least so Helen’s husband, Victor (Paul Cavanagh) suggests. Paul begins a conversation with Victor, before realizing he is Helen’s husband, or in fact, even knowing the identity of the woman holding court across the room, whom he instantly abhors. Given Paul’s rudeness and snap analysis of his wife, Victor seems to harbor no ill will. Paul attempts damage control by serenading the guests with Sid’s accompaniment. But Helen is cruel and condescending.  Paul doesn’t allow her to get away with it however, and this sets the tone for their fiery maelstrom – a passion, too hot and bothered to last, but will ultimately consume and derail their lives.

Earlier, Sid had forewarned Paul of the dangers of his ego, “You have all the characteristics of a successful virtuoso. You're self-indulgent, self-dedicated and the hero of all your dreams.” Paul swats back with, “You ought to try a few dreams yourself, it might make you less cynical. When I look at you, I know what I want to avoid,” and Sid backs down in true Oscar Levant self-evasive glibness with “One of us is offensive.” Helen introduces Paul to Bauer and later, premiere philharmonic conductor, Hagerstrom (Fritz Leiber). Both are impressed with his burgeoning musical genius. But Esther suspects a deeper intervention afoot in her son’s life. “She’s a married woman,” Paul’s mother reminds him, encouraging the sweetheart’s romance with Gina instead. But Paul knows what he wants: fame more than anything else - success through the machinations and connections only Helen can provide.

In retrospect, Paul exploits the self-pitying socialite rather callously, perhaps nowhere more obviously than in the scene immediately following Victor’s granting of a divorce to Helen – having suffered and been humiliated one too many times by his wife’s unapologetic trysts with younger men. Besides, Victor knows Helen is really in love with Paul. Rushing to the theater to share this good news with him, Helen catches Paul in the middle of a recital – passing a note to one of the stagehands, shared with Paul while Helen awaits his reaction in the shadows. Only his response is hardly the one anticipated. Paul reads, then crumples up the note and goes on with the rehearsal without giving Helen a second thought. Realizes that a foul miscalculation has briefly resurrected her from the ashes of despair from a fantasy perpetuated only in her own mind, Helen slips back into her jaded repose, retreating in all her Arctic desolation to the beach house where she spent a rather blissfully obtuse weekend with Paul much earlier in the story.

“Here’s to love,” Helen quietly reflects, alone and tear-stained, “…and here's to the time when we were little girls, and no one asked us to marry.” This moment harks back to another at the start of Helen’s affair with Paul when she coolly explains her own romantic past thus, “I was married twice before - once at sixteen; once at twenty-one. One was a crybaby and the other a caveman. Between the two of them I said goodbye to girlhood.” With nowhere left to turn, no one to go home to, and, arguably nothing left to live for, Helen Wright has come to the end of her very decadent and depraved quest for love. Nothing remains but the obvious – suicide. In death, Helen’s memories of Paul will reign supreme as the unattainable fantasy that, arguably, never was, at least for her. But the sacrifice will also shake Paul from his seemingly impenetrable ego-driven thirst for fame.

Throughout Humoresque there runs a thread of disillusionment about imperfect, and, in most cases, grossly flawed male/female relationships. None are represented as anything but unreservedly tragic. Gina’s broken heart over losing Paul shatters her school girl’s idealism. Victor’s aging fop permits his wife’s dalliances to satisfy her appetite for younger playmates while quietly emasculating him, even as he continues to keep the home fires lit for Helen’s return. Paul’s all-consuming devotion to his art robs him of more earthly pleasures. Helen’s penultimate realization, that in elevating Paul’s stature as concert performer she has lost him for good, dismantles what is left of her own fragile notions of respectability. Paul’s penultimate awakening reveals his art has devoured not only his own chance for lasting happiness but also caused reprehensible damage to the most pivotal female figures in his life.  If anything, Humoresque is the antithesis of its title, extolling sad ironies rather than the frothy leitmotif of escapist amour. The message is quite clear. Passion destroys. Love maims. Obsession kills.

Crawford’s screen persona, once built upon ingénues aspiring beyond their working class, to graduate into entrenched go-getters, if not to the manor house, then destined to ascend into respectability through sheer will, is turned asunder in Humoresque; a perversion of the perennial ‘American dream girl makes good’ mythology, steeped in studio-sanctioned glamor, re-established for Crawford in Mildred Pierce. In this previous endeavor, Crawford’s enterprising waitress and house frau once more becomes a great success and her own woman. Yet, in retrospect, the last act of Mildred Pierce, with its delicious murder committed by a jealous daughter, a destructive byproduct of privilege, seems to foreshadow Crawford’s descending into suicidal despair in Humoresque – and foreshadows virtually all the subsequent roles she would play under her Warner contract and elsewhere as the damned martyr, doomed to remain alone.

The Odets/Gold screenplay is brilliantly augmented by Oscar Levant’s exchanges with John Garfield - particularly brutal and scathing - two friends frequently at each other’s throats, just a line or two away from an all-out fist fight. Levant’s penchant for wisecracks – self-deprecating or otherwise – crackles with intense self-loathing and a cynicism railing against authority, privilege and the world at large in general. His is an utterly wicked, yet inescapable desire to assuage into that world of high art and culture so readily admonished by Sid as tripe. Sid’s attacks on Helen are ingeniously glib and brutal, “Tell me, Mrs. Wright, does your husband interfere with your marriage?” or “I envy people who drink. At least they know what to blame everything on.” Yet, if Helen is hardly able to play ball with Sid on his acerbic level, then Levant’s leviathan of mesmeric scorn is given a formidable adversary in John Garfield, whose career was built on playing tough scrappers who never take guff from anybody.

Instead of fists, Garfield’s violinist uses brooding intonation to give Levant’s struggling pianist a tongue-lashing, and to assert Paul’s authority in the disastrous affair with Helen. Early on, Helen makes Paul a gift of an expensive cigarette case - an apology for her arrogance at the party where they first met the night before, telling him “I spend my life doing penance for things I never should have done in the first place.” Yet Paul’s apology to Helen comes too late to do either any good. Humoresque remains an extraordinary achievement – provocatively realized in its ideas, haunting in its execution and riveting in the universally sound performances given throughout. While Mildred Pierce is held as the pinnacle of Crawford’s tenure at Warner Bros., and, arguably, her movie career in totem, Humoresque represents the star at her most imperiously cultured, yet strangely common, occasionally vial, but ultimately, fallible and tragically human.

The Warner Archive has finally come around to giving us Humoresque on Blu-ray. And what an achievement it is; sporting a gorgeous B&W image with extraordinary clarity, exceptionally nuanced contrast and beautifully rendered film grain. In short, there is nothing to complain about here. Age-related artifacts that afflicted Warner’s tired DVD are gone. This is a reference quality affair and one that should easily be snatched up by every serious film buff and Crawford enthusiast.  The magnificent orchestral recordings are exceptionally well-served in 2.0 DTS mono. Extras have all been ported over from the DVD and include ‘The Music of Humoresque’ short subjects and a badly worn theatrical trailer. Bottom line: Humoresque is exquisite melodrama. It’s also an exemplar of the woman’s picture meets film noir, and the tragi-drama with light hints of smack-down comedy a la Oscar Levant’s inimitable charm. A great movie given it’s due from WAC. And a ‘must have’ for everyone who desires to experience the best entertainments ever made.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

5

VIDEO/AUDIO

5+

EXTRAS

1