Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 54

Baker’s novel Young Man With A Horn, loosely based on the life
of Bix Beiderbecke, was adapted to the screen with Kirk Douglas
loosely cast as Bix and his playing loosely imitated by Harry James.
Most musicians hated the book and the film. “Bix would have hated
it,” says friend and saxophonist Bud Freeman. So did Eastwood.
He remembers seeing the film, noting the breathing was off, the
dubbing [Harry James’s trumpet] and the plot impossible. Even
then, it seems, Eastwood knew about jazz movies.
The film ’s only saving grace was the role o f the older black
mentor to white musician Douglas and Hoagy Carmichael as his
piano playing sidekick. It was a role Louis Armstrong would
reprise in several subsequent films with jazz themes.
Young Man With A Horn was followed in 1951 by The Strip,
with M ickey Rooney cast as a drummer (playing his own drums) in
trouble with the mob. Pete Kelley’s Blues, in 1955, a Jack Webb
production, cast the stoic Webb in the title role as a band leader who
runs afoul o f gangsters during the 1920s. The film at least included
Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald in the cast. In Man With The Golden
Arm, Frank Sinatra is more convincing as a drug addict than as a
jazz drummer. Elmer Bernstein’s score, however, is effective
although the composer disclaimed it as a jazz score.
A far superior film for its use of jazz was I Want To Live, a 1958
film starring Susan Hayward. Critic John Tynan called it a
“ significant contribution to the elevation of the status of jazz in
film.”(5) Barbara Graham, the film ’s heroine, was a devoted jazz
buff, and besides Johnny Mandel’s score, the film featured on
screen performances by musicians Art Farmer, Gerry Mulligan,
Shelly Manne, and Bud Shank. Also notable for its use of
musicians was The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), which had
Martin M ilner as a guitarist with Chico Hamilton’s quintet, and the
object o f Burt Lancaster’s vendetta. The Lancaster character liked
jazz musicians but didn’t want his sister to marry one.
It was not until the fifties that jazz was used , however

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