HUMORESQUE (Jean Nugelesco, 1946)

Clifford Odets’s play Golden Boy starred Julius Garfinkle, whom Hollywood would christen John Garfield, giving him the names of presidents, albeit one of whom had been very quickly dispatched. Just as with Having Wonderful Time (1938), where Garfield’s Broadway part went to Doug Fairbanks, Jr., Garfield was not cast as Hollywood’s Golden Boy (Rouben Mamoulian, 1939), the boxing violinist navigating Lower East Side poverty; rather, the film made a star of curly-topped Bill Holden. In the postwar 1940s, when Lower East Side-born Garfield was himself a Hollywood star, friends endeavored to give him a chance to bring to the screen the Odets part. Well, two chances, because the part was split between two films: Humoresque, where Garfield plays brash violinist Paul Boray; the more substantial Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947), written by Abraham Polonsky, where he plays brash boxer Charlie Davis.
     Odets himself wrote the script for Humoresque, based on the story by Fannie Hurst. Garfield had a worse problem than the fact that Hollywood homogeneity, rooted in anticipated audience bigotry, allowed the Lower East Side immigrant family to which Paul belonged to be only vaguely Jewish. Co-star Joan Crawford had just won an Oscar, and another writer, Zachary Gold, was brought in to fatten up her part as the married society matron who underwrites Paul’s concert career and beds with him besides. (Offscreen, Crawford and Garfield likewise became lovers.) Crawford extravagantly emotes rather than acts the part of Helen Wright. But Garfield significantly pulled up the level of her leching, sad, self-pitying performance.
     Garfield, whose fiddling is dubbed by Isaac Stern no less, is, however, the reason to see what is now a swanky soap opera. His intense, sensitive acting is incandescent, to the quick, brilliant, and he effortlessly matches Crawford narcissism for narcissism.