After her Oscar-winning triumph in MILDRED PEARCE, Joan Crawford then delivered another iconic performance in HUMORESQUE, easily holding her own opposite intense John Garfield.
Previously filmed by Frank Borzage in 1920, this time screenwriter Clifford Odets borrowed from the premise of his own play GOLDEN BOY.
Paul Boray, a New York grocer's son, is a talented classical violinist, although success eludes him, but he is pushed on by his devoted mother.
Paul and his pianist friend Sid attend a swanky party; he plays his violin but is antagonistic at the patronising attitude of the hostess Helen Wright, an arts patron who is bored with her retinue of adoring men and her loveless marriage.
Helen is attracted to Paul however and secures him a manager and finally, his success. Of course they become lovers - much to his mother's displeasure.
But love doesn't bring them happiness, just a lonely Wagnerian ending...
Shelf or charity shop? For God's sake... it's Joan in a sequinned Adrian gown getting drunk to the Liebestod! I have always had issues with HUMORESQUE however, Jean Negulseco's direction plods along, taking it's sudsy time to bring Crawford into the film while over-indulging the boorish performance from Oscar Levant as the pianist friend. The amount of screentime afforded Ruth Nelson's sanctimonious and provincial mother is irkesome too - the idea is problematic that the hero should not stray from hearth and home, his emotionally-dead mother and dreary childhood sweetheart; the final image of Paul walking back to the family store one presumes is meant to be heartwarming but it strikes me as singularly awful. John Garfield gives a steely performance as Paul but needless to say the film comes alive with the arrival of Joan Crawford as the glacial Helen, and she, cinematographer Ernest Haller and composer Franz Waxman deliver two glorious scenes without dialogue - Helen drifting into an ecstatic reverie in the concert hall at Paul's violin playing, totally unaware of the cold stares from his family, and the famous scene as Crawford, alone and intoxicated, becomes one with Wagner, the wind and the sea...
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