Humoresque (Warner Bros., 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, March 21) my husband Charles came home from work at around 10:50 p.m. and caught me in the middle of watching Turner Classic Movies. They had on a cartoon short called The Hep Cat, a surprisingly homoerotic tale of a cat and a dog, both male. The dog assumes girl-cat drag to seduce the cat. Charles asked me what TCM was showing after that, and it was the 1946 film Humoresque, directed by Jean Negulesco from a script by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold based on a 1919 novel by Fannie Hurst called Humoresque: A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It. The stars were Joan Crawford (in her first film after winning her long-awaited Academy Award for Mildred Pierce) and John Garfield, who’d been boosted to movie stardom in another adaptation of a Fannie Hurst story about music, Four Daughters, in 1939. The film opens with world-famous violinist Paul Boray (John Garfield) abruptly canceling his latest concert. A crisis meeting between Boray, his accompanist Sid Jeffers (Oscar Levant, with his usual slashing wit), and his manager Franklin Bauer (Richard Gaines), shows Boray declaring he’s through with music forever, he doesn’t even like it anymore, and he’s going to quit his concert career. Then the film goes into a flashback of Boray’s life, starting in his childhood (in which the young Robert Blake plays Boray as a boy, and Charles gave him major brownie points for looking enough like John Garfield you could easily imagine them as being the same person at different ages). Boray and his parents Rudy (J. Carrol Naish), a grocer in New York’s tenement district (“played” by Warners’ two-decade old set built for The Jazz Singer!) and Esther are at a toy store to buy him something for his birthday. Rudy is trying to get his son a suitably butch present, like a baseball bat or a set of boxing gloves, but Paul has his sights set on an $8 violin the store has on sale. Rudy drags Paul home without getting him the fiddle, but eventually Esther sneaks back to the store with $8 in hand to buy Paul the instrument. At first Paul plays unbearably badly and scratchy, but eventually he practices enough to learn the basic technique and wins a slot at the local music school playing in their student orchestra. At one rehearsal Paul keeps playing when the conductor tells him to stop, and walks out with his violin in its case. We got the message: this is a man whose destiny is a solo career as a concert star, not an anonymous drone in an orchestra.

Under pressure from his family – not only his parents but his brother Phil (Tom D’Andrea) and his sister Florence (Peggy Knudsen) – to start bringing in some money (the time is the early 1930’s, in the middle of the Great Depression) – Paul gets a job, at Sid’s recommendation, at a radio station. Only at his first rehearsal the technicians running the broadcast decide it’s too long and cut a huge section out of the last movement of whatever it is they’re broadcasting, and Paul has another divo hissy-fit and stalks out. Fortunately, Sid has heard of a major 1-percent couple, Victor Wright (Paul Cavanagh) and his trophy wife Helen (Joan Crawford – who doesn’t enter the movie until about half an hour in, which probably disappointed 1946 movie audiences expecting to see the star from the get-go). Helen has been through two previous marriages and latched on to Victor because his money would enable her to live well and he wouldn’t insist on sexual exclusivity. She’s become known as a patron of the arts who latches on to young men with talent, drains them emotionally dry, and cuts them loose as soon as she’s bored with them. (In this she’s an ancestor of the character Joan Fontaine played in the 1956 film Serenade, also a Warner Bros. project, but the movie was bowdlerized from James M. Cain’s 1937 novel, in which the character was a Gay conductor who seduces a star tenor. I’ve often joked that Serenade is the movie in which Joan Fontaine played a Gay man, and I’ve long wished Pedro Almodóvar would remake Serenade come scritto.) Helen takes an instant interest in Paul and agrees to find him a manager and underwrites his concert debut, which takes place in a small half-filled hall. Nonetheless, Paul Boray receives such good reviews (aside from a rather pissy dismissal from a paper called the New York Progressive) that his concert career is launched. Though Paul has a class-peer girlfriend back home, Gina (Joan Chandler), he falls hard for Esther even though she keeps insisting her interest in him is merely professional, not personal. Ultimately he wears her down and they make love on the beach outside one of her multiple homes seven years before the similarly lubricious beach scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. By this time Esther has discovered she’s as much in love with Paul as he is with her, and she even asks Victor for a divorce so the two can marry. But Paul’s mother Esther reads him the riot act about how unsuitable a match between him and Helen would be.

It climaxes when Paul gives a big concert at which the finale is going to be an orchestral arrangement of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, done by Franz Waxman (who was at the top of his form when he composed the music for this film) with Oscar Levant supplying an unneeded piano obbligato but Paul (or rather Isaac Stern, John Garfield’s violin double) is taking over the soprano line beautifully. (Instrumental-only versions of the Liebestod usually annoy me, and I sometimes find myself humming the missing soprano part.) Neither Helen nor Esther come to Paul’s big concert, though Helen decides to stay behind and listen to the radio broadcast of it. Unfortunately, she’s so overcome by the dilemmas in her life and the crisis she’s made for herself that she decides to drown herself in the beach at the same place where she and Paul had had sex for the first time. Paul, Sid, and Bauer find her body, but the shock of her death is what unhinged Paul and led him to start canceling his concerts in the first place. The film ends with Paul walking out of his fancy apartment and heading towards the tenement neighborhood where he grew up, as Sid and Bauer conclude that it’s just a temporary setback and he’ll return to the career for which he was destined. Humoresque is a movie that holds up surprisingly well; obviously producer Jerry Wald was going for the mix of romantic melodrama and film noir that had made Mildred Pierce a box-office success, and though this one is tilted more towards romance than noir, the noir elements are there in the casting of Garfield (who, as he did in Four Daughters, brings brooding Method intensity to what otherwise could have been a pretty nothing role) and in Crawford’s formidable appearance. She’s wearing all black in almost every scene she’s in, and director Jean Negulesco recalled that at first he had a hard time communicating with her and telling her what he wanted on set.

In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse, Negulesco recalled that, at the suggestion of his wife Dusty Anderson, he did an oil portrait of Crawford as Helen Wright (he’d been a successful painter in his native Romania before coming to the U.S. and getting involved with films), gave it to her, and said, “This is what the character should be.” Crawford also had her problems with Garfield, who, according to an imdb.com “Trivia” comment, “tried to obtain an emotional bond with the character Joan Crawford played by looking deeply into her eyes, which very much unnerved Crawford, who told the director, ‘Tell him to stop looking at me!’” The scenes in which Garfield, who actually had no idea of even how to hold a violin, much less play one, were done with a special technique called “the octopus.” It involved having Garfield wear an oversized suit jacket with two extra sleeve holes in it. Two real violinists stood behind Garfield in his scenes and put their arms through the extra holes, one to do the bowing and one to do the fretting in synch to Isaac Stern’s pre-recording. Oscar Levant was apparently so amused at the sheer number of people involved that at one point he joked, “Why don’t the five of us go out and do a concert?” In his The Celluloid Muse interview Negulesco took credit for inventing the technique, but it had actually been created in 1936 by Swedish director Gustav Molander for the first version of the film Intermezzo. He’d come up with it to make it look like Ingrid Bergman could play the violin, and when Bergman came to Hollywood in 1939 and did a remake of Intermezzo as her first American film, she taught it to David O. Selznick’s technicians. It was so convincing that at later Hollywood parties Garfield would be asked to play a number on a violin, and he’d have to beg off with excuses similar to the ones Dooley Wilson, who was a talented singer but couldn’t play piano, had to use to beg off singing and playing his hit song “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca. In later years Negulesco was a bit embarrassed at all the special camera tricks he indulged in in Humoresque, but they add a great deal to the film, especially the montage of proletarian life in New York City that had Charles joking we were suddenly in the land of Dziga Vertov and his 1928 documentary Man with a Movie Camera. Humoresque holds up quite well, at least partly because of the ambiguity of Crawford’s character; it’s about midway through the progression pioneering French film critic André Bazin noted when he said she was looking more masculine in each new film, and whereas Bette Davis would have played a role like this with flaring intensity, Crawford’s impassivity actually works better for it.