Cinema: Low Corpuscle Count

Youngblood Hawke pays excessive respect to the antic Hollywood tradition of turning bad novels into worse movies. Herman Wouk’s 1962 bestseller about a young novelist’s spectacular career seemed to be written with one eye on Thomas Wolfe and one eye on an eventual film sale, but this foresighted assist did not save the movie from ineptitude.

Wouk described his hero as a cigar-smoking Kentucky coal trucker, huge, thick-featured and rustic, “a hulking sloven of twenty-six who had written an ugly bellowing dinosaur of a novel.” In the slender person of James Franciscus, schoolteacher star of TV’s Mr. Novak, Youngblood’s red corpuscle count seems low. Down home, Mama Mildred Dunnock no sooner scolds him about “wastin’ yur time scribblin’ stories” than the phone rings. Long distance. A famous publisher is plumb crazy about his book. He heads for Manhattan, meets a fetching editor (Suzanne Pleshette) whose first act of loyalty is to set him up in a $50-a-month garret with a skylight, a terrace, and a splendid view of the city’s challenging spires. In movies like Youngblood Hawke, every office, flat and cellar bistro adroitly manages to look out on the skyline.

The rest of the film looks in on Manhattan’s literati, proffering a view of life at the top that will be wonderfully satisfying to restless schoolgirls in Great Falls. Everyone is crude but beautiful, and Max Steiner’s busy background music puts every known human emotion into italics. Champagne flows. Famous critics stagger to their feet at parties, uttering dire absurdities about “the prime young stag hunted to death by rich hunters.” Youngblood is hounded to the bed of a sleek, wealthy matron (Genevieve Page). He goes on to acquire the Pulitzer Prize, his own publishing house, part ownership in a shopping center—and bankruptcy, moral and fiscal. Finally, while penning another doorstopper to pay off his debt to a Swiss bank, he catches pneumonia. “Apparently fell into the stream while trying to make it to the road with his manuscript,” says the doctor with innocent wit. In the book, the author dies, but in the movie he survives—presumably to prove that a doomed genius has as much right to live as anybody.