Young Man with a Horn is a 1950 American musical drama film starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, Hoagy Carmichael, and Juano Hernandez. Directed by Michael Curtiz, it was based on the 1938 novel of the same name by Dorothy Baker inspired by the life of jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. The film was produced by Jerry Wald, and its screenplay written by Carl Foreman and Edmund H. North. Plot Rick Martin is a young Midwestern orphan cared for by an indifferent elder sister, living in his own isolated world. He is first drawn to an inner-city mission for alcoholics and its piano-accompanied hymns. Seeking a more portable instrument, his eye catches a trumpet in the window of a pawn shop. He works as a pin setter in a bowling alley to save up enough money to buy it. Tutored by Black jazzman Art Hazzard (Juano Hernandez) Rick grows into an outstanding, intuitive jazz musician (played by Kirk Douglas). He lands a job playing for a large dance band, getting to know piano player Willy "Smoke" Willoughby (Hoagy Carmichael) and beautiful featured singer Jo Jordan (Doris Day). In spite of being ordered to stick to the song arrangements, Rick prefers to improvise, and one night during a band break he leads an impromptu jam session, which gets him fired. Rick and Smoke leave together, but go separate ways. Some time later Jo and Rick discover one-another in New York City. She falls for him again, and finds him a job in New York with a dance orchestra. One night her friend Amy North (Lauren Bacall) accompanies her to hear Rick play. A wealthy dilettante studying to be a psychiatrist, Amy is a complicated young woman still disturbed by her own mother's suicide, which she blames on her father. Though she claims to be incapable of feeling love, and warns Rick away, he persists in questing for her, so completely he begins to neglect his old friends. Always concerned with his welfare, Jo eventually tries to open his eyes to Amy and the harm she will do him; overhearing, Amy stuns her by telling her that she and Rick have already married. Amy does not enjoy Rick's music and is not interested in his career, focusing on her own psychiatry studies. Rarely together because of their opposite schedules, they begin to quarrel and Amy sometimes does not even come home at