Humoresque is a 1920 film directed by Frank Borzage.
Leon Kantor is a boy in a Jewish neighborhood in New York some time during The Edwardian Era, the son of immigrant Jewish refugees from Tsarist Russia. When he sees a violin in a thrift shop he begs his father to buy it, but his father doesn't want to shell out $4. His mother then produces an old violin that Leon's older brother abandoned. Leon can immediately play it like a virtuoso.
Cut forward about a decade. Leon has established himself as one of the world's foremost violinists, much to the delight of his parents, giving performances all over the world. And he's fallen in love with Gina Berg, a girl from his neighborhood. All this happiness is gravely threatened by the entry of the United States into The Great War.
In 1946 it was loosely remade into a film starring John Garfield as the violinist and Joan Crawford as his lady patron.
Tropes:
- All Jews Are Cheapskates: Leon's father Abraham doesn't want to fork over the money for the violin, trying to convince his son that a cheap kazoo or a tinny music box are just as good.
- Child Prodigy: Little Leon plays the hell out of a violin the first time he is given one.
- Funetik Aksent: Used occasionally in the title cards to indicate the Jewish New Yorker accent of Leon's parents, like when Abraham says "This is moosik!"
- Funny Foreigner: Abraham the Russian immigrant. ("Now mama, you eat dinner before I get mad from you.")
- Greedy Jew: So the Gentile bullies in Leon's neighborhood think. They gang up on him and draw a dollar sign on the back of his jacket.
- Hypocritical Humor: Abraham is scornful of Mama Kantor's desire to encourage her son to be a violinist, wishing instead that Leon would join him in Abraham's brass business. When Leon is later a huge success, Abraham tells Mama Kantor, "Didn't I always tell you that my boy would be someday a fancy feedler?"
- Jewish Mother: Mama Kantor is a Jewish mother straight from central casting. When Leon is touring Europe to great acclaim, she is following along, showing his baby pictures to random strangers. She extols how handsome he is. When it's time for him to go to France, she asks him to sit in her lap like when he was a child.
- Red Herring: The opening scene of the film reveals that Leon's older brother Manny, who is in his late teens, has the mind of an infant due to some sort of brain damage suffered while leaving Russia. This has nothing at all to do with the rest of the story.
- Throwing Off the Disability: Leon spends months despondent, a cripple unable to play his violin due to his arm being damaged in the war. When Gina fakes a suicide with pills, Leon snaps out of it, picking her up with both arms and carrying her to a couch. Afterwards, he can play the violin again. Justified, sort of, when a doctor says Leon can break through the scar tissue in his shoulder with an act of will.
- Time Skip: Something like ten years between young Leon revealing himself as a child prodigy with the violin, and adult Leon as an acclaimed concert violinist.
- Title Drop: The audience at Leon's hometown concert shouts for a "humoresque", that is, a piece that is lively and humorous. Later, Leon's mother asks for one as he is going off to war.
