For long considered a lost film, I was surprised and felt quite privileged to easily track down and watch this admittedly truncated (coming in at just under 2 hours) and poorly-preserved copy of this rarely-seen movie.
A film adaptation of the ambitious 1935 opera with music and songs by the great George Gershwin, it finally came to the big screen in 1959 at the aegis of movie mogul Sam Goldwyn, indeed it was the last film he produced, with a big-name director Otto Preminger in tow and a starry cast of prominent black performers like Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge and the young Sammy Davis Jr. In a breakout role. Preminger had directed Dandridge, along with other black performers earlier in the decade in another feature drawn from the operatic world, "Carmen Jones", a movie I enjoyed, but this one I found a bit heavier going.
Nothing to do with the music which is excellent throughout but the main problem watching the film is the depiction of the desperate, poverty-stricken lives of the inhabitants of Catfish Row. Everyone talks in what I call a demeaning "Do-dat" patois and act very deferentially to the white authority figures who come along later in the action.
Many have commented on Preminger's directorial style which consists of long takes, the avoidance of close-ups and keeping the camera in a fairly static front-centre location, all of which gives the effect of a filmed play rather than a wide-screen movie. I understand that Preminger did this to negate any possible tinkering with the final cut of his movie by the powers that be but artistically it works to the movie's detriment in making the film flat and one-paced.
I must admit to being distracted by the sight of Sidney Poitier's disabled Porgy crawling about on his knees, even as I appreciate this must have been extrapolated from the original stage play, I just wished for someone to at least give him a set of crutches. It was also just too obvious that both he and Dandridge were lip-syncing their big arias all of which contributed to the general sense of unreal artificiality of the piece.
From the little I admittedly know of opera (I'm not a fan) I'm generally aware that they often tend to be thin on plot, characterisation and character motivation and felt that the characters here too were rather walked through their roles. The one performer who stood out somewhat from the (rat?) pack was Sammy Davis Jr. As the Mephistophelean Sportin' Life who has his own designs on Dandridge's Bess.
So, a patchy production at best which left me in the end with the impression that director Preminger, in trying to thwart Goldwyn's anticipated meddling with his movie, inadvertently threw the baby out with the bath water, by suppressing much of the emotional feeling which underpins the story here.
Songs like "Summertime", "Bess You Is My Woman Now", "I Loves You Porgy" and "I Got Plenty Of Nuttin'" have deservedly lasted down the years, but it's a pity that a definitive movie version isn't out there. This, sadly isn't it and I doubt these more enlightened times will ever permit a more intuitive and nuanced retelling of the story than we get here.
A film adaptation of the ambitious 1935 opera with music and songs by the great George Gershwin, it finally came to the big screen in 1959 at the aegis of movie mogul Sam Goldwyn, indeed it was the last film he produced, with a big-name director Otto Preminger in tow and a starry cast of prominent black performers like Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge and the young Sammy Davis Jr. In a breakout role. Preminger had directed Dandridge, along with other black performers earlier in the decade in another feature drawn from the operatic world, "Carmen Jones", a movie I enjoyed, but this one I found a bit heavier going.
Nothing to do with the music which is excellent throughout but the main problem watching the film is the depiction of the desperate, poverty-stricken lives of the inhabitants of Catfish Row. Everyone talks in what I call a demeaning "Do-dat" patois and act very deferentially to the white authority figures who come along later in the action.
Many have commented on Preminger's directorial style which consists of long takes, the avoidance of close-ups and keeping the camera in a fairly static front-centre location, all of which gives the effect of a filmed play rather than a wide-screen movie. I understand that Preminger did this to negate any possible tinkering with the final cut of his movie by the powers that be but artistically it works to the movie's detriment in making the film flat and one-paced.
I must admit to being distracted by the sight of Sidney Poitier's disabled Porgy crawling about on his knees, even as I appreciate this must have been extrapolated from the original stage play, I just wished for someone to at least give him a set of crutches. It was also just too obvious that both he and Dandridge were lip-syncing their big arias all of which contributed to the general sense of unreal artificiality of the piece.
From the little I admittedly know of opera (I'm not a fan) I'm generally aware that they often tend to be thin on plot, characterisation and character motivation and felt that the characters here too were rather walked through their roles. The one performer who stood out somewhat from the (rat?) pack was Sammy Davis Jr. As the Mephistophelean Sportin' Life who has his own designs on Dandridge's Bess.
So, a patchy production at best which left me in the end with the impression that director Preminger, in trying to thwart Goldwyn's anticipated meddling with his movie, inadvertently threw the baby out with the bath water, by suppressing much of the emotional feeling which underpins the story here.
Songs like "Summertime", "Bess You Is My Woman Now", "I Loves You Porgy" and "I Got Plenty Of Nuttin'" have deservedly lasted down the years, but it's a pity that a definitive movie version isn't out there. This, sadly isn't it and I doubt these more enlightened times will ever permit a more intuitive and nuanced retelling of the story than we get here.