Romancefest 2011: Porgy and Bess

Turns out PORGY AND BESS is kind of a rare flick these days. I didn’t realize that when I made my list of movies to watch for February. It wasn’t available to Watch Instantly or by mail from Netflix, so I checked the greatest video store of all time, Movie Madness. Sure enough, they had it. When I found it on the shelf it was clearly a bootleg of some kind with all kinds of warnings on it:

“DVD-R – may not play in some players!”

“Special $1.00 rental!”

“Transfer quality – fair.”

As I read up on the film, I got a few conflicting stories about how neither the Gershwins, who wrote the opera the film is based on, nor Samuel Goldwyn, who produced the film, were particularly happy with the finished product and buried it after a short release. On top of that it seems most of the major cast members didn’t particularly care to appear in the film and Otto Preminger, the director, didn’t particularly want to make the film Goldwyn wanted to make.

All this is a shame, not so much because the movie is a bona fide great film – it’s just okay – but more because it’s a rare example of a big budget Hollywood showcase specifically for African American talent. Viewing this movie hammered home just how white Romancefest has been – both this year and last.

The movie stars Sidney Poitier as Porgy, a crippled beggar living in a poor, all-black neighborhood just after the turn of the century. A murdering, gambling, drug addict/rapist (Brock Peters) goes on the lam and leaves his floozy girlfriend Bess (Dorothy Dandridge) behind to fend for herself. She resists an offer to go to New York with the local drug dealer (Sammy Davis, Jr.) and ends up living in Poitier’s humble shack and growing to love him in spite of their circumstances.

It’s tough to judge the cinematography and other technical aspects looking through the haze of the “fair” transfer on the bootleg I watched, but it was still easy to see that the entire movie has a slow melancholy tone about it, right from the very first mournful notes in the opening scene. Both lead roles, Porgy and Bess, are kind of thankless, and it’s my understanding neither lead provides their own singing voices, so the two roles really worth noting are Brock Peters as the over the top villain and Sammy Davis, Jr. as the drug dealer. My favorite scene was probably the one at the community picnic in which Sammy Davis, Jr. interrupts a sermon to do a song and dance where he points out that just because it’s in the Bible, it doesn’t necessarily make it so.

In an era when almost any movie is readily available in some form of home media, it’d be nice to see a movie of this cultural significance get a real release with some extras putting it in historical perspective and some restoration to make the widescreen look as beautiful as it should.