Cinema: The New Pictures, Jul. 6, 1959

• Share

Porgy and Bess (Samuel Goldwyn; Columbia). The sound stage burned down. The leading man almost quit. The original director was fired. But Producer Sam Goldwyn kept plugging away at his long-awaited, much-ballyhooed screen version of George Gershwin's durable Broadway musical. By the time the show was in the can, it had cost more than $7,000,000 to produce—and it may cost almost as much again to promote and distribute. If Sam's past performance (The Best Years of Our Lives, Guys and Dolls) is anything to go by, he will probably get his money back. But the customers will scarcely get their money's worth.

Porgy and Bess is only a moderate and intermittent success as a musical show; as an attempt to produce a great work of cinematic art, it is a sometimes ponderous failure. The fault is not entirely Producer Goldwyn's. The original Broadway musical ('TIME, Oct. 21, 1935), a good try at the great American folk opera, is troubled with an awkward, ill-paced plot—the last act falls flat because all the best tunes are used up in the early part of the show. The libretto, by Charleston-born Novelist DuBose Heyward, is full of the sort of amiable condescension toward the "darkies" that used to pass for progressiveness in the South. What really matters in the show is George Gershwin's music; some of it, particularly the recitative, is banal, but half a dozen tunes are as good as any Gershwin wrote, and Summertime will still be sung and loved a hundred years from now.

On the stage the show has an intimate, itch-and-scratch-it folksiness that makes even the dull spots endearing. On the colossal Todd-AO screen. Catfish Row covers a territory that looks almost as big as a football field, and the action often feels about as intimate as a line play seen from the second tier. What the actors are saying or singing comes blaring out of a dozen stereophonic loudspeakers in such volume that the spectator almost continually feels trapped in the middle of a cheering section.

The worst thing about Goldwyn's Porgy, though, is its cinematic monotony. The film is not so much a motion picture as a photographed opera. Just to make sure the customers get the point, Vienna-born Director Otto Preminger has directed most of it as though it were a Bayreuth production of Gōtterdāmmerung, Choruses march and countermarch; actors lumber woodenly about the stage, obviously counting their steps, and then suddenly take up a stance and break into song. And for some strange, wrong reason —perhaps to give the show an elevated, operatic tone—the actors speak in precise, cultivated accents that are miles away from the Negro slums of South Carolina. For that matter, Sidney Poitier's Porgy is not the dirty, ragtag beggar of the Heyward script, but a well-scrubbed young romantic hero who is never seen taking a penny from anybody. And Dorothy Dandridge, who emphasizes the elegance of her bones more than the sins of the flesh, makes something of a nice Nellie out of bad Bess.