Word: besse
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
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...
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...
...good things about the show. Sammy Davis Jr., looking like an absurd Harlemization of Chico Marx, makes a wonderfully silly stinker out of Sportin' Life. The singing is generally good-particularly the comic bits by Pearl Bailey and the ballads by Adele Addison, who sings the role of Bess while Dorothy Dandridge acts it. And the color photography gains a remarkable lushness through the use of filters, though in time -2 hr. 36 min., including an intermission -the spectator may get tired of the sensation that he is watching the picture through amber-colored sunglasses...
...Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, on the other hand, tilt into the lyrics on a new two-LP Verve album with an infectious grace as easy as a ramble through the high cotton. The combination of Armstrong's gravel throat and Ella's honey-clear voice in Bess, You Is My Woman Now makes for the finest reading of the song on records...