Word: goldwynism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Porgy and Bess. George Gershwin might not have been overjoyed with the heavy, static, wide-screen pageant that Producer Sam Goldwyn and Director Otto Preminger have fashioned from his folk opera but nothing can prevent the show's songs from tingling the spine. Standout performances: Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey...
...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...
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...
...Jazz. Harry Belafonte and Lena Home seem to be naturals for Porgy, if not for Sam Goldwyn, and their failure to do better on RCA Victor's album is chiefly due to their efforts to force a mood without really making the material into anything their own. 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...