Word: sportin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Dick Dudgeon, the imposturing knave of the title, Actor Douglas gnashes his teeth - as well as the arch dialogue -and looks less like the male Candida that Shaw intended than like a Sportin' Life in tights. Actor Lancaster, as the local parson, glooms away Shaw's most romantic scenes as if he were lost on a Brontë moor. In a climactic scene of comic derring-do, ex-Acrobat Lancaster makes heroic hash of a colonial court house and all the Redcoats in it. Otherwise he is as stiff and starchy as the clerical collar he eventually gives...
Porgy and Bess. George Gershwin's songs, Pearl Bailey's lusty singing and Sammy Davis Jr.'s diabolic portrayal of Sportin' Life pep up Sam Goldwyn's ponderous, $7,000,000 film version (in wide-screen Todd-AO and lush color) of America's No. 1 folk opera...
Porgy and Bess. George Gershwin's songs, Pearl Bailey's lusty singing and Sammy Davis Jr.'s diabolic portrayal of Sportin' Life pep up Sam Goldwyn's sometimes ponderous $7,000,000 attempt to film (in wide-screen Todd-AO and lush color) the No. 1 American folk opera...
Still, there are some 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...
...record company pressagents. With Samuel Goldwyn's Porgy and Bess about to be released, the record makers have pressed nearly 30 Porgy albums, ranging in style from Overstuffed Country Club to Tubular Cool. Columbia has issued excerpts from the sound track with Cab Calloway dubbed in as Sportin' Life in place of Sammy Davis Jr., who sings the role in the movie.* The sampling is generous, and the sound is refulgent, but most of the performances lack a properly dramatic cutting edge. Notable exceptions: Calloway and Baritone Robert McFerrin, who sings Porgy for Actor Sidney Poitier...