Word: sportin
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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...
...Leningrad station the Porgy company filed through a welcoming committee of "giant men and shabby ladies" like a flock of gaudy parakeets uncaged into a grey wilderness. Earl Bruce Jackson (who plays Sportin' Life in the opera) had holes cut in his gloves so that all could see his rings, and he waved regally. He also kept brooding about the brown tails, with champagne satin lapels, that he hoped to wear for his planned Moscow wedding (to a cast member) and thus get into Leonard Lyons' column...
...selves on their second night in town when they staged Russia's first jam session at the staid Astoria Hotel. As one member of the cast put it: "The band was doing up Cherokee. It was strictly from the cob. Man, it was square! Lorenzo Fuller [an alternate Sportin' Life] decided to go scalp the piano. Ned Wright [Robbins] felt the spirit striving and took everybody to the sunny side of the street . . . One of the Russian cats got the spirit and did a buck and wing routine that flipped everybody's wig. Everything was copacabana, just...