Porgy and Bess is a 1959 American musical drama film directed by Otto Preminger, and starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge in the titular roles.
Due to its controversial subject matter, the film was shown only briefly following its initial reserved seat engagements in major cities, where it drew mixed reviews from critics.
[5] Set in the early 1900s in the fictional Catfish Row section of Charleston, South Carolina, which serves as home to a black fishing community, the story focuses on the title characters: crippled beggar Porgy, who travels about in a goat-drawn cart, and the drug-addicted Bess, who lives with stevedore Crown, the local bully.
He is detained by the police merely to identify the body, but Sportin' Life, who has fed Bess cocaine, convinces her Porgy inadvertently will reveal himself to be the murderer.
Otto Preminger was one of several producers, including Hal Wallis, Louis B. Mayer, Dore Schary, Anatole Litvak, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Harry Cohn, who had tried to secure the film rights without success.
Cohn even wanted to cast Fred Astaire, Al Jolson and Rita Hayworth, and have them perform in blackface, something to which the Gershwin estate vehemently opposed.
[10][11][12] When Langston Hughes, Goldwyn's first choice for screenwriter, proved to be unavailable, the producer approached Paul Osborn, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Sidney Kingsley, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Clifford Odets and Rod Serling, all of whom expressed varying degrees of interest, but cited prior commitments.
Only Las Vegas entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. expressed interest in appearing, and arranged to audition for a role during a party at Judy Garland's home.
When Poitier realized his refusal to star in Porgy might jeopardize his appearance in the Stanley Kramer film The Defiant Ones, he reconsidered and grudgingly accepted, assuring Goldwyn that he would "do the part to the best of my ability – under the circumstances.
"[13][17][18] Mezzo Muriel Smith, co-creator (double-cast with soprano Muriel Rahn) of the Broadway title role in Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones, and originator of the role of Bloody Mary in the original London cast of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, whose more important movie ghost-singing assignments included dubbing for Zsa Zsa Gabor in John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and for Juanita Hall in the film version of South Pacific (1958), turned down Goldwyn's offer to portray Bess, responding that the work "Doesn't do right by my people."
Leontyne Price, who had portrayed Bess in the 1952 European tour and the acclaimed 1953 Broadway revival, was invited to sing the role on film, but responded, "No body, no voice."
[20][21] Despite Goldwyn's intention that the music sound as much like the original opera as possible, he did allow Previn and his team to completely rescore and even change the underscoring heard during the fight scenes and at several other moments, as well as in the overture.
William Wyler was willing to step in if Goldwyn could postpone a few months, but the producer opted to replace Mamoulian with Otto Preminger, who had already started preparing both Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Exodus (1960), but was willing to set them aside for the opportunity to helm Porgy and Bess.
When Mamoulian changed tactics and attempted to raise charges of discrimination against Preminger, he lost the support he had managed to gather, and after three weeks, the matter was resolved in favor of Goldwyn.
He grudgingly agreed to allow the director to film the picnic sequence on Venice Island near Stockton, but for the most part, Preminger felt his creative instincts were stifled.
[28] Porgy and Bess opened on a reserved-seat basis at the Warner Theatre in New York City on June 24, 1959, and the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles on July 5.
[36] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote the "most haunting of American musical dramas has been transmitted on the screen in a way that does justice to its values and almost compensates for the long wait...N. Richard Nash has adapted and Otto Preminger has directed a script that fairly bursts with continuous melodrama and the pregnant pressure of human emotions at absolute peaks...Mr. Preminger, with close and taut direction, keeps you keyed up for disaster all the time.
Under André Previn's direction, the score is magnificently played and sung, with some of the most beautiful communication coming from the choral group...To be sure, there are some flaws in this production...But, for the most part, this is a stunning, exciting and moving film, packed with human emotions and cheerful and mournful melodies.
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 singing is generally good—particularly the comic bits by Pearl Bailey and the ballads by Adele Addison...And the color photography gains a remarkable lushness through the use of filters, though in time...the spectator may get tired of the sensation that he is watching the picture through amber-colored sunglasses.
"[38] James Baldwin gave a negative review in his essay "On Catfish Row": "Grandiose, foolish, and heavy with the stale perfume of self-congratulation, the Hollywood-Goldwyn-Preminger production of Porgy and Bess lumbered into the Warner theater...[T]he saddest and most infuriating thing about the Hollywood production of Porgy and Bess is that Mr. Otto Preminger has a great many gifted people in front of his camera and not the remotest notion of what to do with any of them...This event, like everything else in the movie, is so tastelessly overdone, so heavily telegraphed—rolling chords, dark sky, wind, ominous talk about hurricane bells, etc.—that there is really nothing left for the actors to do.
"[40] Porgy and Bess was seen on network television only once — Sunday night, March 5, 1967, on ABC-TV (during a week that additionally saw a rebroadcast of a TV adaptation of Brigadoon and the first telecast of Hal Holbrook's one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!).
[2] In 2007, the film saw a theatrical showing when, on September 26–27, the Ziegfeld Theatre in midtown-Manhattan presented it in its entirety, complete with overture, intermission and exit music, followed by a discussion with Preminger biographer Foster Hirsch.
[2][43] In 2011, Porgy and Bess was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.