Porgy, Dillinger, and the unbearable Bess

 

The Unbearable Lightnesss of Being (1988)

When waitress Tereza (Juliette Bincohe) moves in with her lover, brain surgeon Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis), she’s confused by his Bohemian lifestyle.

When Sabina, one of Tomas’s other lovers, gets Tereza a job as a photographer, she inadvertently photographs Soviet tanks invading Czechoslovakia, and, realizing their importance, smuggles them to the west.

Sabina, Tomas, and Tereza flee to Switzerland where Sabina has an affair with a married professor, but when he abandons his family, she ends the relationship. Homesick Tereza returns to Czechoslovakia and Tomas soon follows.

I’m a fan of Daniel Day-Lewis, but this fell flat. I’m unclear if the film was arguing commitment and monogamy are antiquated notions or trying to affirm their importance. It casts Tomas’s various sexual escapades as protest against communist oppression, only to later reinterpret them as selfishness. Desperately trying to say something profound, it says nothing.

 

 

Porgy and Bess (1959)

Drug addict Crown kills a man and flees Catfish Row, a small fishing community in South Carolina. Desperate for a place to stay, his girlfriend, Bess (Dorothy Dandridge) movies in with crippled beggar Porgy (Sidney Poitier). They live an idyllic domestic life until Crown returns and rapes Bess when she refuses his advances.

Porgy kills Crown in retaliation, and while he’s being questioned by the police, drug dealer Sportin’ Life (Sammy Davis Jr.) convinces Bess to leave with him. The film ends with a despondent Porgy pledging to find and bring her back.

On the strength of his performance in this film, Poitier exploded into super-stardom in the 1960s, becoming the most critically acclaimed black actor of the era.

Dorothy Dandridge was the first black woman to receive an Academy Award for Best Actress. Poised to become a huge star, she let others, including her lover director Otto Preminger, derail her career and died in 1965 at the age of 42.

Samuel Goldwyn’s effort to bring this musical to the screen would make a fascinating film. He badgered the Gershwin estate for years before they consented to the film. After shooting had started, he fired the first director, Rouben Mamolian, who had directed the original, commercially unsuccessful Broadway production. The film’s second director, Otto Preminger had a prior relationship with Dorothy Dandridge, contributing to on-set tension. The Gershwins were opposed to casting Sammy Davis Jr., but pressure from Davis’s friends, including Frank Sinatra, forced Goldwyn to include him. A fire during production ruined many of the sets and caused a massive delay. Many of the eras leading African-American actors were unwilling to star in a film they felt perpetuated stereotypes. Sadly, the film’s financial failure effectively ended Goldwyn’s career.

By adapting the tropes of Italian opera, Gershwin makes the black experience in the United States universal, and by fusing classical musical concepts with jazz, he brought new respect to the burgeoning American art form.

Unfortunately, this important piece of American film, musical, and racial history is rarely seen because of lingering disagreements with the Gershwin estate.

 

 

Dillinger (1945)

Following his arrest for robbery, John Dillinger (Lawrence Tierney) befriends several hardened criminals in prison and joins their gang after his release. His insatiable ego leads him to take control of the group and eventually become public enemy no. 1. Eventually, he’s killed by police coming out of a Chicago movie theater.

This is a decent movie about one of America’s most famous and mythologized mobsters, but by the mid 1940s, America’s fascination with gangsters was waning, and Tierney doesn’t have the charisma of James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson, who made us identify and root for the bad guy. This lack of emotional investment makes this film bland and forgettable. Dillinger’s notoriety deserves a better movie.

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