Perhaps because he wanted to keep costs down, perhaps because, at the time, he did not have an eye on posterity, Goldwyn bought only a fifteen-year lease of the rights. After that, the film could not be shown without the permission of the authors or their estates; and if they granted permission, the estates would have to be handsomely compensated. In 1972, when his father’s lease expired, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. tried to obtain permission from the Gershwin and Heyward estates to rerelease the film and was turned down. Shamefully, the Gershwin estate over the years has continued to veto requests to make the film available again. Surely, whatever their objections, the estate has a moral responsibility to ensure that viewers have the opportunity to come to their own conclusions about this still contested work. As Donald Bogle noted,
There has been a curiosity among blacks to see a film that, through its absence, has now acquired a legendary status. But you have to let the black community know it is seeing a 1959 film and that the images are dated. You can’t dismiss the concerns of black audiences, you can’t tell a black audience, “Don’t be upset.” But you can ask, what else can we see here? The black audience does not want to see a “hero” like Porgy, but of course they would respond to the music, even if they could not fully involve themselves in the story. If they see it in a great print, the black audience might well appreciate the film in terms of its visuals and performances. But blacks, like everyone else, haven’t had the opportunity to see it in decades.57
Both Rouben Mamoulian and Otto Preminger wanted to turn Heyward and Gershwin’s folk opera into a realistic film about a Southern black ghetto, but were forcibly prevented from doing so by Samuel Goldwyn. The directors were wrong and the producer they regarded as a simpleton was right. In his original novel, as well as his play and opera, DuBose Heyward’s express intention was to present a highly stylized evocation of Negro life. With its rolling cadences in both dialogue and descriptive passages, Heyward’s novel indeed “sings,” precisely the quality that had attracted George Gershwin, who shaped his musical idioms to cues he received from the novelist. The literal approach that first Mamoulian and then Preminger wished to pursue would have disfigured the material, destroying its lyricism and only emphasizing its racial stereotyping. Catfish Row is a separate realm, a “dream” of a black ghetto of the past not to be confused with the real world of 1912, the period in which the novel takes place, nor with the realities of black life at the time of the film’s release. Appropriately, therefore, Oliver Smith’s not quite realistic settings and cinematographer Leon Shamroy’s painterly use of color and light underscore the fact that Catfish Row is a place for musical expression rather than a site for social protest or grievance. (Shamroy was nominated for an Academy Award.) When the characters slide from speaking to singing there isn’t the rupture there would have been if the story had been set in a realistic environment, a ghetto rendered with documentarylike authenticity.
Preminger, to be sure, had initially resisted Goldwyn’s aim of confining the action to a studio-built Catfish Row. But once he had won the right to shoot the opening scene (“Summertime,” exquisitely rendered in yellow tones) and the picnic scene on location, he played by Goldwyn’s rules, designing Porgy and Bess as exactly the kind of stately pageant the producer wanted. Preminger’s measured staging—his preference for long takes and camera movement over editing—enfolds Gershwin’s music in ceremonial elegance. And the director’s style, dignified and clean, complements the decision of the actors to speak well.
To viewers who demand visual realism, the film’s limbolike world may look theatrical, but Preminger’s approach is decidedly not filmed theater. His group shots and deep-focus compositions fused to the horizontal dimension of the Todd-AO wide screen, Preminger in supple and unobtrusive ways employs the language of film to enhance the language of music. (A nice touch that reveals the filmmaker’s understanding of the role of music in the life of Catfish Row is its complete absence, including underscoring, on the few occasions when white outsiders invade the ghetto. In Catfish Row white men don’t, and can’t, sing.) Throughout, as in Carmen Jones, Preminger stages songs not to stop the show but to underline their narrative relevance. His direction of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” for instance, supports the dramatic reason for the number, which expresses the title characters’ growing feelings for each other. At the beginning of the song, through intercutting Porgy and Bess occupy their own separate frames; but as their soaring voices celebrate their love, Preminger shoots them within the same frame. As if out of respect for their swelling emotion, the camera, in mid-shot range, remains stationary while, seen in deep focus through the open window of Porgy’s cottage, Catfish Row residents pass by. Preminger’s mise-en-scène draws contrasts within the same visual field between the private, intimate space of the new lovers and the public world outside.
Private as opposed to public space is again meaningfully counterpointed in Preminger’s staging of a lament, “My Man’s Gone Now,” sung by Serena after Crown has killed her husband in a crap game. Placed in deep focus, mourners in stylized postures turn away from the widow, as if to allow her privacy in her time of sorrow. Yet the fact that the mourners occupy the same frame as Serena reinforces the motif sustained throughout of Catfish Row as a close-knit community that protects itself against outsiders like Crown and Sportin’ Life as well as white folks who don’t belong there.
To offset what is ideologically if not musically the show’s most problematic number, Porgy’s anthem, “I Got Plenty o’ Nothin,” in which a black cripple celebrates his joy in not-having, Preminger begins the song with Porgy framed in his window—the character is on display “performing” a song. Once he has to some extent protected the song by setting it in a frame within the frame, Preminger then pays tribute to the rhythm and melody of the number by expanding the space in which it is performed. He moves Porgy from the shadowed interior of his cottage to the open square outside, bathed in a golden early morning light. His handling of space in Porgy’s aria, “Where’s My Bess?” is also resonant. Preminger places Porgy on the bottom right of the frame, at the opposite side of the vast wide screen from his neighbors. The empty space between the isolated cripple and the ensemble seems to augur the loss that is to engulf the character when he discovers that Bess has left him.
Throughout, the camera responds to the needs of the music. In a beautifully
Porgy (Sidney Poitier) and Bess (Dorothy Dandridge) isolated in a deep-focus, wide-angle shot on the vast Catfish Row set designed by Oliver Smith.
choreographed long take, the camera stays on a woman selling strawberries as she makes a circle around the Catfish Row set while singing a glorious melodic fragment. As she exits a hawker of she-crabs enters, promoting his wares in another melodious outburst as the camera follows his movement. Preminger’s unifying long take provides a visual counterpoint to the way the two song fragments flow together. The camera sweeps alongside the citizens of Catfish Row, dressed up for a picnic, as they sing “I Can’t Sit Down.” Freer and more mobile than any previous camera movement, the lateral tracking shot here underscores the characters’ excitement about an excursion to the outside world. (Preminger’s insistence on filming the picnic sequence on location makes thematic sense—the picnic is an outing, an escape from the ghetto.) The camera is also released during “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” the subversive sermon that Sportin’ Life performs during the picnic. High-angle moving shots and a swooping crane shot are cinematic salutes to the character’s swaggering, vaudevillian turn.
Preminger is strict. His film contains not a single close-up, even in moments such as a climactic fight to the death between Porgy and Crown where a variety of visual punctuation might be expected. The director departs from his austere regime in only a few places, as when he presents the fight that erupts during a crap game with a blast of cinema rhetoric. In an ominous low-angle shot, the silhouetted figures of the combatants, Crown and Robbins, strain against each other in the foreground as in deep focus the inhabitan
ts of Catfish Row open their shutters to observe the struggle. A vertiginous high-angle shot that italicizes the moment when Crown strikes Robbins a fatal blow is followed by an extreme long shot of the observers closing their shutters in unison. In passages in earlier films such as The Man with the Golden Arm and Saint Joan, Preminger’s reserve undermines tension, but not here: his unyielding procession of medium and long shots provides the right frame for a fable, an opera, taking place in a limbo world.
By the director’s design, cues for passion come not from the grammar of filmmaking but from the performers. And in this “expurgated” Porgy and Bess, star iconography is crucial, a way of binding the audience to the characters. Protecting the image he had been building throughout the 1950s, Poitier plays Porgy with an ineffable dignity. We never see the character begging, and far from being illiterate or primitive, Poitier’s beautifully spoken character is unmistakably intelligent. In a hotter version the actor’s containment—Porgy is a character, after all, nearly driven mad by his feelings for Bess—might have been damaging. But Poitier’s restraint matches the cool elegance of Preminger’s direction. Nonetheless, the actor apparently has “not yet completely forgiven [himself for having taken on the role].”58
Dorothy Dandridge’s Bess is also a victory of star acting. She may be less Heyward’s original hard-living, hard-luck, good-time gal, “a whore in a two-dollar dress,” than she is “Dorothy Dandridge,” a woman of regal carriage. Still, the actress vividly suggests her character’s contradictory nature, the painful split between Bess’s love for Porgy and her lust for Crown. Without the aid of a single close-up, Dandridge conveys a sense of Bess’s tortured inner self, the strain of a life addicted to sex and drugs. Typical of the challenges Preminger handed her is the way she must react, in an uncut long shot, to Sportin’ Life’s temptation song, “There’s a Boat That’s Soon Leaving for New York.” In the course of the song, as Sportin’ Life tries to bend Bess to his will, Dandridge manages to delineate her character’s gradual shift from resistance—she stiffens when the tempter first slinks toward her—to capitulation.
Both professionally and personally, Dandridge’s courageous and undervalued performance was the end of the line. At the New York premiere, accompanied by her new husband Jack Dennison, a white Las Vegas restaurateur and huckster whose financial misdealing was to lead her to bankruptcy, she looked wan, played out. Missing was the sparkle she had had at the opening of Carmen Jones only five years earlier. Then, radiant with possibility, she might have believed she could win against the odds to become
Crown (Brock Peters) in a scene from Porgy and Bess.
America’s first black leading lady. But the disappointments in the intervening years had made her confront the reality that despite her beauty and her talent she would be unlikely to break the color barrier. After Porgy and Bess she would have nothing but defeats: starring roles in a few poverty row productions and nightclub bookings at ever less prestigious hotels. At her professional nadir, she would be the lounge act in a Las Vegas hotel where Nancy Wilson was the showroom headliner. On September 9, 1965, Dorothy Dandridge committed suicide.
In the Broadway-style roles scored for nonoperatic singers, Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis Jr. also project strong star personas. Bailey may have been a nuisance on the set, heartily disliked by most of the company, but as Maria, a character who embodies the communal spirit that draws together the citizens of the ghetto against troublemaking outsiders, she suffuses the film with a warm, droll, earthy presence. Sammy Davis Jr. plays Sportin’ Life, drug dealer and cynic, in perhaps the only way he could, as a hoofer determined to wow the audience. Dressed in skintight pants, he glides in and out of scenes with slithering dancelike movements. As a tempter he’s reptilian rather than charming, but his Las Vegas–style showmanship is electric. He attacks with ebullience Sportin’ Life’s two great pop numbers, “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “There’s a Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York,” potent reminders of Gershwin’s roots in Broadway razzmatazz. Brock Peters, who didn’t have a star presence to project, enacts Crown as a figure of primal force. In Preminger’s mise-en-scène the character is linked to the dark forest into which he drags Bess and the thunderstorm from which he emerges to create havoc in Catfish Row.
André Previn’s orchestrations pay tribute to George Gershwin’s dual allegiances to “high” and “low,” elitist and popular, musical idioms, and the singing throughout (Poitier is dubbed by Robert McFerrin, Dandridge by Adele Addison) has an emotional vibrancy that plays productively against Preminger’s formal approach. Considering its era, and the circumstances under which it was produced, neither musically nor dramatically is the film a definitive version of the folk opera. It is unlikely, however, that any single production of this deeply problematic piece can ever claim the final word. Black viewers and aficionados of opera and of musical theater will almost inevitably find elements of any interpretation to be objectionable or only partially realized. The Goldwyn-Preminger Porgy and Bess is nonetheless one of the most misunderstood, underrated, and unfairly treated works in the history of American film. It deserves, indeed demands, to be seen again in its original road-show version. Made near the end of the studio era, Porgy and Bessis a lustrous “studio” film of a kind we are not likely to see again. “It is a work of great historical value,” Brock Peters said. “It represented a special assemblage of talent, and students of film are unfairly being deprived of seeing it. It is a work of art and I am proud to have been a part of it.”59
Working for hire and juggling the concerns of Goldwyn, Ira and Lee Gershwin, and his racially sensitive cast, Preminger placed his own signature on the final product. First to last, Porgy and Bess is an Otto Preminger film, one of his most commanding performances and an overlooked American masterpiece.
ELEVEN
On Trial
“I knew Otto was having a lot of problems on the set of Porgy and Bess,” Wendell Mayes said,
but when he would meet me nearly every night to discuss the work I had done that day [on the script of Anatomy of a Murder] he would be completely focused, and completely calm. When he was with me, the difficulties with Porgy were forgotten, and the only thing in the world that mattered was our script. Off the set, Otto was not into his act, and remember, Otto was an actor first, an actor second, an actor third, and fourth and fifth, and remained so all his life. He was a man of rather astonishing contradictions and despite the fact that he was an enormously sophisticated European gentleman he was not a cynic, as you might expect—in my experience, the Europeans of Otto’s nature and status in life were cynical. Not Otto, who had the optimism of a child. He believed that everything was going to go right.
Mayes observed that Preminger responded to the script as a director rather than a writer. “The only thing Otto ever had to say as we went through the script was, ‘Wendell, I don’t know how to shoot this scene,’ and then he would explain to me why he didn’t know how to shoot it. And I would make the necessary changes. He was very considerate, and never changed a word, or even a comma, without my consent.”1 Mayes finished the script in mid-December at almost the same time Preminger completed shooting Porgy and Bess.
In January 1959, with his art director Boris Leven, Otto made a second scouting expedition to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that confirmed his earlier resolve to shoot the entire film, including all the interiors, on location in the actual settings where the murder and subsequent trial had taken place. Leven backed him up, remarking that “the peculiar provincial individuality of the area could not be recreated on a studio set.” “It’s not only the look of the place that I want to get on the screen,” Preminger said. “I want the actors to feel it, to absorb a sense of what it’s like to live here—to smell it. This is a story that requires reality. I’m going to bring the whole cast and crew up here and install them in Ishpeming [Michigan]. We’ll live through it together and that will help to make the film more ‘real’ than any single thing I could do.”2
&
nbsp; Returning from Michigan, Otto scheduled a March 23 starting date and then, commuting regularly between his New York office on West Fifty-fifth Street and his office at Columbia in Hollywood, he began to assemble his cast. For Paul Biegler, the lawyer who takes on the job of defending Frederick Manion, a second lieutenant accused of killing a bartender who had allegedly raped Manion’s wife, Preminger wanted, and got, James Stewart. For Laura Manion, the officer’s seductive wife, who may or may not have been raped, Preminger, impressed by her performance in the recent film A Face in the Crowd, sought newcomer Lee Remick. When he interviewed her, the actress was in the eighth month of a pregnancy; but since she would have given birth by the time shooting was to begin, Preminger handed her a script and led her to believe he would cast her in the role. However, before she had finished the script he called to tell her he had signed Lana Turner and asked if she would be interested in playing a supporting role. “I did a very brave thing, or perhaps a foolish thing,” Lee Remick recalled. “I said, ‘No, thank you, I really would not.’ ”3 Hope Bryce, hired as costume coordinator, began to have a problem with Lana Turner.
Otto told me he wanted everything in the film to be realistic, and so I suggested to Lana, who would be playing a character who lives in a trailer park, that she should wear slacks, capri pants, or Western pants. I made an appointment for us to have a fitting at a Western shop on Rodeo Drive. At the time she was only two blocks away, and yet she didn’t show up. This happened twice. Lana’s agent, Paul Kohner, informed us that she wanted her clothes made by Jean Louis, who usually designed her wardrobe. But you can’t custom-make junky clothes. When Otto went with her to Westmore about wigs, she exasperated him. “This woman is going to drive me crazy,” he told me. He began to think that Lana wasn’t right for the part, that maybe she was really too old for the part.4
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