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(More customer reviews)I believe Porgy and Bess was the first movie I ever saw, when I was about three years old, in a movie theater in the Queensbridge Projects, Long Island City, NY. (My second movie was West Side Story.) Porgy and Bess has only appeared a couple of times on TV, and a few times in special screenings. The last screening was probably the year 2000 at either Brooklyn College or the Long Island University campus in Brooklyn, which had a panel discussion afterward over the film's supposed racism and other issues.
I'm not often one to knock political correctness, but please, knock your PC fears aside and release this movie! It's inspiring, fun, glorious, exciting, etc., etc., with wonderful performances by Dorothy Dandridge (Bess), Sammy Davis, Jr. (who dances up a storm as Sportin' Life), Pearl Bailey (Maria), and Brock Peters (outstanding as Crown). I've only thought this recently: Sidney Poitier, although he does an admirable job, is miscast as Porgy. Porgy is a good soul, but Poitier is too refined for an uneducated street beggar; Poitier's Porgy, I imagine, went to college to study law and had a bad accident which devastated his life. Too bad Brock Peters couldn't play two roles at once.
The movie even has a scene, which I think is in the play Porgy but isn't in the opera, where Serena offers to take an orphaned baby given to Bess, and Bess refuses.
I love P&B's verve, spirituality, fun, and grand Gershwin music. I've seen the full operatic version on Broadway (by the Houston Grand Opera) in the 1970s and at the Metropolitan Opera House in the 1980s or 90s, as well as the truncated New York City Opera version in 2000. Now please do us Porgy and Bess fans a favor and release this movie on DVD, too! (I'd prefer it on VHS, but people aren't making those anymore, are they?)
BTW, I am an African-American woman with a love of musical theater and American opera.
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