Porgy and Bess (1959) Review

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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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Diary of a Country Priest: The Criterion Collection (1954) Review

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(More customer reviews)I have not yet seen Bresson's earliest film The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne. That film was based on a Denis Diderot novel and that is not surprising as the Bresson films I have seen all have a distinctive literary quality. Diary Of A Country Priest as well as A Man Esaped(based on a memoir) & Pickpocket(based on a Dostoyevsky story) are all stories narrated to us by the protaganist. Diary of A Country Priest may be the most literary of them all for this film focuses almost exclusively on the thought processes of the priest. He tells his own story as though it were a confession. Bresson was a devout Roman Catholic but you don't have to be religious to appreciate this film because the priest struggles not so much with his faith but with his place in society. The film is quiet and is centered in this priests lonely introspections. He struggles not with faith but with making contact with another human being. Strangely enough his beliefs make him an outcast even to the other priests as they are much more practical minded and see the church as providing a practical social function. The other priests may believe in God but they live in the world comfortably. The young priest though is not practical and his religious feelings make him unable to function on any practical level. He has faith and yet he makes many of the villagers uncomfrotable because he is not a friendly gregarious presence as some of the other preists are but a quiet solemn one. He is really incapable of living on the surface of life and so he is incapable of the friendly kind of chatter that wins friends so when he goes on his rounds from home to home his social awkwardness tends to make people feel a bit uncomfortable. However when one woman has a true crisis of faith he is there for her in a way that one can see that it is this kind of situation he was made for. One of the more interesting and lighter aspects of the story is a friendship that develops between the priest and a young village girl. The girl is a rebel and tells lies and is drawn toward anything but the contemplative kind of life the priest lives and yet the two get along very well. The two both feel isolated from others for different reasons but somehow they provide each other with an interesting kind of company.

I think A Man Escaped & Pickpocket though both also quiet films are probably each more accessible than this one. A Man Escaped is about a resistance fighter who plans an elaborate escape from a Nazi prison, so though quiet and intorospective in its way we know there will eventually be a climax when he makes his attempted escape. Pickpocket is also very introspective but its a study of a criminal mind with plenty of exciting thefts and it ends with promise that the criminal has found something worth living for and so will change his ways. Diary of A Country Priest is quiet all the way through. There is beauty in it but its an austere kind of beauty. This film compared to A Man Escaped & Pickpocket takes a lot more patience and has the least entertainment value but provides the deepest and richest experience. Its a one of a kind film for a very discerning kind of filmgoer. All of Bressons films are made with great care (he took 3-4 years to make each one) and this one any filmgoer will be able to see is the one he put the most care into.

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A young priest arrives in the French country village of Ambricourt toattend to his first parish, but the apathetic and hostile rural congregation rejects himimmediately. Through his diary entries, the suffering young man relays a crisis of faiththat threatens to drive him away from the village and from God. The fourth film byRobert Bresson (Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne) finds the director beginning toimplement his stylistic philosophy as a filmmaker, stripping away all inessential elementsfrom his compositions, the dialogue and the music, and exacting a purity of image andsound. The DVD also features an audio commentary by film historian Peter Cowie,deleted scenes and the trailer.

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