Cinema: The New Pictures, Jul. 6, 1959

Porgy and Bess (Samuel Goldwyn; Columbia). The sound stage burned down. The leading man almost quit. The original director was fired. But Producer Sam Goldwyn kept plugging away at his long-awaited, much-ballyhooed screen version of George Gershwin’s durable Broadway musical. By the time the show was in the can, it had cost more than $7,000,000 to produce—and it may cost almost as much again to promote and distribute. If Sam’s past performance (The Best Years of Our Lives, Guys and Dolls) is anything to go by, he will probably get his money back. But the customers will scarcely get their money’s worth.

Porgy and Bess is only a moderate and intermittent success as a musical show; as an attempt to produce a great work of cinematic art, it is a sometimes ponderous failure. The fault is not entirely Producer Goldwyn’s. The original Broadway musical (‘TIME, Oct. 21, 1935), a good try at the great American folk opera, is troubled with an awkward, ill-paced plot—the last act falls flat because all the best tunes are used up in the early part of the show. The libretto, by Charleston-born Novelist DuBose Heyward, is full of the sort of amiable condescension toward the “darkies” that used to pass for progressiveness in the South. What really matters in the show is George Gershwin’s music; some of it, particularly the recitative, is banal, but half a dozen tunes are as good as any Gershwin wrote, and Summertime will still be sung and loved a hundred years from now.

On the stage the show has an intimate, itch-and-scratch-it folksiness that makes even the dull spots endearing. 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 worst thing about Goldwyn’s Porgy, though, is its cinematic monotony. The film is not so much a motion picture as a photographed opera. Just to make sure the customers get the point, Vienna-born Director Otto Preminger has directed most of it as though it were a Bayreuth production of Gōtterdāmmerung, Choruses march and countermarch; actors lumber woodenly about the stage, obviously counting their steps, and then suddenly take up a stance and break into song. And for some strange, wrong reason —perhaps to give the show an elevated, operatic tone—the actors speak in precise, cultivated accents that are miles away from the Negro slums of South Carolina. For that matter, Sidney Poitier’s Porgy is not the dirty, ragtag beggar of the Heyward script, but a well-scrubbed young romantic hero who is never seen taking a penny from anybody. And Dorothy Dandridge, who emphasizes the elegance of her bones more than the sins of the flesh, makes something of a nice Nellie out of bad Bess.

Still, there are some good things about the show. Sammy Davis Jr., looking like an absurd Harlemization of Chico Marx, makes a wonderfully silly stinker out of Sportin’ Life. The singing is generally good—particularly the comic bits by Pearl Bailey and the ballads by Adele Addison, who sings the role of Bess while Dorothy Dandridge acts it. And the color photography gains a remarkable lushness through the use of filters, though in time —2 hr. 36 min., including an intermission —the spectator may get tired of the sensation that he is watching the picture through amber-colored sunglasses.

The Nun’s Story (Fred Zinnemann; Warner), inspired by Kathryn Hulme’s bestselling novel, is one of Hollywood’s rare attempts to make a serious study of the religious life.

From her first day in the convent, Sister Luke (Audrey Hepburn) finds it harder than her sisters do to give up the natural for the spiritual life. Of her three vows—poverty, chastity, obedience—she can keep two without much difficulty, but the third is her undoing. She cannot manage to keep the silence that is required of all novices; she cannot bear to stop whatever she is doing when the bell of command is rung; she cannot persuade her thoughts from memories and objects, “the vanity of this world.” Her nature rebels because her will insists on nothing less than saintly perfection; she cannot accept her human imperfection. She makes her sacrifice not with love but with pride, not for God’s sake but for her own.

After she has studied at the School of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, her superiors send her to the Belgian Congo as a nurse, where she is assigned to work with a character called Dr. Fortunati (Peter Finch), who is described with Gothic horror as “a genius and a devil” but turns out to look like nothing worse than Alan Ladd with eyebrows. “Don’t ever think for an instant,” Sister Luke is warned, “that your habit will protect you.” After teasing this tedious notion about for the better part of an hour, the script clumsily returns to its proper theme: love of God v. love of mankind.

Visually, The Nun’s Story is almost dazingly beautiful. The colors are rich and sensuous, the light innocent and cool; and when light and color play together on the medieval stones of Bruges or Brussels, the screen glows like an awakened frame of old Vermeer. Dramatically, the film has been admirably conceived and impressively executed. Religiously, it is rather shallow. There is merit in the picture’s painstaking effort to convey the physical reality of convent life, but somewhere the spiritual reality is lost. The radiant pageant of devotion ravishes the senses, but it does not touch the heart.

The failure is perhaps principally Director Zinnemann’s, but it is partly Actress Hepburn’s, too. The character she plays is a woman torn by powerful emotions, but, although a sensitive performer, the leading lady seems unable to express strong feelings of any kind. She is too cool; and so is the picture. She has the presence of the sprite, not the presence of the spirit. Calm and exquisite in her habit, she looks most of the time like nothing more troubled or troubling than (if such a thing were possible) a recruiting poster for a convent.