Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

Ostensibly, the film was not withdrawn for its controversial depictions of African Americans but for artistic reasons. It was withdrawn, they said in effect, because the surviving Gershwins did not want a Broadway version of Porgy and Bess to represent George and Ira’s opera in a film. Michael Strunsky, the nephew of Ira and his wife Leonore and their executor after the latter’s death in 1991, summarized Leonore’s strong position on the subject: “My aunt didn’t want it distributed. She and my uncle felt it was a Hollywoodization of the piece. We now acquire any prints we find and destroy them.”21 It is also clear that Ira’s wife Leonore, who lived to see Porgy and Bess produced on the prestigious stages of the Metropolitan and Glyndebourne, did not want a filmed stage version to represent the work and for this reason did not even approve a filmed operatic Porgy and Bess until nearly a decade after Ira’s death in 1983. This was the television studio production directed by Trevor Nunn (not a videotaped live performance in front of an audience) that eventually appeared in 1993 and will be discussed shortly, nearly sixty years after the opera’s Broadway debut.

Certainly, the Goldwyn-Preminger film poorly represents the work when compared with the operatic form intended by Gershwin. This may be reason alone for lovers of the opera to avoid the film. But the change of approach from an operatic to a more conventional Broadway musical conception of the work does not result in a film that is disrespectful of the work or a failure on its own Broadway-Hollywood terms. Much of the recitative and large stretches of the choral numbers have vanished, and Robbins and Crown fight in silence. But nearly all of the many songs are present and often complete. If one can believe the timings offered by A. Scott Berg or Howard Pollack, the film actually runs longer than the version Broadway audiences saw in 1935 (after the 40 minutes of cuts).22 It might be constructive to compare the Preminger Porgy and Bess with the Franco Zeffirelli Otello (1986), which reduced Verdi’s opera to 123 minutes (including long stretches of elaborate montages with neither music nor dialogue). Marcia Citron offers a list of what is absent from this adaptation, including the seemingly indispensable “Willow Song.”23 Compared to Zeffirelli, Preminger is a purist.

Preminger’s accomplishment was to reveal the opera’s vital Broadway roots, and to reveal them in an idiomatic cinematic form. One fascinating byproduct of the non-operatic approach becomes evident in the decisions of what besides the songs needed to be sung. Although Gershwin offers many degrees and varieties of nuance in his recitatives, Preminger’s decision to replace most of the recitatives with spoken dialogues allows the ones that remain to become increasingly meaningful, especially since most of these are given to central characters at strategic moments in the work. One telling example is the expressive passage that begins with “They pass by singin,’” in which Porgy incorporates his own signature theme as well as his loneliness to explain why he is resigned to life without a woman. Another occurs a little later in the opening scene during Porgy’s musical foreshadowing of “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” as he rolls the dice. Still another place where impassioned recitative takes over speech occurs during Bess’s confrontation with Crown on Kittiwah Island in act II, scene 2 (“It’s like dis, Crown”). As the film progresses, the use of recitative at other lyrical musical moments when dialogue can no longer suffice creates an aura around these moments that is less evident when everything is sung. One might miss the addition of Serena and Maria that converts Porgy’s great third act aria, “Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess,” into a magnificent operatic trio in the stage version, but the direct, uncluttered, and obsessive quality of his solo plea in the film has an effect that is admittedly slightly reduced in an ensemble.

The filming was interrupted by a devastating fire that destroyed two million dollars worth of sets and costumes and nearly brought production to a permanent halt. One of the casualties of the fire was Mamoulian as director, who was fired after he continued to insist on using actual settings in Charleston, South Carolina, and expressed other ideas that were at odds with Goldwyn’s vision of the film. In the end, only the Kittiwah scene was filmed on location. His employment terminated, Mamoulian was nonetheless paid in full for his work, which did stop him from taking legal action. Mamoulian’s firing marked the end of a brilliant career that included his direction of Love Me Tonight, Golden Boy, Oklahoma!, and Carousel as well as both the play and opera based on the story of Porgy and Bess.

Although allegedly none of the surviving footage was shot by Mamoulian, one fascinating likely remnant occurs in the part of the film that corresponds to the final scene of the opera (the part of the scene that occurs prior to Porgy’s return from prison where he was jailed for a week because of his refusal to look directly at Crown’s dead body). The published vocal score contains most of the material that was cut during the tryouts, an unusual situation that has greatly contributed to the resistance by music directors to cuts in the opera. One part missing from this score, a rhythmic sequence added by Mamoulian, opened the final scene onstage in 1935. A description of the sequence appears in a production script now housed in the New York Public Library. The concert performance under conductor John Mauceri that was performed by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in 2006 not only followed Gershwin’s cuts but restored this sequence. The 1959 film offers something similar at the beginning of the scene before the chorus enters with “How are you dis mornin’”?24

The film, long unavailable in theaters or on video, made a rare guest appearance in 1998, on the occasion of a Gershwin Centennial Festival sponsored by the Institute