Viewing ‘Porgy and Bess’ is a rare opportunity

In commemoration of the centenary of actor-director-producer Otto Preminger (“Laura,” “The Man With the Golden Arm”), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting Saturday the only existing 35mm Technicolor road-show print of Preminger’s 1959 film, “Porgy and Bess.”

Out of circulation for nearly four decades, “Porgy and Bess” aired once on ABC in the late 1960s and has never been given an official VHS or DVD release.

Based on George Gershwin and DuBose Hayward’s seminal 1935 folk opera -- songs include the standards “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” -- “Porgy and Bess” was the last film produced by the legendary Samuel Goldwyn and features some of cinema’s greatest African American actors, including Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., Brock Peters, Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll.

Film historian and filmmaker Ken Kramer is supplying the rare print, which he compiled from three separate acquisitions. “It has only been run three times in the last five years,” Kramer says.

Nominated for four Oscars -- it won for best score -- “Porgy and Bess” is set in 1912 in Catfish Row, an African American fishing community in Charleston, S.C. Dandridge plays Bess, a woman of a shady repute who attempts to leave her lover (Peters) after he is wanted for murder. Poitier’s Porgy is a poor but honorable beggar who offers Bess refuge.

The production was beset with numerous problems, including a fire that destroyed sets, costumes and sketches. Rouben Mamoulian, who directed the original stage production, was initially set to helm the film but was replaced by Preminger after disagreements arose with Goldwyn.

The Gershwin family never liked the film because they felt it was too “Hollywood.” In a 1993 interview with The Times, Michael Strunksy, trustee and executor of Ira Gershwin’s estate, raised eyebrows and the ire of film historians and preservationists when he stated “we [the estate] now acquire any prints we find and destroy them.”

It was later discovered that a negative of “Porgy and Bess” still existed in the Goldwyn vault. And maybe feelings have changed, because both the George Gershwin Family Trust and the Ira and Lenore Gershwin Trusts, along with the Samuel Goldwyn Company, gave permission for the LACMA screening.

-- Susan King