Porgy and Bess

“The Goldwyn Touch!...more dramatic than ever before!”

In the early 1900s, Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina, is home to a Black fishing community. Porgy (Sidney Poitier), a crippled beggar who gets around in a goat-drawn cart, loves Bess (Dorothy Dandridge), who is addicted to drugs and lives with the neighborhood bully, Crown (Brock Peters). Otto Preminger adapts the Gershwin opera, turning its sung recitatives into spoken dialogue and keeping the songs.