BEFORE: Another Rat Pack-based film tonight - for some reason I thought today was the 5-year anniversary of Jerry Lewis' death, and considering that he's the subject of tomorrow's film, I was bummed that I wasn't reviewing THAT film today. BUT, I just double-checked and he died on August 20, 2017 - so I would have been off by a month. No harm, no foul. Somehow I doubled up my movies last week and I still didn't end up where I thought I needed to be - but it's all good, and Sammy Davis Jr. carries over from "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road".
Perhaps this is a sign that I should slow down a bit, we're here in the Dog Days of Summer, and it's much too hot to work so hard. Now that I know I have a path to the end of the year, I can relax a bit, there's no need to rush. Let's see, 30 days has September, the others have 31, so it turns out there are 72 days until October 1, and I've got just 46 films to watch in those 72 days, so I either need to take three weeks off in September, or I need to cut back to 5 films a week, instead of 7. Sure, I'm anxious to finish the Summer Rock & Doc Block, but let's get real, I don't want to have a big break later on, I'll go a bit nuts. So maybe tomorrow I'll take the day off and watch those last 2 episodes of "Moon Knight", then maybe a movie, then I'll watch some of the new "Stranger Things" episodes - you know, find a way to balance this all out. I think if I split up the rest of the documentaries into shorter "theme weeks" I can spread the chain out longer.
THE PLOT: A star-studded roster of interviewees pays tribute to the legendary, multi-talented song-and-dance man.
AFTER: Wow, there was so much about Sammy Davis Jr. that I didn't know, and this documentary filled me in. This is how it should be done, Mr. Entertainment here got better treatment than Sinatra did last night with that hack job "One More for the Road". Now I'm really wishing that I watched that longer, probably better Alex Gibney doc about Frankie. Oh, well, let's focus on Sammy, a man who earned 3/4 of the EGOT title (no Oscar, and one might argue that the Emmy was won by the program "Sammy Davis Jr.'s 60th Anniversary Celebration", not the man, but I'm willing to let that slide.)
Sammy Davis Jr. was born in Harlem in 1925, the son of entertainer Sammy Davis Sr. (duh) and tap dancer Elvera Sanchez, who Sammy always claimed was Puerto Rican, but she was actually the daughter of Cuban immigrants, and he feared anti-Cuban backlash. I guess that's worse somehow than Puerto-Rican backlash or African-American backlash (black-lash? Sorry.). His parents separated when Sammy was three, so his father took him out on tour because he was afraid of losing custody, and as a result Sammy never got a formal education, and even as an adult he said he read at a fourth-grade level.
But he joined the Will Mastin Trio as a child, and the trio was him, his father and his "uncle", or godfather, Will Mastin. Since they worked the black entertainment venues (aka the "chitlin circuit"), he didn't really encounter racism until he was drafted into the Army in 1944, and was part of the first integrated army batallion, and was frequently abused by white soldiers from the South. He got into so many fights that his nose was broken many times, and permanently flattened. Let that sink in a bit - his fellow soldiers chose to beat up someone ON THEIR SIDE rather than channel all that aggression and hate toward the enemy. Sammy realized he couldn't punch racism away, but got reassigned to the Army's Special Services branch, which held performances for troops. There he earned two medals and a discharge in 1945.
Sammy rejoined the family act, and started doing his impressions of Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, plus singing, dancing, playing instruments, you name it. His father and "uncle" didn't approve of him doing impressions of white movie stars, but the crowd seemed to enjoy them. Davis gained some attention, and his career was helped by former movie star Eddie Cantor, who sang his praises on his TV variety show. Then here's where we link up with the other docs from this week, in 1959 Sammy joined the Rat Pack, with Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford, and they all performed together in Las Vegas, plus they made the movies "Ocean's 11" and "Robin and the 7 Hoods". Sammy could perform at the casinos, but due to Jim Crow laws, he couldn't spend the night there. Black people, even famous ones, had to stay in rooming houses west of the city, and not on the Strip. Sammy couldn't dine in the hotel restaurants, or gamble in the casinos, and if he swam in the pool, someone would often demand that the pool be drained afterwards, which is just ridiculous.
Still, Davis managed to break through some race-based barriers - he was part of the first inter-racial kiss/love scene on stage, also one of the first inter-racial kisses on TV (with Nancy Sinatra on a variety special) and then there was the 1973 kiss on the cheek of Archie Bunker on "All in the Family". Does it seem like Sammy Davis liked kissing people? But it was a hug that got him in some trouble, when he hugged Nixon on stage during the 1972 campaign. (Previously the Rat Pack had supported JFK's campaign in 1960, and look what that led to...). At JFK's inauguration Sammy Davis got un-invited, because of his marriage to a white woman, May Britt, so some Rat Pack members boycotted the Washington gala as a result.
Back to Nixon, once he hugged him on stage the black community felt betrayed, and Davis had to formally apologize on stage. Once again, Sammy was caught in the middle - at one point hated by the African-American community for supporting Nixon, and hated by the white community because, well, you know. And people of both races didn't approve of his marriage to a white woman, remember that anti-mixed marriage laws weren't ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court until 1967. Sammy's marriage (which was actually his second, he'd paid a black woman to marry him in 1958 so he could avoid mob violence, that marriage didn't last long) ended in 1968, the doc doesn't mention it here, but Sammy had an affair with Lola Falana, that probably didn't help. Nor does the documentary mention Sammy's third wife, Altovise Gore, who had been a dancer in his play "Golden Boy", and that marriage lasted 20 years, until he died in 1990.
His musical career started to decline in the late 1960's, but he still scored an almost-Top Ten hit with the song "I Gotta Be Me", and then an unexpected #1 hit with "The Candy Man", the theme from the original "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" movie in 1972. Even that came with controversy, because Sammy didn't care for the song, then later found out that some people thought it was about drugs, not candy, and that sent the wrong image. Meanwhile Sammy had gone from stage acting to making TV appearances on everything from "The Rifleman" to "I Dream of Jeannie" to "Charlie's Angels", where he played himself AND a Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator, how very meta.
The doc also covers the car accident in which Davis lost an eye, and how that time in the hospital led him to convert to Judaism, after Sammy realized that the African-American struggle was similar to that of the Jewish one over the last few hundred years. How he went to entertain the troops in Vietnam, after learning that many soldiers had become addicted to drugs, though I'm not sure how his performances there were designed to change that. Anyway, that led to Sammy and his third wife getting invited by Nixon to perform at the White House, and then The Davises were invited to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom, they became the first African-Americans to do that.
There's little point in dwelling on the illness that took him out (throat cancer, damn those cigarettes) so instead the doc focuses on the 60th Anniversary TV special in his honor, with an all-star cast that included Eddie Murphy, Michael Jackson, Diahann Carroll, Ella Fitzgerald and Sinatra paying tribute. They include the whole tap-dance routine with Davis and Gregory Hines, which is pure magic, and I don't even like tap-dancing. So I'm definitely going to be keeping one eye on the DVR listings for the PBS show "American Masters", they put out a quality project. I can't really tell if they produce their own movies, or just license other companies' documentaries about movie stars and musicians, but who cares? Even if this is a TV movie, that's still a movie. I just recorded their docs about Miles Davis ("Birth of the Cool"), Keith Haring ("Street Art Boy") and Buddy Guy ("The Blues Chase the Blues Away") and with luck, these films will be part of next year's Doc Block.
Also starring Burt Boyar, Todd Boyd, Leslie Bricusse, Diahann Carroll, Billy Crystal (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Whoopi Goldberg (ditto), Michael Dinwiddie, Gerald Early (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Will Friedwald (ditto), Norman Lear ditto), Jerry Lewis (ditto), George Schlatter (ditto), Margo Jefferson, Quincy Jones (last seen in "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road"), Jason King (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Buz Kohan, Baayork Lee, Kim Novak (last seen in "Pal Joey"), Emilie Raymond, Max Rudin, Donald Rumsfeld (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Arthur Silber Jr., Michele Simms-Burton, David Steinberg, Charles Strouse, Paula Wayne,
with archive footage of Louis Armstrong (also carrying over from "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road"), Tony Bennett (ditto), Joey Bishop (ditto), Peter Lawford (ditto), Dean Martin (ditto), Sidney Poitier (ditto), Elvis Presley (ditto), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Nancy Sinatra (ditto), Harry Belafonte (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Glen Campbell (ditto), Humphrey Bogart, Bill Boggs (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Angie Dickinson (ditto), Jacqueline Kennedy (ditto), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Martin Luther King (ditto), Joe E. Lewis (ditto), May Britt, Cab Calloway, Eddie Cantor, Nat "King" Cole, Bill Cosby (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Larry King (ditto), Walter Cronkite (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Queen Elizabeth (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), Duke Ellington, Stepin Fetchit, David Frost (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Arsenio Hall (ditto), Richard Pryor (ditto), Dinah Shore (ditto), Judy Garland (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Isaac Hayes, Gregory Hines (last seen in "The Automat"), Whitney Houston (last seen in "Dolly Parton: Here I Am"), Michael Jackson (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Eddie Murphy (ditto), David Letterman (last seen in "Jagged"), Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "The Last Word"), Rocky Marciano, Will Mastin, Marilyn Monroe (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Rob Reiner (ditto), Anthony Newley, Pat Nixon (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Carroll O'Connor (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Will Rogers, Isabel Sanford, Jean Stapleton (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Sally Struthers, Ethel Waters and the voice of Tony Curtis (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project")
RATING: 7 out of 10 "Laugh-In" skits as "The Judge"
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