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Director Sam Pollard digs deep, offering film clips of Davis as a child performing in a movie alongside Ethel Waters in 1933. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SAMMY DAVIS JR.: I'VE GOTTA BE ME")īILLY CRYSTAL: Sammy is such a unique blend of talent and insecurity.ĭEGGANS: Crystal, who performed a famous impersonation of Davis on "Saturday Night Live," joins a slew of compelling voices in PBS' "American Masters" documentary "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me." A central theme of this poignant film - how Davis struggled to live on his own terms while coping with the realities of life as a black entertainer in a racist America. had it all - a master dancer, musician, actor and singer who hung with Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack and made a hit out of a soaring anthem for perseverance and individuality, "I've Gotta Be Me."ĭEGGANS: But as comic Billy Crystal notes in the film, there was self-doubt and pain behind his dazzling facade.
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NPR TV critic Eric Deggans has this review.ĮRIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: On the surface, Sammy Davis Jr.
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That's according to a new biography airing tonight as part of the "American Masters" series on PBS. GREENE: But that song about a song and dance man who fell on hard times also summed up Davis' worries about being left behind as a performer. And he could belt out pop hits like this. The Dino dichotomy - the tippler hipster, the lonely lone cat - is vibrant here, and makes the recent news that Martin Scorsese has postponed his planned feature film of Nick Tosches’ great Martin biography Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams even more disappointing.The artist Sammy Davis Jr.
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And there’s a terrific montage in which the camera travels in and out of the windows of the Sands Hotel, as we see, in turn, Sinatra, JFK, Davis, and Lawford engaged in sex with various women when the camera finally rests, it’s on Martin, alone in his room, looking at TV and sipping a glass of milk. Cohen includes quick but cutting scenes of Martin’s emotional remoteness from his wife and even himself.
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Martin, in fact, emerges as the true hero, in the sense that he’s the only guy who stands up to Sinatra’s bullying, who follows his own instincts and goes his own quietly tortured way. It’s telling that screenwriter Salem builds his best scenes not around Sinatra - who remains a potent yet unknowable enigma - but Martin and Davis. But the soul of the movie is in the Pack’s high jinks and complex camaraderie. This relationship - which flourishes as Sinatra uses his Mob influence to swing the presidency to JFK, then withers as Kennedy spurns Sinatra’s friendship for those same Mob-related reasons - drives the plot of The Rat Pack. Kennedy (William Petersen, who played JFK’s dad, Joseph, in the 1990 miniseries The Kennedys of Massachusetts). It was also the period when he was attempting to reach out beyond showbiz, to exert an influence on politics in his cultivation of John F. (Don Cheadle), Joey Bishop (Bobby Slayton), and Peter Lawford (Angus Macfadyen) to form a kind of floating nightclub act, movie cast ( Ocean’s 11, Sergeants 3), and emotional-support group. The late ’50s and early ’60s were not only the height of his infamous Rat Pack, when Sinatra surrounded himself with showbiz cronies like Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. It was the shrewd notion of Cohen ( Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story) and screenwriter Kario Salem - the man who wrote last year’s brilliant HBO movie Don King: Only in America - to focus on a very specific era in the now-deceased Chairman of the Board’s career.