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But despite his fame and fortune, he struggled for acceptance in the black community. He was a one-of-a-kind entertainer who broke through many barriers, using his talent to fight bigotry, racism and anti-Semitism. “Because it was the only place he was safe.Dancer, singer, musician, patriot, activist, rebel and survivor-Sammy Davis, Jr. “I was always convinced he was going to die on stage,” publicist David Steinberg says of his client, who succumbed to complications of throat cancer in 1990 at 64.
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Through it all, Davis, whose regrets included never having spent a day in school, comes off as almost achingly introspective, an enormous talent who did his best to power through more obstacles than he should ever have had to face. And so we see him telling David Letterman about having appeared in blackface as a child, discussing with Dinah Shore the days when black performers in Las Vegas couldn’t live in the hotel, “couldn’t play in the casino, couldn’t go in to have a sandwich after the show,” and talking to an agog David Frost about his father’s disapproval of his son’s daring to perform impressions of white stars like Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney. In those forums, he sometimes addressed racial issues less jovially than he did in the Rat Pack’s act. If you saw it during its festival run, including at the 2017 Philadelphia Film Festival, you might still want to watch for the bonus performance footage included in PBS’s presentation.īeyond the performances, I’ve Gotta Be Me benefits from Davis’ talk-show interviews, which date from an era in which talk-show guests could do more than offer a prepackaged anecdote and set up a clip. Pollard’s film front-loads the Nixon-hug backlash, but it makes strong arguments for Davis’ having been misunderstood by his critics - “His commitment was never fully recognized historically,” says Harry Belafonte - and, more important, he wasn’t recognized for having been one of the most versatile entertainers in history. But he had a vision for himself that was bigger than white or black,” says writer Jason King.
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“He couldn’t be accepted in the black community, in the white community. Kennedy and Sinatra who’d betrayed Davis, with a last-minute withdrawal of an invitation to Kennedy’s inauguration because of controversy over Davis’ interracial marriage to Swedish actress May Britt. Nixon as betrayal.Įarlier, it was John F. and Charley Pride are both in the American Masters spotlight this week as part of PBS’s celebration of Black History Month, and their stories are undeniably stories of triumph - the child performer from Harlem who grew into one of America’s most popular entertainers, and the sharecropper’s son from the Jim Crow South who dreamed of baseball stardom but instead conquered the largely white world of country music.įor Davis, the subject of Sam Pollard’s documentary Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me, which makes its American Masters debut on PBS on Tuesday, the very things he saw as signs of having made it - headlining with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin as part of the Rat Pack, the invitation to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House - put him out of step with some members of his own race, who saw his very public embrace of Richard M.