Featuring the opera star Leontyne Price, the concert baritone William Warfield, and the irrepressible jazz bandleader Cab Calloway, this virtually unknown short film documents the first stop on what would become a four-year US State Department–sponsored tour of the Everyman Opera Company's production of the Gershwin-Heyward opera Porgy and Bess.
The new steward of Siltala ends up falling in love with the beautiful widow of the house. Their romance is endangered by misunderstandings and the fact that the estate of Siltala is swimming in debt.
Swindler in jail devises a scheme to blackmail the family of recently deceased people, threatening to tell supposedly incriminating facts about their dead relatives' lives.
On an African safari with his friend Grant, Clyde Beatty plans to buy some black-maned Numbian lions from Jo Carter but her animals are wiped out by a fire.
"The Man from Cairo", a Michaeldavid production for distribution by Lippert, with Ray Enright the only credited director on the film print, finds Mike Canelli, the man from Cairo, nosing around Algiers with mystery surrounding the people he meets and the things he does and has done to him, all deriving from the war-time theft of $100,000,000 in gold which lies somewhere in the adjacent desert.
Comments
Have you watched Porgy and Bess in Wien yet? What did you think about it?
