Racism held Sammy Davis Jr. back from the screen success of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, but an ABC Movie of the Week gave him his best lead role. chlopinions looks back at The Pigeon:
gave him the rare chance to lead a movie; while the narrative was messy and too prone to hysteria, he bought real texture and humanity to his fatally flawed trumpeter. Despite the strength of his performance, he’d never get another chance to lead a big screen feature under his own steam.Elaine Hagen and her daughter Barbara are in possession of a diary containing information that could sink the criminal enterprise of Mr. Stambler .
And the most important asset was, of course, Sammy Davis Jr. Davis was such a dazzling, multi-talented entertainer, it’s not all that surprising that his ability at straightforward acting has been somewhat lost to time. Perhaps the prime benefit of’s generic nature is how it gave him the opportunity to excel as a regular guy on screen—not singing; not dancing; not having to fend off a constant stream of racism.
Davis would continue racking up film and TV credits for the rest of his life, until his untimely 1990 death from oral cancer at the age of 64. Although he continued to be an engaging screen presence, none of these later projects really caught fire; frankly, few of them deserved to.stands as one of too-few examples of the magnetic ease with which he could inhabit a lead movie role.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.
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