A Man Called Adam

TCM's star in Summer Under the Stars for today (August 11) is Sammy Davis Jr. Davis didn't get the chance to be the star in too many movies, often playing secondary roles. One movie where he is the star is A Man Called Adam, which will be on tonight at 9:45 PM.

Davis plays Adam Johnson, a jazz trumpeter who at the start of the movie is on tour playing in nightclubs with his combo. However, in one of the clubs, a patron starts heckling him to play happier music, something which causes Adam to leave in a snit and head back home to his apartment in New York, nearly assaulting the heckler while leaving! Imagine trying to organize a tour with a temperamental musician like that!

However, Adam returns home to find he's not alone. Adam's friend Nelson (Ossie Davis) knew that Adam was going to be away for a few more days yet, so Nelson let another jazzman, Willie Ferguson (Louie Armstrong) use Adam's apartment together with Willie's granddaughter Claudia (Cicely Tyson), who's busy fighting the civil rights battle, this being the mid-1960s. Considering that Adam was hoping for an assignation, coming home to see strangers in his apartment is not something he was hoping for.

However, he respects old Willie Ferguson, and he finds Claudia lovely, so he's possible open to being in some sort of relationship with her. It's not going to be easy, however, as it would be his first longer-term relationship since his wife and kid were killed in a car crash he caused several years earlier. That crash, in which Adam was driving drunk, led Adam further down a spiral of alcohol abuse.

Claudia, meanwhile, is still naïve enough to think that she can reform Adam, and tries to figure out what the hell it is that's making him so angry with the entire world, as he lashes out a bunch of times at various people, be it the big guy at the management/booking agency Manny (Peter Lawford); another woman who says something untoward to Claudia; or the police who show up at a friend's house upstate that the friend has lent to Adam and Claudia but without any sort of note to give the police who might naturally wonder what these unknown people are doing.

It goes on like this for almost 100 minutes. The jazz music is great, and if you're a jazz fan that's more than worth the price of admission, as they say. A lot of that footage looks almost as though it was done in documentary style. Davis isn't bad as an actor here, and Tyson is unsurprisingly quite good. But boy is Adam a frustratingly broken person, to the point that it's an uncomfortable portrayal at times that makes the movie difficult to watch. You wish that sometimes somebody could just shake some sense in the guy, like Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance.

But watch it anyway. It's quite good even if it is difficult at times. It doesn't seem to be on DVD at all, so you're going to have to catch the TCM showing.