Message with Music

A Man Called Adam. According to the fantasies cherished by scenario writers, the decline and fall of a great jazz trumpeter never really gets under way until the musicman's sweetheart tells him, as she frequently does, "I won't let you be less than you are."

Since nearly every line of dialogue strikes a familiar blue note, the only way to justify still another fictional show-biz biography is to link it to the color question. Adam is a specialty act salted with social protest. It is played at a feverish pitch by Sammy Davis Jr., who has surrounded himself with such Negro performers as Ossie Davis, Louis Armstrong and, as the girl in his cheering section, a sunburst of shy sepia charm named Cicely Tyson. A handful of jazzmen (Mel Torme, Kai Winding, Nat Adderly) make the score swing but aren't much help otherwise, except as evidence that when Sammy plays a good gig, his pals can be sure of work. Even Frank Sinatra Jr. sits in, tussling with a sappy role as Davis' sidekick, and Peter Lawford is improbably cast as "Manny," the hardhearted booking agent.

For plot, the film boasts a CORE sampling of injustices that supposedly explain the color-conscious hero's heavy drinking and bad temper. Seldom is there any doubt that what makes Adam run is Sammy. Carpentered into the story line are all the predictable solo turns--a crying jag, a tender love episode, a scene in which he wields a broken bottle to make his agent grovel, and a reprise in which Davis crawls across a restaurant floor to shine Lawford's shoes. There is a semifinal glimpse of the doomed genius staggering through city streets, climaxed by a moment of bitter glory when he blows his heart through a horn and dies. His ailment is never precisely named, though he coughs a lot whenever prejudice crowds him.

The film's message, buried under clouds of smoky jargon, ends with the distressing thought that nonviolence, man, will get you nowhere. Playing a born loser who digs the lesson too late, Davis at best displays his own brash will to win and fires suspicion that a coherent statement about inequality cannot be fitted comfortably into the format of a headline entertainer's syrupy one-man show.

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