If you go to a video store in search of movies featuring Sammy Davis Jr., who died Wednesday morning, you'll likely find a nice selection.
Davis appeared in more than 20 movies. Some of the better ones are now available on videocassette.Here's a list of Davis' films you can rent or buy:
ROBIN AND THE 7 HOODS (Warner Video, $59.65) is a musical comedy spoof set in the heyday of Chicago's gangster era, featuring "Rat Pack" members Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Davis and co-starring Bing Crosby and Jill St. John. When Sinatra, Martin and Davis are cavorting together, it's like they're sharing an joke you'd like to be in on. Like "Guys and Dolls," this light, breezy bit of fluff - about a hood who becomes a heroic Robin Hood - is loaded with lovable gangsters. Though never a knockout, it's always entertaining. Near the end, Sinatra belts "My Kind of Town" as part of a showy production number. It's the high point of the movie.
A MAN CALLED ADAM (Charter Entertainment, $59.95). Davis plays a tortured trumpeter in this 1966 film featuring a cast that's nearly all black. Haunted by a past tragedy and angered by racist society, the surly musician soaks his misery in booze. The question is whether music and the love of a good woman (Cicely Tyson) can save him. The ending is surprisingly downbeat. Not great but features some absorbing sequences. Davis is outstanding.
THAT'S BLACK ENTERTAINMENT (VCI, $29.95). This 60-minute documentary compiles scenes from the Black Cinema Collection, 22 films discovered in a Texas warehouse in 1983. These were made for black audiences during the '30s and '40s by black producers and directors and featured such figures as Paul Robeson, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne and a very young Sammy Davis Jr.
TAP (RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, $89.95.) Gregory Hines is a whirling dervish with lightning at heel and toe. He doesn't tap lightly, deftly; he taps powerfully, as if he were trying to communicate his whole being through his routines. Hines' artistry isn't the effortless, breezy sort that one associates with the older masters, many of whom play parts in the film. And at times his dancing can seem dogged or degenerate into mere aerobics - you miss the cool elan of his models. The heaviness of his style is perfectly suited to the movie's story. Hines' Max is a gifted dancer who sees dancing as a dead end and, because he has no other skills, turns to crime. In every image you can feel the force of the film's mission to carry tap dancing to a larger audience. It attempts not only to show us some great dancing, but also to tell us why it's important and put it in context. Unfortunately, there's not nearly enough dancing, and the context it creates is almost entirely that of show-business cliches. Davis and a whole list of tap greats play a part, but oddly enough the filmmakers don't seem to have known what to do with the older generation of dancers. The movie, though, does capture Davis' last dance performance on film, a brief tap routine made poignant because he had undergone painful hip surgery in 1985 and received an artificial hip in 1988.
FRANK, LIZA & SAMMY - THE ULTIMATE EVENT! (Kodak, $29.95). The tape features a more familiar Liza, belting Broadway standards with Frank Sinatra and Davis. The performance, filmed last year at the Detroit stop of the "Rat Pack" reunion world tour, in which Minnelli subbed for an ailing Dean Martin, features solo turns by all three performers, capped by what Kodak calls "the ultimate climax" when the three are united for a medley of show-stoppers.
BLOOPERS FROM "STAR TREK" AND "LAUGH-IN" (Video Yesteryear, $19.95). Davis is glimpsed in the "Laugh-In" segments, along with many others, in this pastiche of mistakes and mis-spoken words from the TV shows.
THE CANNONBALL RUN (Vestron Video, $89.98). Davis and Dean Martin are teamed in this Burt Reynolds vehicle about a real cross-country car race.
CANNONBALL RUN 2 (Warner Home Video, $79.95). Davis and Martin return, along with Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine, in this Reynolds sequel.
GONE WITH THE WEST (Unicorn Video, $49.95). A little-known western starring James Caan, Stefanie Powers and Davis. This is the tale of how the anger of a gunfighter and Indian girl made a southwestern town a ghost town.
OCEAN'S 11 (Warner Home Video, $69.95). "The Rat Pack" (Sinatra, Martin and Davis) star in this Lewis Milestone-directed movie in which 11 ex-Army buddies plan the heist of a lifetime, simultaneously robbing five Las Vegas casinos on New Year's Eve.
SWEET CHARITY (MCA Home Video, $44.98). Shirley MacLaine stars as Charity, a dance-hall hostess who dreams of a simple old-fashioned marriage. Somehow, she ends up giving her heart to one undeserving man after another.
MOON OVER PARADOR (Warner Home Video, $79.95). Davis makes a brief appearance in this comedy about a dictator of a Latin American county who suddenly dies and a down-and-out New York actor who is persuaded to impersonate the ruler.
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (MGM/UA Home Video, $19.95). Davis does a cameo in this Las Vegas-set James Bond thriller, starring Sean Connery as 007.