Call it Rat Pack chic. Call it the Capote syndrome. But there’s surely little in planet Hollywood that can justify the existence of the four — yes four! — competing movie projects now in development on the life and work of that fleet-footed entertainer extraordinaire Sammy Davis Jr.

Perhaps inspired by the success of warts-and-all black musical biopics such as Ray , or quasi-fictional biopics such as Dream-girls , and perhaps simultaneously blinded by the fundamentally difficult and indeed controversial nature of their subject matter, Hollywood producers are duly ploughing ahead with two Davis Jr biopics, one documentary, and one drama. The films cover such potentially hot topics as Davis’s alleged desire to be white and the then shockingly hot-button romance between the star and Kim Novak in 1957. Sammy and Kim will reportedly star Andre Benjamin, aka Andre 3000 from the band OutKast.

The best-selling Davis Jr autobiography Yes I Can will form the basis for both the feature documentary and one of the Hollywood biopics. But the really smart money is on a big-bucks adaptation of Wil Haygood’s In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr , starring the Alist draw Denzel Washington, and produced by Brian Grazer ( A Beautiful Mind ), a king of quality block-busters.

Of course, at first glance there’s plenty in the Davis Jr story that would seduce a populist team such as Washington and Grazer. You can picture the opening scene already. Harlem in the 1920s, on the edge of Depression. A boy is born to an ambitious chorus girl called Elvera Sanchez, who, reluctant to play Mommy, hands the bundle over to the boy’s entertainer father, called Sammy Davis. The father, keen to proceed with his showbiz career, immediately takes the baby out on the road with him (Davis Jr was, in fact, raised in those first years by his grandmother, but this is the movies, after all).

Cut to Sammy Davis Jr, at the age of 3, taking his first tentative steps on to his father’s stage, and loving it (and cue those swelling John Williams strings). Cut to the teenage Davis Jr, a precociously gifted talent, performing now with his father and the seasoned vaudeville pro Will Mastin in the popular Will Mastin Trio. Then cut to an Army base in Wyoming in the dog days of the Second World War, with the newly drafted Davis Jr overcoming institutionalised military racism by wowing the GIs with his stage act (more strings, please). And on it goes, deftly of course, to a horrendous car crash in 1954, in which Davis Jr, then on the brink of superstardom, is mangled in a head-on Cadillac collision. He loses an eye, gains a scar or two, but is resilient as ever and, with the help of new celebrity chums Frank Sinatra (Russell Crowe, anyone?) and Tony Curtis (Ben Affleck?), he returns triumphantly to the limelight, this time in the Broadway vehicle Mr Wonderful .

We wind down, in Act III, with Rat Pack era camaraderie, jaunty seasons at the Sands Hotel in Vegas, TV specials, movie deals, and finally an emotional, three-hankie death from throat cancer in 1990 (cue strings, fade to black). We finish up, however, at the Academy Awards in 2009, with Washington and Grazer scooping Oscar gold for their moving and typically gut-wrenching production. They dedicate it to the memory of Sammy.

And yet, if Washington and Grazer are to be true to the real story of Davis Jr, or even true to the one found in Haygood’s often unforgiving tome, they’re in for a decidedly bumpy ride. For, unlike anything in Ray or Dreamgirls , Davis Jr is a persona who lives right in the sensitive faultline of the American Dream. His story is riven with difficult questions about racial identity that still bedevil the race-obsessed society that America is today.

For a start, there is the question of the entertainer’s seeming acceptance of negative racial attitudes, and his apparent willingness all his life to play the jester for the chance to be approved by so-called White Society. Repeatedly, interviewees in Haygood’s book — friends and acquaintances — point out his reluctance to join the civil rights movement and refer ultimately to his desire to, well, be white. “He did so want to be white,” said the star’s first love, an Irish-American Catholic called Helen Gallagher.

“I think he thought he would be accepted more.”

Now, Denzel Washington is a fine actor, and more than adept at playing powerful cool-headed heroes, but there is nothing in his canon, or indeed in the canon of any black A-lister, to suggest the urge or the need to play a weak-willed character who, underneath it all, really wants to be white. (Washington, curiously enough, would be far more suited to the role of Will Mastin, a tough nononsense professional who guided Davis Jr’s career, often jealously, through the early years.)

Furthermore the Kim Novak affair, infamously cut short by order of Harry Cohn, the boss of the racially-sensitive Columbia studio, still reverberates today in Hollywood, where the likes of Washington and Will Smith are cast opposite exclusively nonCaucasian women in romantic roles. This denial of interracial romance, born out of a bigoted fear of miscegenation, is eerily echoed in Davis Jr’s apparently irrational appetite for “white women”.

“Being caressed by a white woman made him feel soft and loved,” Haygood writes. “He could not help himself. White womanhood is what he wanted.”

At the same time Haygood reminds us that black women referred to Davis Jr derisively as a “mosquito in a tux”. Again, Washington is a fine actor, but in our image-conscious issue-aware times, is he really prepared to show himself debased and on his knees, slavering over the sight of Cameron Diaz and Kirsten Dunst in cameo roles as Davis Jr’s pale-skinned delectables? And this from an actor who once played Malcolm X?

Finally, there is something essentially ephemeral, something empty even, at the core of the Davis Jr persona that makes it genuinely difficult biopic material. He was an impressionist, after all, and spent an entire career mimicking the dance moves of vaudeville’s finest — the stage energy of Mickey Rooney and the louche style of Frank Sinatra.

Similarly, it is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that a lifetime on the defensive, trying to negotiate an instinctively hostile American society, had forced a tiny black kid from poverty-stricken Harlem to adopt so many masks and disguises that their eventual removal revealed precious little beneath. He is, thus, the ultimate man who wasn’t there.

And yet, maybe this existential emptiness is the hook. Maybe this is the allure that attracted Washington all along. If so, and if the movie can be unflinching in the face of the real Sammy Davis Jr, then we can expect a revolutionary movie biopic. If not, and if audience-savvy changes are made, Washington and Grazer can simply expect a whole lot of Oscars instead.

One life, many versions: duelling biopics

Capote v Infamous
The two movies strangely focused on exactly the same short period in the writer Truman Copte’s professional life, the writing of his bestseller In Cold Blood. Infamous was the better movie, but Capote came out first and was the success story.

Wyatt Earp v Tombstone
The legendary lawman proved an irresistible draw for macho movie icons Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell. While the latter star opted for a lean action crowd-pleaser, Costner instead went for a life-spanning epic that ran for nearly three hours and bored audiences senseless.

Alexander v Alexander the Great
Oliver Stone brought the Macedonian ruler to life with the aid of Colin Farrell and a couple of bottles of peroxide. The movie was generally derided. Baz Luhrmann and Leonardo DiCaprio quietly cancelled their own Alexander biopic.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette