Classic films which you wish got made

Welles and Haymes were both Rita's husbands at various times. Haymes was very bland in his '40s musicals, but I recently listened to a Suspense radio drama he did in the '50s, an excellent thriller about a man trapped in a home's private elevator while killers burglarize the house, and he's not bad.

Was this project connected to Thomas Mann's book series?

In the '40s Columbia owned the film rights to Porgy and Bess. Harry Cohn intended to make it as a vehicle for... Rita Hayworh.

At one point Cohn was going to film it in blackface, with Al Jolson as Porgy.

When he he realized the absurdity of that idea, he changed the characters to white, and cast Fred Astaire as Porgy. That's right, Cohn planned to have the screen's most celebrated dancer play a crippled beggar.

Eventually Cohn realized he could not cast current stars in any P&B adaptation. This and the story's dependence on censorable plot devices such as drug use and cohabitation convinced him to abandon the project.