Carmen Jones (1954)

Carmen Jones (Dorothy Dandridge) is great as a tempestuous she-devil, tempting and playing around with straight-shooting Joe (Harry Belafonte) as he prepares to go to flight school at a Southern army camp during World War II. The two meet at the camp where Carmen also works. When she gets in trouble, Joe's Sergeant (Brock Peters) makes Joe escort Carmen to a civilian court for trial. But, taking care of Carmen is more than he is capable of. First, she coaxes him to her hometown. Then she coaxes him to Chicago to see Husky Miller's boxing match with some of Husky's groupies, including Frankie (Pearl Bailey) and Myrt (Diahan Carroll).In the title role, Dorothy Dandridge, was the first black woman to be nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award. The movie is loaded with many other "firsts": first all-black cast in a color CinemaScope musical, first musical adaptation of Bizet's opera with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstien, and the first musical directed by Otto Preminger.Carmen Jones is great musical, full of fun, dancing, and song, and I was happy to see some of the old black stereotypes broken. For example, most speech and behavior patterns seemed more natural and fluid to me as a white person. One has a feeling that this movie is fairly up to date for the 1940s--unlike Porgy and Bess which was a Gershwin opera set in a poor black fishing village in 1912 South Carolina.In spite of all of its superlatives, the movie does seem somewhat disjointed at times—hard to explain.. However, I think Dandridge's performance was worthy of an Oscar.

Carmen (1954)First of all, this is a gorgeous movie. The WWII-era sets, the fluid photography with a lot of long takes, the lighting and costumes and overall feel are elegant and un-compromised, first frame to last. Second, the idea is fabulous, an all-Black cast and an African-American adaptation of the classic Carmen opera (by the French composure Bizet). The vernacular and the stereotypes might seem worn, or even insulting if you take them wrong (or just take them out of context) but in fact it's in line with that even better, earlier opera, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The stereotypes are ones that made sanitized sense equally to White and Black America just as other musicals made sanitized sense to the same audiences. If I sound like an apologist, I'm only responding to attacks on the film ("farcical" "gruesome" or "dreadful"), as being untrue or insensitive to Blacks, by saying that nearly all musicals are incredibly stylized and false, and nearly all movies of this era played with safe, simplified versions of life. No, to be fair to this really interesting movie you need to treat it like you would your own favorite movies from the 1950s, accepting the limitations just as the movie makers did. It's got its own syntax and style, it's own inner set of rules.And within those the performance of the character Carmen by Dorothy Dandridge is incredible. She's on fire, introspective, nuanced, and outrageous. The cast around her is excellent but inevitably uneven, and she stands easily above them in pure performance energy, even over the other big star, Harry Belafonte. All of this said, the beautiful, finely made, early widescreen movie here, "Carmen Jones," is lacking some kind of necessary intensity to work. I can't pin down why. From little strains of Bizet that perk it up (like a boxing worker whistling the most famous theme as he works) to the truly perfect photography and editing (maybe too perfect?), the movie has a steady, compelling flow. It's based on a Broadway musical from 1943 (the year the movie is set, as well), and it has the bones of a great drama, if a familiar one (it's still Bizet).What might be the biggest problem is the understandable decision to film it in a realistic way, with song (and minimal dance) numbers inserted relatively seamlessly along the way. This is the standard musical approach from from the early Astaire-Rogers films to the relatively contemporaneous Arthur Freed productions of the early 1950s like "Singin' in the Rain." But Carmen, the opera and stage musical, is not a lighthearted romantic comedy. It isn't just escapist entertainment. And the gravitas and drama in it, at the end in particular, doesn't quite work the way it does on the opera stage. You watch Belafonte and Dandridge acting their hearts out, but it has that perfect 1950s movie-making production to remind us that it's a movie, and we are detached in a far different way than watching a stage version, with real people and false settings.But never mind all that--you'll see for yourself how absorbed you get and why not more so.A couple last things. First, the singing voices of the two leads are dubbed (yes!), surprising in Belafonte's case in particular because he was (and is) an accomplished singer. Second, Dandridge and director Preminger were having a longterm affair during the filming and after, and she pulls off what might be the best performance of her life here. Third, the movie was shown to the head of the NAACP before release to check on any problems that might be seen from an African-American point of view (this is 1954, remember) and no objections were raised. By this point, Preminger had been working with an all Black cast and was in close quarters with the leading lady so he must have had some sense that what he was after was on target for the time.Watch it if you have interest in any of these things--WWII civilian life, Dandridge or Belafonte, opera adaptations into movies, early big budget African-American movies, Preminger movies, or terrific early Cinemascope photography. That should cover a lot of viewers, but not all. For me, I liked it a lot, and liked parts of it enormously (like the short clip of Max Roach drumming away on a barroom stage). But I felt slightly restless too often to get totally absorbed. One last suggestion--see it on the biggest screen you can, so it will be immersive.

I have seen my fair share of musical movies and even though it's not my favorite genre I can say with certainty that I still really enjoyed watching this movie and is therefore among the more entertaining ones that I have ever seen.Not only is this movie a modern take on the novel and opera 'Carmen' but it also is one that has a completely Afro-American cast. This gives the story a whole new different attitude and it brings certainly live to the whole movie and story.It's an 1954 movie but let me tell you that the movie feels a lot more modern than that. If you would had told me that this movie was from 1974 I would had certainly believed it. It's not just because of the approach that the movie feels way more modern but also really because of its fine visual looks.As far as the musics goes, an important aspect within a musical movie of course, I also must say that I quite liked it, even though it was certainly weird seeing how basically every singing bit of the movie got dubbed by an obviously totally different person, that sounds really nothing like the actor who is playing the character.In this movie you could had real easily hated the Carmen character, fore she is one that is a real tease with men, steals boyfriends from other women and every now and then applies some manipulation, with her sexual and sensual powers. Yet you far from hate her, for which most credit really needs to go to the actress portraying her, Dorothy Dandridge, who also even received an Oscar nomination for her role in this movie.But at the same time there also is not really anything that makes this movie stand out as a truly excellent one. It's production values obviously weren't too high and the movie feels a bit static and simplistic at times. Nevertheless, I simply enjoyed watching this movie and that is what counts the most.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

From director Otto Preminger (Laura, Anatomy of a Murder), as is the tradition I might have heard the title somewhere before, but I recognised it from the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, so naturally I watched it. Basically it is an all black contemporary musical version of Georges Bizet's legendary opera Carmen, also based on the Broadway musical production. The story starts at an all black army camp where Cindy Lou (Olga James) has gone to see her fiancée Joe (Harry Belafonte), but their reunion is spoilt when Joe is ordered to take civilian parachute maker and man eater Carmen Jones (Oscar and BAFTA nominated Dorothy Dandridge) off the base. Carmen sets her sights on Joe, knowing his engagement and due to go into pilot training for the Korean War, and he does succumb to her charms, forgetting completely about Cindy Lou. Because Joe did not hand Carmen to the authorities he is put in prison, and while she waits she hangs around in Billy Pastor's jive café, where she meets besotted boxer Husky Miller (Joe Adams). She is initially uninterested, but her friends Frankie (Pearl Bailey) and Myrt (Diahann Carroll) convince her that she can't turn an invitation from Husky's manager to see him fight in Chicago. When Joe turns up quickly getting into a fight with Sergeant Brown (Brock Peters) for hitting on Carmen, she goes to Husky's training camp, where her friends try to convince her to forget about Joe and "go with the money" by staying with Husky. Later, Carmen gets her cards read by Frankie, and with the Nine of Spades representing death, she is convinced she will die soon, so she decides to dump Joe for the luxurious lifestyle with Husky. Cindy Lou comes back looking for Joe, but he is still in love with Carmen and rejects Cindy Lou with disdain. The night of Husky's big fight has come, and Joe turns up trying to convince Carmen to take him back, and when she rejects him the cards prediction turns out to be to true when he kills her. Also starring Roy Glenn as Rum Daniels and Nick Stewart as Dink Franklin. Dandridge is fantastic as one of the ultimate Femme Fatales of the cinema, the story is good modernised conventions of opera, the songs (especially Dat's Love, Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum, Stan' Up and Fight, and Dat's Our Man - music is also the Overture) have been written around the great classical music, it is a very watchable musical melodrama. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Music for Herschel Burke Gilbert, and it was nominated the BAFTA for Best Film from any Source, and it won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Musical/Comedy. It was number 52 on The 100 Greatest Musicals. Very good!