Otto Preminger (1954)
Oscar Hammerstein’s transposition of Georges Bizet’s Carmen has a World War II setting and was first produced on Broadway during the War, in 1943. In his autobiography Otto Preminger described the stage show as a collection of ‘skits loosely based on the opera’ with music ‘simplified and changed so that the performers who had no operatic training could sing it’. In bringing the material to the cinema screen a decade later, Preminger wanted to make ‘a dramatic film with music rather than a conventional film musical’; he encouraged the screenwriter Harry Kleiner to draw on Prosper Mérimée’s novella, which was Bizet’s source, as well as the opera’s libretto. It’s surprising, then, that Preminger, despite casting actors who could sing (Harry Belafonte is perhaps better described as a singer who can act) in the two main roles, had their musical numbers dubbed by opera singers. Carmen Jones deserves its place in the US National Film Registry of ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ films but it’s stylistically confused. Preminger’s coalition of realistic drama and operatic voices is at the heart of the confusion.
The opening half-hour, which culminates in the seduction of squeaky-clean army corporal Joe (Belafonte) by sultry bad girl Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge), is the best part of the film. On an army base somewhere in the American South, where the story begins, Joe is top of the class. More handsome, ambitious and clean-living than any of his fellow soldiers (he doesn’t drink or smoke), he’s won a place to study as an aircraft pilot, and is due soon to leave for flight school. His lovingly demure fiancée Cindy Lou (Olga James) comes to visit Joe at the base; the first sign of an impulsive streak in him appears when Joe’s decides he wants to marry her there and then. That plan is soon thwarted. When Carmen, who works in a parachute factory on the base, flirts shamelessly with Joe in the canteen, he easily ignores her. She then starts a catfight with another factory worker. Sergeant Brown (Brock Peters), who resents Joe, unkindly assigns him to deliver Carmen to the civilian authorities for punishment (and a probable custodial sentence). That means a road trip of fifty miles with a girl who’s already come on strong to him.
In the passenger seat of the army jeep, Carmen won’t keep her hands off Joe, though he keeps pushing her away. When she tries to abscond, that necessitates more close contact between them, as he catches her, binds her hands and feet, and throws her over his shoulder. You become intensely aware of the physicality of the two stars, especially Dorothy Dandridge. What the African-American film historian Donald Bogle describes as her ‘wildly uninhibited body movements’ are more stylised than I expected (I’d seen Carmen Jones only once before, getting on for fifty years ago) but they’re no less impressive for that. The sustained physical contact, even though it’s often antagonistic, makes Joe’s eventual capitulation to Carmen inevitable. This follows a genuinely erotic moment, when she tells him the belt in his trousers is twisted, removes and straightens it then starts working it back into place. This first part of Carmen Jones on its own justifies turning Hammerstein’s stage musical into a film. Although it includes Carmen’s ‘There’s a Café on the Corner’ (Hammerstein’s version of Bizet’s Séguedille), its expressiveness isn’t chiefly dependent on song and dance. It raises hopes, though they prove to be short-lived, of sufficient substance between the Carmen musical highlights to realise Preminger’s idea of ‘a dramatic film with music’.
Joe gets up next morning to find a note from Carmen, who says she loves him but can’t face the prospect of jail so is running away. It’s Joe who ends up inside – in the military stockade – for letting his charge escape. Once released, he goes to the night club where Carmen now works, arriving shortly after the celebrated prizefighter Husky Miller (Joe Adams) has put in an appearance in the club. Husky, who makes his big entrance to ‘Stan’ Up an’ Fight’ (the Toreador Song), takes an instant fancy to Carmen. He orders his sidekicks (Roy Glenn and Nick Stewart) to make sure they get her on a train to Chicago, along with Frankie (Pearl Bailey) and Myrt (Diahann Carroll), Carmen’s friends and co-workers at the club. The ‘Whizzin’ Away Along de Track’ quintet, in which the other four urge her to join them on the train and Carmen assesses the pros and cons of hooking up with a rich man whom she doesn’t love, is effective – not least because it doesn’t demand power singing and feels closer to a number in ‘a conventional film musical’. But Carmen Jones struggles once the action switches to Chicago.
Carmen goes there with Joe, who is now in hiding from the military authorities. He arrived at the night club determined to make a fresh start; Carmen, angry at the prospect of his leaving her for flight school, threatens to pair off instead with Sergeant Brown, who’s also sniffing around her at the club. The two men come to blows; Joe comes out on top but knows he’ll face another spell in the stockade – much longer than the first – for assaulting a senior officer. Joe and Carmen take the same train as Husky’s entourage but not in their company. When they get to Chicago, they hole up in a rented room. It’s shabby – noisy too, beside a busy railway line. Preminger and the cinematographer Sam Leavitt make the brief scenes there claustrophobic but the ‘realism’ (always a relative term in Carmen Jones) that felt central in the road-to-seduction episode is peripheral now.
Carmen’s abandonment of Joe to become Husky’s mistress and the build-up to Joe’s lethal revenge on her, at the boxing arena where Husky’s big fight is taking place, are bound to be melodramatic. That wouldn’t be such an issue if Preminger hadn’t, in the earlier stages, leavened the melodrama with a bit of realistic texture. Once he stops doing so, you wonder why he did so in the first place. The action turns increasingly stagy – as in a scene when all the main characters – including Cindy Lou, making a last-ditch attempt to save Joe from Carmen and himself – all congregate in a room at Husky’s gym. Dorothy Dandridge’s singing voice is dubbed by Marilyn Horne, Harry Belafonte’s by LeVern Hutcherson and Joe Adams’s by Marvin Hayes. This is a bigger problem with Belafonte because his own singing voice is so familiar but in all three cases the operatic sound is wrong. It not only reinforces the disconnection of the sung and spoken elements of Carmen Jones but conflicts with the vernacular of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics. If the material didn’t need opera-trained voices in the theatre, why were they required in a medium where the acting was likely more naturalistic than on the Broadway stage?
It’s no coincidence that Pearl Bailey, who does her own singing, delivers the film’s most enjoyable and satisfying performance: her ‘Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum’ (the Flower Song) in the night club is easily the musical highlight. The animalistic energy of the ‘Rhythm on a Drum’ dancers is the peak of Herbert Ross’s choreography, too. I’m also guessing that Olga James did her own singing as Cindy Lou: this bobby-soxed wronged ingénue is a drag but James makes her a coherent drag. In contrast, the dubbing has a jarring effect even in a small role like that of Myrt: Diahann Carroll, in her big-screen debut, is lip-syncing to the high-pitched voice of Bernice Peterson.
Dorothy Dandridge became the first actor of colour to be nominated for a lead acting Oscar for her performance in Carmen Jones. (Hattie McDaniel had won, and Esther Waters had been nominated, as Best Supporting Actress. The first male Oscar nominee of colour was Sidney Poitier for The Defiant Ones, four years after Carmen Jones.) Dandridge has extraordinary presence throughout although her classiness pays diminishing dividends. The tension between the actress’s sexy elegance and the shameless hussy her character is meant to be is compelling. Dandridge isn’t so effective, though, when it comes to dramatising Carmen’s supposedly falling in love for the first time or, when she forsakes Joe for the material perks of life with Husky, what drives her to do so. Dorothy Dandridge’s Carmen is enduringly famous for unhappy off-screen reasons as well as for its intrinsic quality and distinctiveness. Her own short life, like the fate of the character that made her a star, reads like a ‘tragic mulatto’ story.
Harry Belafonte’s acting is also more satisfying in the early stages. He’s relaxed and charismatic in the scenes at the base and makes Joe’s infatuation with Carmen credible. He’s less comfortable as the driven-to-distraction version of Joe in the film’s second half. Although only thirty at the time, Joe Adams (who became Ray Charles’s manager) looks older; he’s a strong presence but on the mature side for an aspiring boxer (Husky is known as ‘the Coming Champ’). Brock Peters, also appearing in his first film, has both singing and non-singing duties: he dubs the singing voice of Roy Glenn as well as playing Sergeant Brown. I liked Peters more as this unsympathetic character than in his better-known victim and sad nice guy roles in To Kill a Mockingbird and The L-Shaped Room respectively.
Carmen Jones chiefly merits inclusion in the National Film Registry pantheon because it’s a big (CinemaScope) 1950s musical with an all-black cast that did well at the box office. (Preminger went on to make a film of Porgy and Bess later in the decade, with Dorothy Dandridge but without repeating the commercial success of this earlier collaboration.) The fact that Oscar Hammerstein’s musical was first staged on Broadway in the same year that Hollywood made a very different all-black musical – Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky – underlines the conceptual originality of Carmen Jones. Minnelli’s film is a better crafted piece of cinema but the characters in Cabin in the Sky are mostly infantilised or insultingly over-simplified. The dramatis personae of Carmen Jones may be broadly drawn but at least the strongest of them are adults fighting with their feelings and loyalties. There are aspects of the production that stick in the craw – like the fact that Dorothy Dandridge’s singing voice was supplied by a white woman. But even that was some kind of progress from casting a white actress as Pinky’s light-skinned heroine-of-colour, five years earlier.
4 June 2020
