NFR Project: 'Carmen Jones' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Carmen Jones”

Dir: Otto Preminger

Scr: Harry Kleiner

Pho: Sam Leavitt

Ed: Louis R. Loeffler

Premiere: Oct. 28, 1954

105 min.

This film is a real problem. Is it progressive or retrogressive?

Time has not been kind to Carmen Jones. It all started with famous lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II’s desire to modernize Bizet’s famous 1875 opera Carmen. (The opera was itself derived from Prosper Merimee’s 1845 novel.) It was Hammerstein’s desire to indicate a contemporary, English-language equivalent of the supposed “hot-blooded” sentiments of the soldiers and the bandits in the old Spain of the opera’s story.

That he did so using Black America is today unforgivable. Mark you, the Broadway show ran for 502 performances. Carmen is probably the most popular and often-performed opera. It seemed like a great idea at the time. This film made money. Dorothy Dandridge was nominated for a Best Actress award at the Oscars – the first time a Black woman had won such a nomination.

It must have seemed like affirmative action to Hammerstein, Preminger, and the rest. To make a feature film in color! In widescreen! With an all-Black cast!

But it’s patronizing. It assumes the Black response to life is fundamentally emotional and unpractical. Every character in this film (except the always-great Pearl Bailey, who, significantly, sings in her own voice) is just a slave to their passions. Which is congruent with Bizet’s Carmen, but here seems to be an excuse for viewing Black people as exotic, untamed, fundamentally alien people.

The movie follows the opera in a contemporary setting. Harry Belafonte is Joe, an Air Force cadet who dumps his earnest, moral girlfriend from back home (Olga James) for the hot-blooded, fiery Carmen (Dandridge). She gets him in trouble; he still loves her. She ruins his life. They intersect with a prizefighter named Husky Miller. He abandons everything for her, then she dumps him for Miller. So he kills her.

The music is Bizet’s, or it is Bizet-adjacent. Dandridge and Belafonte were noted singers: still, they were overdubbed by Marilyn Horne (white) and LeVern Hutcherson (black). The arias that remain are the familiar ones; they are set to lyrics that are overwrought and ineffectual. There is such a desperate attempt here to make "art" here.

The absence of a white person in the film is glaring; the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “This glared like chauvinism in reverse.” You have a gaggle of white people who construct a vernacular for Black people, and then fail to inhabit it. To what? To not “break the spell” of this precocious fantasy? It dies of its intentions. It is exploitative. Would it have been made with a white cast?

Andrew Pulver of the Guardian wrote, in 2007, that the film was “a relic from the gruesome social straitjacket that was segregation; every frame, you feel, is freighted with the tension imposed by the never-appearing white folks.”

One writer, notably, encountered the film on the page. James Baldwin’s “Carmen Jones: The Light Is Dark Enough” from his Notes of Native Son is a masterful deconstruction of the film. You can read it here.

Baldwin tags the movie as “a wedding of the blank, lofty solemnity with which Hollywood so often approaches ‘works of art’ and the really quite helpless condescension with which Hollywood has always handled Negroes.”

He continues, “ . . . it is important that the movie always be able to repudiate any suggestion that Negroes are amoral—which it can only do, considering the role of the Negro in the national psyche, by repudiating any suggestion that Negroes are not white.”

He describes the absence of white people thusly: “This seals the action off, as it were, in a vacuum in which the spectacle of color is divested of its danger.”

“One is not watching either tenderness or love, and one is certainly not watching the complex and consuming passion which leads to life or death—one is watching a timorous and vulgar misrepresentation of these things.”

“One wonders, it is true, if Negroes are really going to become the ciphers this movie makes them out to be; but, since they have until now survived public images even more appalling, one is encouraged to hope, for their sake and the sake of the Republic, that they will continue to prove themselves incorrigible.”

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The House in the Middle.