A historically significant movie rarely goes unvexed by the social mores that made its importance possible in the first place. Piccadilly (1929), among the best-in-quality vehicles to star the first Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong, might have been groundbreaking for daring to see nothing wrong with the sort of mixed-race coupling increasingly stamped out by its era’s censors, but its cameras also cut away right at the moment Wong and her white love interest were to lock lips. A Very Natural Thing (1974) might have been one of the first movies geared for the mainstream to depict dating and sex between men with seriousness, but the dominance of straight film critics in influential staff positions led to much of the widely disseminated discourse around the film treat the movie like a curio rather than something with the kind of merit worth considering on its own terms.
Carmen Jones (1954), Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1943 play — itself a reworking of Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera Carmen that transposes much of the story onto an Army camp during World War II — is one of the first A-list movies to feature an across-the-board Black cast. But it’s hampered by the decision to dub several of its stars’ singing voices with those of white vocalists (who themselves often uncomfortably proffer their conceptions of Black pronunciation in their phrasing) and, in general, Preminger’s clear uneasiness in the musical genre. Though Sam Leavitt’s cinematography and Mary Ann Nyberg’s costume design imbue the film with some visual life thanks to their adeptness with color, Preminger himself helms with a flatness better-suited to the dark dramas he was more accustomed to making than the dynamism a musical requires to come to life on screen rather than feel simply like a filmed stage play.
But like with Piccadilly and A Very Natural Thing, what’s good about Carmen Jones cuts through what isn’t. There’s the music, which, though not immune to lyrical clunkiness, retains much of the force of Bizet’s original compositions. And there is, most of all, Dorothy Dandridge in the title role doing the kind of excellent work that makes her character feel less like the one-dimensional, misogynistically conceived femme fatale type earlier iterations of the character have served as and more a complicated, sexually liberated woman who knows her power and is unwilling to settle for a life she feels is unduly holding her back from what she really desires.
Carmen Jones has strong supporting work from Pearl Bailey, as Jones’ best friend, and Olga Jones, underutilized until it counts most as a woman cast aside on account of Jones’ manipulations. But it’s really Dandridge who carries a movie that, dramatically speaking, otherwise never completely congeals. (There’s the fact of nearly all the characterizations being rote, but also that the story all the Carmen adaptations derive from — a 1846 novella from Prosper Mérimée — is a not-that-interesting one about a man being driven to homicidal anger after being toyed with enough by a seductive woman who gives him what he wants until he no longer provides her with what she wants.) Dandridge overcomes many of her role’s limitations, but Belafonte, as the once-upstanding man driven to madness, struggles to, not helped by the confounding decision to overdub his famously rich voice with a white man’s.
Carmen Jones was a hit; Dandridge became the first Black woman nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. But that wouldn’t mean the wheel for Black representation in mainstream movies would instantaneously turn — for years the film would remain, and still kind of is, a unicorn — or that the substantive parts Dandridge, impeded by bad career advice and a general clumsiness by gatekeepers around where exactly to cast her, ought to have gotten. One might think of Dandridge now as a formidable talent whose promise was squandered before it could really take off. One might also think of Carmen Jones in a similar vein. This is a movie that, with some rejiggering, might have been a lot more than a breakthrough for representation with some good songs and performances. But it endures as a milestone whose quality isn’t quite up to par with its significance.
Peterson Reviews 