Carmen Jones

CinemaSerfNov 2022

3.0

To be frank, I struggled with this... Dorothy Dandridge is superb and both she and Harry Belafonte belt out Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrical adaptations of George Bizet's rousing comic opera tunefully; but not particularly stylishly. That may have been down to the relocation of the story from elegant 19th Century Seville to gritty 20th century North Carolina via which it loses much of the vigour and vibrancy of the original story. Instead, it depicts more of a tale of the aspirational grind of African Americans against poverty and oppression and so I found that rather hijacked the original sentiment, somewhat. The narrative is also, frequently, very disjointed. It was never meant to be a straightforward love story: "Carmen" isn't actually a very nice woman - and her noble lover "Joe" is really just a means to an end for her, leaving his fiancée "Cindy Lou" (Olga James) left high and dry in what is, essentially, a rather sad love triangle. Otto Preminger certainly went out on a limb with it - the extent to which 1950s America was ready for this was very much a gamble; but that doesn't make the film better than it actually is - a wonderfully erudite comment on social mobility and love in America that uses Bizet as it's vehicle; nothing more nothing less...