Prismark10 Carmen Jones is a bold and audacious film of its time. An all black cast based on Bizet's opera Carmen with English lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.The film starts in an army base camp. Corporal Joe (Harry Belafonte) is destined to be a high flyer, on his way to pilot school. His sweet girlfriend Cindy Lou (Olga James) is visiting him and they are thinking of eloping as he has a 24 hour pass.Carmen Jones (Dorothy Dandridge) is a sexy, feisty, independent woman who is desired by all the men and she knows how to tease them. She works in the parachute factory attached to the base and gets involved in a fight with a fellow worker.,Envious Sergeant Brown (Brock Peters) revokes his pass and forces Joe to escort Carmen to a civilian jail after the fight. Joe is in a bind when he takes the shorter more treacherous which leaves his jeep stuck. Both then walk to the nearest town where he has a one night stand with Carmen. The next day Carmen escape and Joe ends up in the stockade but he is still infatuated with Carmen.Even though Joe gets a second chance to get to flying school he ends in in a fight with Sergeant Brown and is on the run to Chicago with Carmen where she has a fling with a boxer.It has hard to feel sorry for Joe and his stupidity. He could have had it sweet with Cindy Lou and flying school but he had Carmen on the brain and his loins.The famous Carmen opera tunes such as habanera accompany the film, some of the songs come across as odd though. I did now know that even Harry Belafonte's voice was dubbed. The film could had also benefited from stronger dance numbers.Dandridge sizzles as Carmen, you can understand her bewitching presence. The film does feel episodic and not a very strong plot with broad brushed characters.

Antonius Block In this adaptation of the opera, Dorothy Dandridge is a firecracker, and Harry Belafonte is not bad himself. He plays a straight-laced GI who is engaged to a sweet young woman (Olga James), but finds himself seduced by Dandridge when he's charged with taking her in to authorities for fighting on the base. There are some scenes with over-the-top symbolism, such as Dandridge between his legs cleaning his uniform while he munches a peach, and it's pretty steamy stuff for 1954.Gradually we see Belafonte degrade himself, as Dandridge tires of him and moves out to another (a boxer played by Joe Adams). It's hard to feel good about Dandridge's character, but then again it's hard not to be mesmerized by her, and it's great to see a strong woman portrayed. In one scene she's baring her beautiful legs, and in another she's telling Belafonte that she "don't account to no man", and that love "don't give you no right to own me – there's only one that does, and that's me, myself." Hallelujah.It's a strong cast as well, including Pearl Bailey, and I considered a slightly higher rating, but knocked it down because of the voiceovers, which made several of the musical numbers a little less enjoyable for me. While true to the opera and maybe necessary because the music is challenging in places, it often sounded unnatural, which is a shame given Dandridge and Belafonte's singing ability. Still – a very good, entertaining movie.

clanciai A colourful and imaginative rendering of the eternal "Carmen" drama in the deep south with Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandrige good enough as the soldier and his fatality, but for me the star of the film is Pearl Bailey as "Frankie", whose first appearance at the Villas Pasta scene immediately lifts the film to a higher level, and her performance in the film continues to sparkle throughout. Many of the scenes shine with originality in their often ingenious translation from the Andalusian stage to that of the deep south, and one of the most impressing is soon in the beginning, when Carmen Jones breaks loose from Harry Belafonte under his transport of her as a prisoner in a jeep. Of course, much of the lustre of Bizet's opera is lost in translation, especially since this is not an opera but a musical, and the texts are all Broadway and nothing of Prosper Merimée. The style is convincing enough, though, and the only disappointment is the substitution of Escamillo with a boxing champion, who is not very dashing but rather the opposite. The glory and drama of the bullfighting is replaced by a crude boxing match. At least, there is nothing wrong with the music, it's all Bizet and all his best tunes of the opera with only a few missing, and with such a golden magic music all through you can even gild the deep south in its most torpid and the dreariest Chicago slum with great lyrical drama, lasting charm and beauty.

secondtake 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.