Carmen Jones

Sure, the music is good, but that's to be expected, problem is that they butchered the lyrics making even some of the most beautiful music somewhat intolerable. The story is mediocre and the acting is pretty meh. The good thing is that even after the memory of the horrendous lines in song are gone the melody remains and that's something most movies can't do--although it is drawing off of one of the most famous operas in history.

Not half bad when it actually tries to be about Carmen, but there's not enough of her. Instead, there's plenty of the dumb moralizing that you can find in any film noir. Don't fall for the confident woman whose aware of her sexuality because it will ruin you. Some isolated great moments, but too conservative and simplistic.

Soldier Boy Falls For "Wicked Carmen"

I think I have some quibbles with the underlying story and its implications, but this is a stunningly enjoyable production. The singing may be dubbed but I could hardly tell, and I think the energy of the songs and performances match very well. There's a certain incongruity between the operatic singing and the realistic staging, but I think it works to the film's advantage, as does the complete lack of white people, even in the background. Lends a surreal touch to the production.

A peculiar idea of Oscar Hammerstein's -- update Carmen with contemporary African-Americans and jazz up all the lyrics. Dates very badly now, but opera fanatics will want to see it, if only for Marilyn Horne dubbing Dorothy Dandridge!

Dorothy Dandridge is great but the moralizing of that era (confident, independent women are sexy but evil!) takes a lot away

Viewed November 19, 2016. Ambitious and highly sensual, but flawed in ways that are hard to ignore. It's fascinating how a movie can be at once completely forward-thinking and frustratingly out-of-touch at the same time. Preminger, to his credit, directs the hell out of this thing. There's one particularly brilliant number, "Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum," where sticks Pearly Bailey in the foreground of the frame while a club full of people dance joyously behind her. It's ecstatic.

I love the idea of this far more than the execution. It is all show and no substance, best evidenced by the actors singing in voices not their own, but also in the ways these people are presented as wretched without a real clue as to why, for instance, someone like Carmen might be the way she is. As presented, she's little more than an individual, cut off from any responsibility to anyone, willing to use her body to get what she wants no matter the cost. Other characters suffer in similar ways.

I wanted to like this, but alas it is a very flawed film mainly due to its poor writing. The characters often deviate from their established characteristics in an unrealistic fashion, with the plot having inconsequential and outright dumb progressions too. At parts the film was so absurd that it removed all suspension of disbelief and replaced it simply with irritation. Alas, the actors do well and some of the music scenes are pretty entertaining.

The music was good. The guy was not.

Easy to enjoy as movement & music, part of the problem for some. Baldwin wrote that the absence of whites "seals the action off in a vacuum in which the spectacle of color is divested of its danger," color itself a vacuum for viewer fantasy, tho Fujiwara notes the irony that parts might be the closest old Hollywood got to depicting segregated Black streets! The dubbing is some distracting additional artifice. (Belafonte wrote in his memoir he ran into his dubber later...as a bathroom attendant.)

Terrible lyrics and a story that, despite its all black cast, plays to a white perspective.