Carmen Jones (1954)

it’s good. you can definitely tell that there wasn’t as much money poured into this as other well-received classical musicals from the era, but its middle-class mundanity is (in its own way) a small step forward. Dorothy Dandrige is literally why you watched this and she…

Sam

Keeping the melodies to Bizet's opera but replacing the words with modern lyrics might have been a mistake. Using "de" and "dere" was definitely a mistake. Dubbing over Harry Belafonte was just rude (Dorothy Dandridge, too, probably, but Belafonte is one of my favorites).…

Sally Jane Black

Inspired by seeing Dorothy Dandridge on the big screen at the Academy Museum, I finally checked this out. Same ole Preminger…fortunately, I like him. Boldly lit and designed but too static (move the camera!), and slightly dyspeptic, it’s illuminated by two of the most…

Sean Fennessey

Surprising how readily legible this film's gender and class politics are six decades after its release, which itself was eight decades after the premiere of its operatic source material. Will the subject of economic dependence tangled up with smoldering eroticism ever fall…

Alice Stoehr

old hollywood: I have brought you something.....groundbreaking...... me: thank you old hollywood: .......groundbreakingly racist and sexist

phoebe 💫

Ideologically intolerable yet often fascinating and intermittently pungent. Preminger always seems to love biting off more than he can chew.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

"If I love you that's the end of you!" Joe (Harry Belafonte) is a man whose life is on the upswing. He's about to start training to be a pilot and about to marry his sweet heart Cindy Lou (Olga James). Life is good. That is, until he meets free as a bird temptress Carmen…

Jesse Snoddon

Otto Preminger's innovative adaptation of Georges Bizet's classic opera Carmen sees the Austrian born filmmaker giving the mellifluous tale a delightfully contemporary spin. Instead of the titular character being a footloose Spanish bohemian this version finds her as a…

Paul Elliott

Maybe you ain‘t got the message yet, but Carmen‘s one gal nobody puts on a leash. No man‘s gonna tell me when I can come and go. I gotta be free. Right until the mid-60s you could always rely on Otto Preminger to deliver the cinematic goods, no matter which genre he…

Schratzi