Screen Politics: Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones

Nelly Furman

In the early days of black and white cinema, one finds a surprising number of parodies of Georges Bizet's famous opera, Carmen. With his 1954 Carmen Jones, Otto Preminger presents the first technicolor version of Bizet’s opera. But Preminger's film proposes itself as another kind of parody. Bizet's music serves in this film as a backdrop to Oscar Hammerstein II’s lyrics for a thoroughly American story. Filmed with an all-black cast that included well-known stars: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll and Pearl Bailey, Otto Preminger's movie tells another black and white story. While its purpose is to showcase the talents of African- American actors and to testify to America's discriminatory social history of the fifties, in so doing it also unwittingly reveals Hollywood's own political paradigms and cultural prejudices. In a most curious manner, Preminger's film, whose aim was to denounce racism in America, becomes itself the blind and unknowing carrier of Mérimée's nineteenth-century racial and social ideology. The purpose of this chapter will be to show how Preminger's film, while purportedly referring back to Bizet's opera, unconsciously projects onto the silver screen one of the most disturbing interpretations of the theme of ethnic difference since Prosper Mérimée's original 1845 short story.

Preminger, Otto: Carmen Jones Dandridge, Dorothy Race Opera and film Hammerstein, Oscar II American sociopolitical history

In 1954 appeared the first colour version of Bizet’s opera, Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones. Not a remake of the opera, but more precisely a ‘musical’ in the Broadway tradition, Preminger’s film is decidedly an American story, as the ‘Jones’ in Carmen’s name intimates. While respecting some of the highlights of the musical score of Bizet’s opera, Preminger’s film proposes itself as another kind of story. No longer located in southern Spain, but in rural Florida, it is the story of an Afro-American soldier who, after killing his sergeant, flees with his beloved Carmen, a worker in a parachute factory, to seek a new life in Chicago. Preminger filmed with an all- black cast that included Dorothy Dandridge as Carmen Jones; Harry Belafonte as Joe; Olga James as Cindy Lou, Joe’s sweetheart from back home, (the role of Micaela in Bizet’s opera); Pearl Bailey as Frankie and Diahann Carroll as Myrt (Mercedes and Frasquita in Bizet); Brock Peters, as Sergeant Brown; and finally Joe Adams, as a 122 Nelly Furman prize fighter named Husky Miller who plays Joe’s rival, the equivalent of the toreador Escamillo, in the opera. Although Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and Pearl Bailey were popular, highly established singers with very distinctive voices, only Pearl Bailey and Olga James sing in their own voice: the other main roles are dubbed by opera singers. Dorothy Dandridge’s part is sung by a young Marilyn Horne and Harry Belafonte’s arias by LeVern Hutcherson. Olga James uses her own voice because she was a trained opera singer. The only singing voice that remains culturally identified as Afro-American is that of Pearl Bailey. With its all-black cast Preminger’s Carmen Jones not only marks a noticeable moment in film history, but also testifies to the social history of the United States in the fifties. First produced by Billie Rose as a musical on Broadway in 1943, the stage version of Carmen Jones was warmly received. In the patriotic fervour of the Second World War, although the American armed forces were still segregated, and would remain so until 1948, the army was seen as a place of social mobility for young black men who could aspire to become flyers. But that was the early forties: eleven years later, as we will see, when Preminger made the film version of the musical play, the message purveyed dramatically changed. The purpose of this piece will be to re-examine the politics of Preminger’s Carmen Jones, to look beyond the realism, beyond the representational dimension of the film, and by following the interconnected force of its visual and aural narratives attempt to propose a new understanding of its political message. Carmen Jones begins with a young woman, Cindy Lou, who comes to say goodbye to her fiancé, Joe, a soldier getting ready to go to flying school. But in the cafeteria of the base Joe is enticed by Carmen Jones, one of the factory workers. When later Carmen gets into a fight, the soldier is ordered to escort her to jail. On the way she persuades him to stop at her grandmother’s house where they become lovers. He goes to jail: she awaits him. A renowned prizefighter, Husky Miller, and his entourage arrive in town: he sees Carmen Jones looking at him from a balcony and, enthralled, invites her to come to Chicago with her friends. Joe, just released from jail, arrives and gets into a fight with Sergeant Brown, who hits his head against a fountain and dies. Joe and Carmen flee to Chicago. Penniless in a tenement house, Carmen turns to her old friend Frankie for help. Frankie encourages her to become the mistress of the boxer. Joe attempts to attack the boxer at the gym where he practices, and later he goes to the