A Colorful Take on “Carmen”

I’ve been wanting to write about Carmen Jones, and the death of Olga James at age 95 gives me a good (though sad) excuse. Though I saw this film only recently, I’ve been aware of it for many years. My parents, who prided themselves on being open-minded, admired the special flair of Black entertainers like Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, and Harry Belafonte. Their passion for the whimsical 1943 all-Black fantasy-film, Cabin in the Sky (starring Ethel Waters and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) transferred to me, and I love watching it to this day, regarding it as essential comfort-cinema. When Carmen Jones made its screen debut (following a hyper-successful Broadway run) in 1954, I was much too young to see it. But now that I have, I can understand my parents’ enthusiasm. This despite the fact that the two lead performers, both well-known professional singers with movie-star looks and credentials, were dubbed by more operatic voices.

Admittedly, the score of Carmen Jones is not an easy one to sing. It is, at base, Georges Bizet’s Carmen, transferred by lyricist and scenarist Oscar Hammerstein II from the streets and bull-rings of Spain to a small military town in North Carolina, midway through World War II. Carmen, still a seductive vixen, now works in a parachute factory; the  opera’s Don José has become the clean-cut “flyboy” Joe, who’s bound for officer candidate school. The glamorous toreador of the opera has turned into a champion prizefighter, Husky Miller, who whisks Carmen off to Chicago and decks her out in diamonds and furs. Though the language of the songs is contemporary, the score is still highly operatic in nature. I’m told it was a then-unknown Marilyn Horne who supplied star Dorothy Dandridge’s singing voice for the film. The handsome, good-natured Joe, who fails to resist Carmen’s seductive moves on him, is appealingly played by Belafonte, but he (or rather his vocal substitute) is hardly singing calypso .Naturally, there’s a tragic ending.

Before today I had never heard of Olga James, and was wholly unaware of her showbiz career. But a photo that accompanied her obituary in the Hollywood Reporter quickly brought her back to me. For the film version of Carmen Jones James was cast as Cindy Lou (think Micaëla), the sweet country girl whom Joe is planning to marry before Carmen gets her hooks into him. James, who hailed from a showbiz family, trained at Juilliard for a career in classical music, and so she was well equipped to sing arias like “My Joe” and the mournful “He Got His Self Another Woman.” She does so beautifully and poignantly; of all the tragedies in the story, hers is doubtless the saddest, because she does everything right but still loses out on love. (Interesting sidenote: James was married to jazz sax great Cannonball Adderley until his death at age 45.)   

The notion of a Hollywood musical with an all-Black cast is of course something out of a very different era. (Similarly, musicals in which the entire cast is white now seem hugely retrograde.) Though I’m hardly a fan of segregation on movie screens or anywhere else, I remain glad that talented Black performers of earlier eras got to show what they could do, and weren’t always stuck in supporting roles as cheery Pullman porters and feisty kitchen help. One other sidenote: African-American dancers who lived near Hollywood could count on occasional movie work in musicals like this one. In the film’s big dance scene, I love spotting Carmen de Lavallade, my very first dance teacher, and later a major star of the American dance world. 

 

A Jamaica Farewell to Harry Belafonte

My mother considered herself the #1 fan of singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte, who has just died at the age of 96. All of her adult life she adored Belafonte’s singing, his acting, his political stances, and his dusky good looks. And, of course, she passed on this passion to her children.

 There was a time when Belafonte regularly brought his electrifying stage show, complete with backup singers and dancers,  to L.A.’s outdoor Greek Theatre. When the dates were announced, my mother would quickly order two sets of tickets. On one night she’d attend with my father. On another, she’d bring my young sister and me to see the great man in person. I mean this literally—one year she figured out where the entertainers parked their cars, and stationed the three of us where we’d be sure to meet her hero. It worked. Belafonte emerged, and graciously greeted the dressed-up little girls. (He had some of his own at home, so he knew how to talk to kids.) When he complimented me on my pretty dress, I proudly explained that my mother had bought it on sale. It became a family story that was told many times over. Years later, he was equally ingratiating when I (then a young journalist) met him at a record industry luncheon. Someone snapped a photo, which you can see below. It became a prominent feature of my mother’s kitchen bulletin board.

 Belafonte studied acting before he became known as a singer of calypso tunes. One of his earliest films, Carmen Jones (1954), was a musical in which he didn’t get to sing a note. This  all-Black version of Bizet’s Carmen,  adapted from a hit Broadway show, required operatic warbling, and both he and star Dorothy Dandridge were dubbed. Later in the decade, he starred in screen dramas that always had a racial element at their core. A Caribbean-set political and romantic drama, Island in the Sun,  allowed him to bare his torso on-screen and to romance—with serious consequences—the very blonde Joan Fontaine.

 The Belafonte film from the 1950s that I remember best is an imaginative apocalyptic story called The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959). It’s set in Manhattan, in the aftermath of some sort of nuclear disaster that has rid the city of virtually all its inhabitants. The only survivors in this New York ghost town seem to be Belafonte (a mine inspector who was deep underground at the time of the blast), a pretty young Caucasian woman played by Inger Stevens, and a crusty older sailor (Mel Ferrer). What we’ve got here, as the survival of the human race seems in question, is a potential love triangle with strong racial overtones. The film was the first offering of Belafonte’s own production company, dedicated to portraying the African-American experience on-screen.

 In later years, as he began to emphasize social activism over acting, Belafonte took on fewer film roles, though he did appear in movies directed by his close friend, Sidney Poitier. These included 1972’s Buck and the Preacher and the 1974 comedy Uptown Saturday Night, in which his crime-boss character, Geechy Dan, is a wicked send-up of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone. As he aged, he continued to take on occasional roles in films that had personal meaning to him, like Bobby, about events surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy.  His last film appearance was a powerful one, in Spike Lee’s BlacKKKlansmen (2018) He was over ninety when he played for Lee a civil rights activist describing in horrific detail a Klan lynching.  May he rest in peace.