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Carmen Jones

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6.0/10 • 85

1954-10-281h 45m

DramaRomance

Something Really New! Something Truly Different!

At a parachute factory during WWII, vixen Carmen Jones seduces an engaged soldier to avoid imprisonment.

Directors
Otto Preminger
Editors
Louis R. Loeffler

Top Billed Cast

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  1. Dorothy Dandridge

    Dorothy Dandridge

    Carmen Jones

  2. Harry Belafonte

    Harry Belafonte

    Joe

  3. Pearl Bailey

    Pearl Bailey

    Frankie

  4. Olga James

    Olga James

    Cindy Lou

  5. Joe Adams

    Joe Adams

    Husky Miller

  6. Diahann Carroll

    Diahann Carroll

    Myrt

  7. Brock Peters

    Brock Peters

    Sergeant Brown

  8. Roy Glenn

    Roy Glenn

    Rum Daniels

  9. Nick Stewart

    Nick Stewart

    Dink Franklin

Reviews1

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CinemaSerf Avatar

CinemaSerf

Nov 21, 2022

6/10

To be frank, I struggled with this... Dorothy Dandridge is superb and both she and Harry Belafonte belt out Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrical adaptations of George Bizet's rousing comic opera tunefully; but not particularly stylishly. That may have been down to the relocation of the story from elegant 19th Century Seville to gritty 20th century North Carolina via which it loses much of the vigour and vibrancy of the original story. Instead, it depicts more of a tale of the aspirational grind of African Americans against poverty and oppression and so I found that rather hijacked the original sentiment, somewhat. The narrative is also, frequently, very disjointed. It was never meant to be a straightforward love story: "Carmen" isn't actually a very nice woman - and her noble lover "Joe" is really just a means to an end for her, leaving his fiancée "Cindy Lou" (Olga James) left high and dry in what is, essentially, a rather sad love triangle. Otto Preminger certainly went out on a limb with it - the extent to which 1950s America was ready for this was very much a gamble; but that doesn't make the film better than it actually is - a wonderfully erudite comment on social mobility and love in America that uses Bizet as it's vehicle; nothing more nothing less...

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Status
Released
Original Language
English
Budget
$750,000.00
Revenue
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Keywords
operaworld war iiseductionmusicalnorth carolinabased on play or musicallovedesirestockade1940safrican american