Carmen Jones

By Richard Corliss | February 4, 2008 | +

Everett

Director: Otto Preminger

Year Released: 1954

Cast: Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey, Olga James, Joe Adams

“Tall, tan and terrific” was Dorothy Dandridge’s self-appraisal. Who could disagree? The pretty singer-dancer-actress had been in movies since she was a kid, dancing with the Nicholas Brothers to “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in the 1940 Sun Valley Serenade, and a decade later she was playing a jungle princess in a Tarzan movie. In 1954, when Otto Preminger decided to film the Broadway hit Carmen Jones (Oscar Hammerstein II’s black-cast reworking of the Bizet opera), he cast Dandridge to play the cigar-factory Circe. Or, rather, to “speak” Carmen: the young soprano Marilyn Horne did the singing. No matter that Dandridge was only a half-Carmen, audiences liked her and the Hollywood establishment loved her. She got the first Academy Award nomination for a black performer in a leading role.

She had a prom queen’s prettiness — a domesticated beauty, she was close to Halle Berry, who played her in a TV movie — but Dandridge could also strut sexily, prowling with a feline’s predatory grace around Harry Belafonte, who played her hapless lover Joe. Even if Hollywood was not yet color-blind, it couldn’t ignore her luster. If there were roles for an alluring, all-purpose glamour goddess, she got them. Oh, sorry, Dorothy, we’re all out of those this year. She played a few more sultry sex kittens and was disposed of. Unlucky in her choice of men (including Harold Nicholas and Preminger), Dandridge grew depressed and, in 1965, took too many pills and killed herself. She was 41.

Next: The Defiant Ones

Related Topics: Carmen Jones, Drama, Musical, Romance

The Defiant Ones

By Richard Corliss | February 4, 2008 | +

Everett

Director: Stanley Kramer

Year Released: 1958

Cast: Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier, Theodore Bikel, Charles McGraw, Lon Chaney Jr.

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Sidney Poitier was fortunate and cursed: lucky to be the first black man to become a full movie star, unlucky to arrive in the 50s, when Hollywood tried to atone for its guilty racial conscience by creating parables of black sanctity under white oppression. So Poitier got to be a credit to his race first, then an emblem of a sleepy industry’s slow ethical awakening, and only last an actor. He bore up stoically as a black doctor in the 1950 No Way Out, was a tough teen with a liberal heart in The Blackboard Jungle and here, in Stanley Kramer’s Oscar-nominated drama, did a stretch as Noah Cullen, an escaped prisoner manacled to Tony Curtis’s racist con Joker Jackson. It was a strong role, but heavy on the smoldering suffering of someone unjustly condemned for the crime of being black. Really, how many different ways are there to play Jesus?

Lenny Bruce found The Defiant Ones so risible that he built a routine around it, ending with this grandly intoned moral: “To play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ you need the black keys and the darkies.” But to the credit of the movie (co-written by the blacklisted Nedrick Young), the movie doesn’t underline the allegory. It works as a character-driven chase movie; it’s as if Native Son‘s Bigger Thomas, on the run from the law, suddenly discovered he was the Siamese twin of a nasty redneck. And Poitier gets to show a streak of exasperation at his plight. For the handsome, soft-spoken actor, rage was not an option. Five years later, he won a Best Actor Oscar — first ever for a black in a leading role — as the Christlike vagabond helping a convent of nuns in Lilies of the Field. Better to play Jesus than Pullman car porters.