Monday, Nov. 01, 1954

The New Pictures

Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger; 20th Century-Fox). The rattle of the cash register does not often serve as the drum roll of social progress. With this picture it may. Otto Preminger's Hollywood version of Billy Rose's Broadway version of Georges Bizet's grand opera seems sure to be a big hit. It also seems likely that the picture will fling somewhat wider the gates of opportunity for Negro entertainers in Hollywood. For in this picture the actors present themselves not merely as racial phenomena but as individuals, and they put across a Carmen that may blister the rear walls of many a movie house.

All this is the more remarkable because the very idea of doing a black Carmen is a pretty obvious device for converting color into coin. Furthermore, there is a musical objection to the scheme. Bizet wrote French romantic music that, as many critics feel, is hardly even suitable to its original Spanish subject. With back-country U.S. Negroes, it goes about as well as pink champagne at a hoedown. On top of this, Oscar Hammerstein II dipped his big toe in the Mississippi mud and wrote some lyrics that should be thrown back to the catfish. Fortunately, he also supplied a book that is considerably better than the original libretto, with a shift of the plot to Jacksonville, Fla., and into high colloquial gear.

Carmen Jones (Dorothy Dandridge) is a fold girl in a parachute factory during World War II. She has every man of the military guard wrapped up--every one except Corporal Joe (Harry Belafonte), who loves Cindy Lou (Olga James). But one day Carmen gets in a hair-tearing fight with another working girl, and off to the pokey she goes with Corporal Joe. On the way she lures the corporal beyond the call of duty, and escapes.

When Joe gets out of the guardhouse, Carmen gets the poor boy into hot water again, and leaves him to stew in it while she joins the camp-following of Husky Miller (Joe Adams), the heavyweight champ. The green-eyed monster takes care of the rest of the plot.

At its best, the original Carmen is pattern passion: a rose, a flame and a blade, woven into drama as formal as a Spanish dance. In Carmen Jones the dance is a ring of savages in firelight, jumping any way the devil pulls the strings, terrible and beautiful and simple as God's chillun without their wings.

Energy, in fact, is the essence of this picture; the audience is not merely stimulated, it is all but electrocuted. Even the huge CinemaScope screen seems hardly big enough to carry the mass scenes. And yet, through the pelt of colors and the whirl of action, Carmen herself holds the eye--like a match burning steadily in a tornado. Actress Dandridge employs to perfection the method of the coquette: by never giving more than she has to, she hints that she has more than she has given--and sometimes even more than she really has to give.

Carmen's singing, fully equal to the other sides of her performance, cannot be credited to Singer Dandridge. Her voice was found to be too light, and Marilynn Home's was skillfully dubbed in. LeVern Hutcherson does the singing for Actor Belafonte, and does it handsomely. Belafonte seems a rather Sunday-go-to-meetin' type to attract a Carmen, but he makes the big scenes convincing. Pearl Bailey, through the second half of the film, lolls around superbly under feather boas, dragging her weight in rhinestones and "livin' off de fatheads of de land." And in one scene, using her own inimitable vocal cords, she belts out the Chanson Boheme as they never heard it in old Bohemia.

The Adventures of Hajji Baba (Allied Artists; 20th Century-Fox). In the old days, when a Hollywood studio wanted a famous composer to write background music for a film, it had to play an expensive game of Haydn seek; nowadays, the film colony has a sort of Bach yard full of kept musical geniuses. The current favorite is a man called Dimitri Tiomkin, who has filled in the awkward pauses of High Noon, Cyrano de Bergerac and many other recent pictures with stuff that one critic called "Kaffee-Klatchaturian."

With Hajji Baba, Composer Tiomkin rises above all that. He has not written his score to fit the film; the film has apparently been written to fit his score. The compliment is a dubious one. Allegedly based on some 19th century picaresques about Persia by Author James Morier, Hajji Baba is all too obviously based on nothing but some old Bagdad sets that Producer Walter Wanger found around Hollywood. From there out it's silks of Ind. accents of Chi. on with the swarth and out with the nautch. A heavy navel bombardment in rich color is followed by dialogue ("Allah be praised!") and swarms of half-naked warrior women who kill their male captives with too much kindness. Enter Hajji the Barber himself (John Derek), who goes in for close shaves and comes out with a distant princess (Elaine Stewart).

All this is trussed together by hundreds of yards of Composer Tiomkin's sound track--a sort of Faroukish turn ("Come to my tent, O my beloved") on the old snake-dance tune. It may not be much as music, but it's perfect as a truss.

The Bob Mathias Story (Allied Artists), in purely cinematic terms, is nothing more than a wagonload of newsreel clips hitched to a star. But that hardly matters, since track-and-field Wizard Bob Mathias (TIME, July 21, 1952) is a dazzling star to watch. He plays himself in this modest picture, which straightforwardly takes him from his high-school days in Tulare, Calif, to the 1948 Olympic Games in London, where, at 17, he surprised the world by winning the decathlon; then on to Stanford, where he played some first-class football; and finally to the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, where he won the decathlon a second time.

Beyond the action shots, the film has little to say, although there is a passing attempt at showing how a white-blooded American Boy (Mathias once had anemia) can become a great athlete. The girl friend in the picture, as well as in real life, is now Mathias' wife Melba, who may have the makings of a genuine actress. Her husband will probably be remembered as a great athlete.

The Yellow Balloon (Marble Arch; Allied Artists) is a neat little British thriller about an ingenuous, sober-faced little boy in the clutches of a mean hoodlum. The child, Frankie (Andrew Ray), playfully grabs a chum's balloon, and in the chase sees his friend topple to death in a bombed-out London building. Having watched this episode, the villain (William Sylvester) moves in on the stupefied Frankie with the friendly assurance that the police would never believe the truth. The boy is thus caught up in a subtle blackmail game that ends, of course, in a wild chase through the city's underground tunnels. The cops close in just as the picture is about to end.

Actor Ray. a small, 15-year-old youngster with big eyes and bigger talent, moves through his nightmare in a state of shock, ready to believe, as gullible children often are, that the world of grownups is a fiery ogre waiting to feed on small boys in trouble. With Director J. Lee Thompson ably pulling the strings, The Yellow Balloon manages to picture for once the nameless and perhaps impenetrable barrier that separates loving, baffled parents from fear-ridden children.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.