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"Hello, Heat-Wave. Introduce yourself." She enters in a hot-pink skirt to unsettle the browns and grays of a North Carolina parachute factory, Dorothy Dandridge moving like a bush fire to declare her philosophy to the straight-arrow corporal (Harry Belafonte): "You go for me, and I'm taboo." "Habanera" in the mess hall, "Séguedille" aboard the Air Force jeep, the prisoner puts her legs up on the shoulders of the reluctant keeper. Twisted belt and bitten peach figure in the seduction in her hometown cabin, the camera pans from their kiss to the fruit squashed against an astrology wheel on the wall, one unbroken, mobile take among many. A burning spirit, a carnality in defiance of the Reaper himself. "Let the old buzzard flap his wings right over me. Till he comes and gets me, I got a lotta livin' to do." Not Welles' Haitian Shakespeare but Oscar Hammerstein's wartime Bizet, unfurled by Otto Preminger across the CinemaScope rectangle with an avid Black cast. The Louisiana nightclub glows like a jewel box amidst weeping willows, Pearl Bailey brings down the house with "Gypsy Song" à la Mae West, toreador duties fall on the heavyweight pugilist (Joe Adams) who jumps off his convertible to hungrily eye the heroine. "You know two-timin' ain't my speed." "Just shift gears and join the female race." A sultry sister of the opaque temptresses from Laura and Fallen Angel, Carmen hightails it to Chicago and presents her painted toes for the AWOL flyboy to blow on, cf. Scarlet Street. It all comes down to a ringside storage closet, as befits the purposefully depoeticized stylization. "You promised you was gonna be mine till the end. That's one promise you're gonna keep." Godard avouches an influence on his own splendid abstraction, Prénom Carmen. With Olga James, Brock Peters, Diahann Carroll, Roy Glenn, and Nick Stewart.
--- Fernando F. Croce |