It’s America in the 1940s, and World War II is still raging. Carmen Jones has started a fight in the parachute factory she works in, and it falls to Corporal Joe to escort her to jail, miles from the military base where both of them work. Joe is engaged to be married, and just wants to get his duty over with. Jones has other plans. She’s flirting with him — hard — as soon as they’re on the road away from the base. Then Joe makes a poor navigation choice and drives the Jeep into a stream, forcing them to walk from there. Little does he know that he doesn’t stand a chance against Jones’s seductive skills. Little does Jones know that it will prove her own undoing, too.
Carmen Jones was the second installment in Fair Haven Library’s film series “A Century of Black Filmmaking,” which began on Feb. 9 with 1920’s Within Our Gates and concludes on Feb. 23 with the Marvel blockbuster Black Panther.
For Kirk Morrison, the library’s branch manager, the film series timed with Black History Month is intended to both give a taste of Black cinema and give a quick sense of its history. “With a century’s worth of movies we could choose, there’s a ton of possibilities,” Morrison said. That they had to use something in the library’s collection was barely a limitation. Within Our Gates, produced, written, and directed by Oscar Micheaux, was a logical starting point, as it’s “the first, or at least the oldest surviving, film that has a Black director and a mostly Black cast,” Morrison said. The plot centers around a romance but addresses racial violence and white supremacy, including lynching. When it was released, Morrison said, “Within Our Gates probably was only playing at Black cinemas that served Black people, and probably very few whites probably even saw the movie.”
The year 2018’s Black Panther — the movie library staff knew they wanted to end the series with — also had a mostly Black cast and crew, but in contrast to Within Our Gates, director Ryan Coogler had “a nine-figure budget,” and with the Marvel machine behind it, the film saw a huge worldwide release. “Everybody identified with Black Panther.”
The trajectory from Within Our Gates to Black Panther, covering nearly a century, seemed clear. With one more slot to fill, “what we were trying to figure out was what we would show in between,” Morrison said. The year 1954’s Carmen Jones, like the other two films, “had an almost entirely Black cast” and in the 1950s “would have been at mainstream cinemas.” The studio took a chance on the movie, filming it in Cinemascope, “the big flash-bang way to show movies” at the time. Carmen Jones in some ways looked backward — it’s based on the 1875 Bizet opera Carmen — and at the same time attempted to be forward-thinking.
Morrison.
Whether Carmen Jones succeeded in its goals is an open question. Following the opera (and the 1943 Broadway show on which it was based), the movie tells the story of Carmen Jones (Dorothy Dandridge), a woman who works in a parachute factory during World War II, who manages to seduce Corporal Joe (Harry Belafonte) away from his fiancee Cindy Lou (Olga James). Utterly smitten, Joe goes AWOL from the military and follows Carmen to Louisiana and then to Chicago. In the Windy City things sour between the hours. Having to remain in hiding from the military police who are searching for him as a deserter, Joe becomes a jealous recluse, while Carmen resumes her flamboyant and seductive ways, falling in with a boxer named Husky Miller (Joe Adams). Tragedy, perhaps inevitably, ensues.
To the modern viewer Carmen Jones is quite the melodrama, which critics noticed at the time. The film enjoyed a successful theatrical release and was nominated for several awards, including two Oscars, one for Dandridge for best actress — the first ever Black woman nominated. But the New York Times called it a “crazy, mixed-up film,” arguing that while the story was “poignant” the film’s treatment of it was “lurid and lightly farcical, with the African American characters presented by Mr. Preminger as serio-comic devotees of sex.” A thoroughly unimpressed James Baldwin found the movie to be an inglorious mess, and wondered if “Negroes are really going to become the ciphers this movie makes them out to be; but, since they have until now survived public images even more appalling, one is encouraged to hope, for their sake and the sake of the Republic, that they will continue to prove themselves incorrigible.”
At the same time, it has its moments. Watching Dandridge on screen it’s easy to understand why she was nominated for an Oscar. A particular scene in a Louisiana nightclub feels like a time capsule. Actress, singer, and author Pearl Bailey, as a friend of Carmen’s, walks away with every scene she’s in; it’s a deep pleasure to see her perform. The scene also includes a cameo by legendary jazz drummer Max Roach.
Placing Carmen Jones as the middle link between Within Our Gates and Black Panther also raises interesting questions about how popular culture reflects social progress. The increasing ability of Black-led movies to reach White audiences — and in Black Panther’s case, worldwide audiences — shows, on one level, a sense of real improvement in terms of opportunities for Black artists.
But Baldwin’s keen excoriation of Carmen Jones at the time is worth bearing in mind. His takedown starts by pointing out “Hollywood’s peculiar ability to milk, so to speak, the cow and the goat at the same time — and then to peddle the results as ginger ale,” and states that “Twentieth Century Fox has brought it off” and “at the same time they have triumphantly not brought it off.” In a particularly sharp turn in his argument, he observes that “Carmen Jones has Negro bodies before the camera and Negroes are associated in the public mind with sex. Since darker races always seem to have for lighter races an aura of sexuality, this fact is not distressing in itself. What is distressing is the conjecture this movie leaves one with as to what Americans take sex to be.”
Baldwin’s argument, in essence, is that Carmen Jones pushed against the forces of racial discrimination while simultaneously falling into some of the traps set by white supremacy in fetishizing Black bodies. His view wasn’t the consensus take at the time, but with a half-century’s worth of hindsight, it feels startlingly contemporary. Fair Haven LIbrary’s placing Black Panther in that historical trajectory allows us to watch — and rewatch — the movie in a different light.
Black Panther is, in this reporter’s humble opinion, a much better movie than Carmen Jones. It matters that a Black director was at the helm in avoiding the problems Baldwin focused in on with Carmen Jones. Its status as a breakthrough movie in 2018, its deep resonance with Black people specifically and with all people generally, is not to be diminished. Fifty years from now, though, will it still look the same way? And what will that say about the time we live in, and the time that’s to come?
“A Century of Black Filmmaking” concludes at Fair Haven Library with a screening of Black Panther on Feb. 23 at 5:30 p.m. Visit the New Haven Free Public Library’s event page for more information.