Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954)

Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey in Carmen Jones

Cast: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Olga James, Joe Adams, Brock Peters, Roy Glenn, Nick Stewart, Diahann Carroll. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, based on a book for a musical by Oscar Hammerstein II, an opera by Georges Bizet, Henri Meilhac, and Ludovic Halévy, and a novella by Prosper Mérimée. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Art direction: Edward L. Ilou. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Georges Bizet. 

Turning Georges Bizet's opera Carmen into a stage musical with an all-Black cast set in the American South was not the coolest idea to start with, especially when it resulted in such silliness as turning the bullfighter Escamillo into the prizefighter Husky Miller and the tavern run by Lillas Pastia into a roadhouse run by Billy Pastor. Still, Otto Preminger's film version of Carmen Jones has a lot to recommend it, particularly Dorothy Dandridge's Carmen, a fiery, committed performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress -- the first ever for a Black performer of either sex in a leading role. The theatrical version that premiered in 1943 was designed to be sung by musical theater performers, not opera singers, but when Otto Preminger agreed to direct the film version, he insisted on operatic voices, meaning that even though Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, the film's Joe, were well-known as singers, their roles and others had to be dubbed in the musical numbers. Marilyn Horne, then only 20, hadn't yet developed the vocal depth and flexibility that would make her an operatic superstar, but her voice matched well with Dandridge's speaking voice, so the illusion works. LeVerne Hutcherson was less successful in dubbing for Belafonte, whose own singing voice was so familiar that the disparity with Hutcherson's becomes obvious. But the best vocal performance in the film is probably that of Pearl Bailey, who belts out the Gypsy Song, "Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum," in her own voice and provides one of the movie's high points. The lyrics provided by Oscar Hammerstein II are sometimes banal -- the Toreador Song turns into "Stand Up and Fight Until You Hear the Bell" -- but usually serviceable. Unfortunately, the film falls apart at the end, with a clumsy staging of the final tragic confrontation of Carmen and Joe.   

The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)

The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak, Arnold Stang, Darren McGavin, John Conte, Doro Merande, George E. Stone, George Matthews, Leonid Kinskey, Emile Meyer. Screenplay: Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Production design: Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Under the Production Code, alcohol flowed freely, and drunks were likely to be glamorous like the martini-swigging Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) or lovable like James Stewart's Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950). But drug use was strictly taboo, even when it was depicted as a road to degradation, until Otto Preminger thumbed his nose at the Code with The Man With the Golden Arm. Preminger's film is very much about the degradation, but he deftly avoided making it into a "problem picture" with a "just say no" moral tacked on, mainly by focusing on the character of Frankie Machine, played superbly by Frank Sinatra. When we first meet Frankie he's just gotten out of prison rehab and is determined to go straight and get a job as a drummer with a band. But he's saddled with a clinging wife called Zosh, played (and sometimes overplayed) by Eleanor Parker. She wants him to resume his old underground life as a card dealer rather than risk it as a musician, and couldn't care less if that life involves resuming the drugs provided by Louie (Darren McGavin). Zosh is, or so it seems, confined to a wheelchair after an auto accident in which Frankie was the driver, and after which he married her out of pity. In fact, she's just milking the supposed disability for all it's worth, and when no one's around she gets out of the chair and walks. The marriage to Zosh also put an end to Frankie's involvement with Molly, a b-girl in a strip club. She's played by Kim Novak, an actress whose beautiful blankness always allows us to project whatever the script wants us to see in her. This doesn't make Novak a bad actress, I think, but simply a limited one who works best in films like Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), in which her role is all about the male gaze and its effects. She's perfectly fine here, though her preternatural beauty seems out of place in the drab urban setting of the film, like an orchid in a junkyard. Anyway, as you can guess, Frankie gets hooked again and has to go cold turkey with Molly's help. The Man With the Golden Arm sometimes feels dated: Sam Leavitt's camerawork is often too bright and flatly lighted, showing up the artificiality of the soundstage sets, and Parker and Novak are too glamorous for their roles. But the film works anyway, thanks to the solid dramatic effect produced by Sinatra's performance and the fine support from McGavin and character actor Arnold Stang, who gives a touching performance as Sparrow, a hanger-on devoted to Frankie. Elmer Bernstein's score is a classic, too, as is the  opening title sequence designed by Saul Bass.

Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947)

Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews, and Henry Fonda in Daisy Kenyon

Daisy Kenyon: Joan Crawford
Dan O'Mara: Dana Andrews
Peter Lapham: Henry Fonda
Lucille O'Mara: Ruth Warrick
Mary Angelus: Martha Stewart
Rosamund O'Mara: Peggy Ann Garner
Marie O'Mara: Connie Marshall
Coverly: Nicholas Joy
Lucille's Attorney: Art Baker

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: David Hertz
Based on a novel by Elizabeth Janeway
Cinematography: Leon Shamroy
Art direction: George W. Davis, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler
Music: David Raksin

Daisy Kenyon is an underrated romantic drama from an often underrated director. Otto Preminger gives us an unexpectedly sophisticated look -- given the Production Code's strictures about adultery -- at the relationship of an unmarried woman, Daisy, to two men, one of whom, Dan O'Mara, is married, the other a widowed veteran, Peter Lapham, who is suffering from PTSD -- not only from his wartime experience but also from the death of his wife. It's a "woman's picture" par excellence, but without the melodrama and directorial condescension that the label suggests: Each of the three principals is made into a credible, complex character, not only by the script and director but also by the performances of the stars. Crawford is on the cusp of her transformation into the hard-faced harridan of her later career: She had just won her Oscar for Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), and was beginning to show her age, which was 42, a time when Hollywood glamour becomes hard to maintain. But her Daisy Kenyon has moments of softness and humor that restore some of the glamour even when the edges start to show. Andrews, never a star of the magnitude of either Crawford or Fonda, skillfully plays the charming lawyer O'Mara, trapped into a marriage to a woman who takes her marital frustrations out on their two daughters. Although he is something of a soulless egoist, he finds a conscience when he takes on an unpopular civil rights case involving a Japanese-American -- and loses. Set beside his two best-known performances, in Preminger's Laura (1944) and in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), his work here demonstrates that he was an actor of considerable range and charisma. Fonda is today probably the most admired of the three stars, but he had always had a distant relationship with Hollywood: He suspended his career for three years to enlist in the Navy during World War II, and after making Daisy Kenyon to work out the remainder of his contract with 20th Century-Fox  he made a handful of films before turning his attention to Broadway, where he stayed for eight years, until he was called on to re-create the title role in the film version of Mister Roberts (John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy, 1955). Of the three performances in Daisy Kenyon, Fonda's seems the least committed, but his instincts as an actor kept him on track.