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.

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)

Joseph N. Welch, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott in Anatomy of a Murder

Paul Biegler: James Stewart
Laura Manion: Lee Remick
Lt. Frederick Manion: Ben Gazzara
Parnell Emmett McCarthy: Arthur O'Connell
Maida Rutledge: Eve Arden
Mary Pilant: Kathryn Grant
Claude Dancer: George C. Scott
Judge Weaver: Joseph N. Welch

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Wendell Mayes
Based on a novel by John D. Voelker (as Robert Traver)
Cinematography: Sam Leavitt
Music: Duke Ellington

An exceptional film, far more deserving of the year's best picture Oscar than the bombastic Ben-Hur (William Wyler), Anatomy has a lot of great things going for it: the wonderful courtroom conflict between old Hollywood pro James Stewart and Method-trained newcomer George C. Scott; the tension and volatility of Ben Gazzara as the defendant; the presence of such scene-stealers as Arthur O'Connell and Eve Arden in the supporting cast, along with other character actor stalwarts like Murray Hamilton, John Qualen, Orson Bean, Howard McNear, and Jimmy Conlin. And even the "stunt casting" of non-actor Joseph N. Welch, famous for the integrity he showed in his confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings five years earlier, pays off handsomely, with Welch bringing both gravitas and humor to his role as the trial judge. The soundtrack by Duke Ellington also adds a touch of greatness to the movie, which  David Thomson calls "magnificent." Where I think it falls short of magnificence is in the treatment of the rape victim played by Lee Remick. There is, of course, some ambiguity remaining in the film as to whether she was in fact raped, but the part as written by Wendell Mayes and the performance as directed by Preminger turns the presumed victim into an air-headed sex kitten. It's possible that Hollywood, so long precluded by the Production Code from even treating the subject of sexual assault, hadn't yet developed a grammar and vocabulary for dealing with the subject. Remick was a fine actress, and she does manage to show moments of vulnerability in her performance, but the general impression of the character given by the film verges on the despicable "she was asking for it." Preminger had been taunting the Code since The Moon Is Blue (1954) and The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), challenging the strictures on language (the words "virgin" and "seduce") in the former and drug use in the latter. Anatomy continued the assault on prudishness, though few who watch it today will be shocked by its rather clinical discussion of whether Laura Mannion was indeed raped, or be inclined to sniff daintily, as Time magazine did in its review, that the film "seems less concerned with murder than with anatomy."