Carmen Jones

Carmen Jones
seen online via YouTube
11.21.10

Not feeling all that great today so this'll be brief. Seeing The Man With the Golden Arm got me interested in director Otto Preminger, so I looked up his other movies and I saw Carmen Jones was on YouTube, so I watched that. I never was a big opera fan, yet I was surprised at how familiar some of the tunes already were to me - having heard them, I suppose, through other pop culture outlets. Watching it, I was reminded of some of the other things Preminger biographer Foster Hirsch talked about at the Loews Friday night - for example, Preminger's willingness to keep the camera on an actor during an important scene.

Not having seen the original opera Carmen, I can't draw comparisons between the two. The ending did shock me, though. One wonders if this were a fully original movie whether they'd go in that direction or not. I was impressed by the singing too. It really felt like opera singing, not singing for a Hollywood musical. Even secondary characters had marvelous voices. And yeah, there was a certain sense of pride in seeing a black movie from back in the day done so well.

I might've first gotten a sore throat on Saturday, but by yesterday it definitely got worse. I was out in the city for no particular reason and by the time I came home I had just enough energy to watch the movie. So now I'm hopped up on pills waiting for this to pass.