Notes of a Native Son

“Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough” was first published in Commentary in January 1955 as “Life Straight in De Eye.” Carmen Jones was a 1954 American musical film produced and directed by Otto Preminger. The film was based on the 1943 Broadway musical of the same name, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, and set to the music of the 1875 Georges Bizet opera, Carmen. The film featured an all-Black cast and ended up being enormously profitable. The basic story line through these various productions is that the beautiful and lustful Carmen seduces a naïve soldier. The soldier abandons his childhood sweetheart and deserts his military duties, only to eventually lose Carmen to a more glamorous adversary, after which the soldier kills Carmen in a jealous rage. In the original opera, Carmen is depicted as a Gypsy woman; in Carmen Jones, she is a lower-class Black woman. Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte play the leads in the film.

Baldwin’s review is negative. He does not like the acting, the singing, or the dramatic narrative arc of the film. For Baldwin, the romance, tragedy, and eroticism of the film, central to the story’s appeal since the original Bizet opera, is reduced to vulgar and sterile misrepresentations of these things. The all-Black cast, a rarity for Hollywood in the 1950s, makes the film significant.

Baldwin observes that it is one of the first, and certainly the most self-conscious, pairings of race and sex for a Hollywood production at that point—although as Baldwin himself has noted elsewhere, the Black image on screen has always been a sexualized one, going back at least to Birth of a Nation in 1915. For Baldwin, the sexualization of Dorothy Dandridge is easily accomplished on screen; and yet the same cannot be said for Harry Belafonte. The Black male, writes Baldwin, remains too fraught with danger and vengeance for Hollywood to handle. What makes the erotic material of Carmen Jones work is the simple fact that Black bodies are always and already associated with sex in the public imaginary.