Knowing instinctively how to “let the camera come to her,” Dorothy with her director’s help pitches her acting precisely for film rather than the opera house or the Broadway stage. When she sings (with Marilyn Horne’s voice), the show, as Preminger intended, doesn’t stop for vocal display. For this down-to-earth Carmen singing is only one of her modes of seduction.
In 1954, in addition to being sexually and racially transgressive, Carmen Jones was also an artistic gamble. Preminger’s goal, turning an opera into a realistic dramatic film, was all but unprecedented at the time and, at least in prospect, insurmountably paradoxical. To make the film conform to the visual codes of movie realism he had to declare war on the conventions of both musical films and opera. Although he could have chosen to protect the unreality of musical performance by embedding the songs in artificial settings, he reasoned that a tinseled mise-en-scène that would be appropriate for light material would be jarring for a dramatic story. And it might alienate or puzzle the general moviegoing public he was hoping to reach.
To translate Carmen into a full-fledged film with popular appeal, he had to find ways of “naturalizing” Bizet’s score. The wisdom of his approach is revealed in Carmen’s first aria, “Dat’s Love” (“Habañera” in the opera), performed in an unmusical setting, the cafeteria of the parachute factory where Carmen works. As she sings, Carmen places food on her tray, exchanges greetings and insults with co-workers, and cozies up to Joe, her next quarry. Preminger’s direction, treating singing as a realistic, casual activity, an extension of speaking, significantly closes a breach between the imperatives of movie realism and those of musical performance.
Although Preminger was everywhere prepared to sacrifice musical purity for dramatic impact, he nonetheless filmed musical performance tactfully, refusing to allow the language of film—editing, camera movement, lighting—to compete with or to artificially enhance the score. His restrained approach works beautifully for the intimate songs; for the big production numbers, however, Preminger’s invisible movie realism is occasionally too tame. In a scene in a café, for instance, when Pearl Bailey launches into a rousing rendition of “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum” (“Gypsy Song” in Bizet), the camera remains on a group of characters at the bar as dancers are glimpsed in deep focus. In the absence of intercutting or reframing the audience is never allowed to appreciate the energy of the dancers. Preminger handles “Stan’ Up and Fight” (“Toreador Song” in Bizet), the entrance song for the prizefighter, in a similarly sedate way, with the camera placed at a distance from the action. But the number calls for a touch of razzle-dazzle, a bit of cinematic bravura in which at least momentarily the film itself should spin along with the musical rhythm.
Preminger’s staging of Joe’s aria, “Dis Flower” (“Flower Song” in Bizet)—the music expresses the character’s passion for the woman who has
Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge) sings “Dat’s Love” (“Habañera”) in a realistic setting, the cafeteria of a parachute factory, in Carmen Jones.
already seduced and abandoned him—is also too becalmed, another instance of the filmmaker seeming to resist the lure of Bizet’s music. Working on a chain gang, Joe, shirtless, performs the number against a panoramic mountain vista that could have been imported from River of No Return. But the implied connection between the deep sexual longing conveyed in the song and the spectacular setting is obscure. Filmed in one unbroken take, the number has a static quality reinforced by Harry Belafonte’s febrile performance—there isn’t enough going on in his face and body to hold the audience’s interest for the duration of the shot.
In “My Joe” (“Micaela’s Air” in Bizet), as Cindy Lou searches for Joe in empty locales (a boxing club, a rickety stairway, a grim city street) that foreshadow her bereavement, the correlation between song and setting is far more potent. This time, treating the aria (magnificently sung by Olga James) as a miniature drama with a structure all its own, Preminger effectively uses intercutting for visual variety. He also stages Joe’s final aria in a dramatically charged setting, a dark basement room in which the character strangles Carmen. In the number, his face suffused with passion, Harry Belafonte, who throughout the film is too guarded for a character gripped by lust, is more expressive than at any other point.
Preminger makes some strong visual choices in opening up the story beyond the limited settings of Hammerstein’s “revue.” An unedited scene early on in a car, as Carmen goes to work on Joe, has become a celebrated early use of CinemaScope composition. Initially, the two characters are separated by a window divider, but as she moves in on her prey Carmen moves from her side of the car to Joe’s. Preminger inserts a lively action sequence in which Carmen hurls herself out of the car, jumps onto the top of a moving train, and then leaps off the train onto a hillside—a cinematic way of representing the character’s impulsive physicality When Carmen returns with Joe to her family house in a small black community overrun with hanging moss and sweltering with humidity, the atmosphere oozes sex, and Carmen, grinding her body against Joe’s, slowly takes off his belt. (Was Joe Breen looking the other way?) A boxing ring scene (shot in Olympic Stadium in downtown Los Angeles) explodes with a pent-up violence that reflects Joe’s growing rage.
“For a whole generation of blacks, Carmen Jones was the film,” historian Donald Bogle recalled.
It is still an important film, as is Dandridge’s performance. It is still one of the great black films. For many blacks, the film and Dorothy remain alive, passed on from one generation to another, without the larger white culture acknowledging it. What makes it so compelling to audiences still—and surely Preminger understood this—is that it is a film in which an African-American woman is not only at the center, but she is making her own choices and is in control, unlike the way Hollywood had previously depicted black women, as in Cabin in the Sky and Pinky. Carmen lives in a world where men are calling the shots, and yet she matches them. And there is an intimacy between Dandridge and Belafonte that was new for black audiences. Their romantic scenes still have a contemporary kick and edge.40
In the weeks before the world premiere of Carmen Jones, Otto personally attended to every detail of advertising and promotion and monitored Dorothy’s extensive publicity campaign. At the same time he was in rehearsal in New York for a television special to be presented live and in color on NBC on October 18, only ten days before the world premiere of his second independent film. For two intense weeks, Otto commuted daily from Manhattan to the Kaufman Studios in Queens to rehearse Tonite at 8:30, a trio of one-acts (“Red Peppers,” “Still Life,” and “Fumed Oak”) by Noël Coward. Early on, it was apparent that he was in trouble. “He didn’t know anything about live television,” recalled actor Larkin Ford (then known as Wil West), who had had extensive experience in the then new medium. “We all felt Otto looked down at the medium, and he made the mistake of trying to transfer film technique to what we were doing. He set camera and lights as for a movie, and he was so concerned about the camera—he didn’t seem to be aware that he’d be in front of a monitor pushing buttons—that there was no time for us actors.”
The stellar company included Trevor Howard, Gig Young, Ilka Chase (with whom, years before, Otto had had a fling), and Gloria Vanderbilt, but the only performer Preminger seemed to pay any heed to was Ginger Rogers. “Ginger was the star and she was very nervous about the show,” as Ford recalled. “She knew she needed direction and she demanded it. Otto did work closely with her, and she really listened to him. For the rest of us, he’d bark directions from a distance. His approach was so different from that of Arthur Penn, with whom I had worked on live television. Penn knew a lot about acting and understood actors and he would get up very close to each of us.”41
At the beginning of the third week of rehearsals, as Preminger continued to be preoccupied with technical details (and, no doubt, with Dorothy and Carmen Jones), there had still been no complete run-through. “He had no sense of what was needed to play this kind of materia
l. Otto didn’t ‘get’ Noël Coward,” Larkin Ford felt.
Rehearsing Ginger Rogers and Gig Young in Tonite at 8:30 for NBC, the directors misbegotten foray into live television.
As tensions began to build, I became the chosen one on the set. Whatever I did, he grumbled. I don’t think he had cast me just to humiliate me, but I was miscast and he was responsible for miscasting me. Gig Young was miscast too, but Gig couldn’t have cared less; he just sailed through and said the pay was good. Trevor Howard, who thought Otto’s direction was nothing, was bored, and tiny Gloria Vanderbilt just smiled all the time. Otto called himself a liberal, but a true liberal doesn’t treat people the way he did; I have a feeling he would have voted for George Bush.42
With a live performance in less than a week and three essentially undirected playlets in shambles, something had to give. Something did. On October 15, three days before the show was scheduled to air, NBC producer Fred Coe walked onto the set to talk to Preminger. The next day, Otto wasn’t there, and Coe, noted for his diplomacy, announced that “ ‘Mr. Preminger will not be with us. I will be with you through the presentation.’
Otto was never seen again,” Ford said. “He had been fired offstage. We did feel sorry for him, a man of that stature to be summarily dismissed for incompetence. But he was incompetent. Otto had great confidence in himself and it must have been disturbing to him when he discovered that he hadn’t been prepared.”43 When the show aired, however, Otto Preminger received credit as producer and director, and in taped segments, shifty-eyed and noticeably ill at ease, he introduced each of the one-acts. Tonite at 8:30 is a classic example of primitive early television. The sets are wobbly; the actors’ timing is always a beat or two off; the pacing is sluggish. Technical glitches—a microphone covers Gig Young’s face for a moment; a door sticks on one of Ginger Rogers’s exits—add to the blurred focus. In later years Preminger would appear regularly as a talk show guest, but he never again directed for television.
The reception of Carmen Jones at the end of the month, however, more than compensated for Otto’s disappointing television debut. He was elated by Dorothy’s reviews and basked in his role as a star maker. On February 12, 1955, as Preminger had assured her she would be, Dorothy was nominated as best actress by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the first black woman ever to be recognized in this category. Otto repeatedly cautioned Dorothy, however, that Hollywood was not ready to give her the best actress Oscar and that there was no chance she would be making a triumphant walk to the stage of the Pantages Theatre on Oscar night. And indeed, when the awards were handed out on March 30, the best actress Oscar was given to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl. (Not until nearly forty years later, when Halle Berry was honored for Monster’s Ball, would a black woman win a best actress Oscar.)
As she continued a punishing schedule of public and nightclub appearances, Dorothy signed a contract with Darryl Zanuck to make one picture a year for a three-year period. Despite his own hectic schedule, Preminger began to direct Dorothy’s cabaret act. In ironic contrast to how he had presented her in Carmen Jones, Otto desexualized Dorothy’s nightclub performance. As Earl Mills observed, “Dorothy thought of herself as a patrician lady of elegance and wanted to be a lady, a nun, onstage.”44 Otto bought her a black, loose-fitting, floor-length gown and worked with her in selecting a less jazz-based repertoire. But like live television, the nightclub was not Preminger’s métier, and when Dorothy opened her Preminger-inspired act at a Miami Beach hotel, it was, according to Earl Mills, “an abysmal failure. She soon went back to the old Dorothy Dandridge. Otto’s hand was constantly in evidence in her professional life. Had he been just her lover it would have been better but he wanted to control every facet of her life.”45
Although she would sometimes complain when Otto would arrive, unannounced, at one of her openings—his take-charge personality could enflame her anxiety—by and large she was a compliant pupil. Otto represented a cultivated world she longed to be part of. He taught her about art and literature as well as about fine furniture and fine dining. He helped her to buy a new home (which, he said, befit her new status as an international star) and to furnish it in exquisite taste. And at this point, Dorothy hoped that being the dutiful Galatea to Preminger’s bombastic Pygmalion would lead to marriage.
In late February Dorothy and her director attended the film’s premieres in London and Berlin (in both cities the film would play for more than a year in exclusive first-run engagements). There was no Paris opening, however, because a technicality in French copyright laws prevented the film from being shown in France. Nonetheless, in an out-of-competition screening Carmen Jones was selected to open the Cannes Film Festival in May. To be present, Dorothy had to negotiate for a week’s leave of absence from her engagement at the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. On May 7, she and Otto departed for France, where on their arrival at the Nice airport they were met by a cordon of international journalists and photographers. They posed for pictures for over an hour before they were ushered through the throngs to a long, cream-colored Cadillac, in which they were driven to the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. The night of the screening, dressed in a white gown and white fur stole, Dorothy arrived on the arm of her director. Gallantly, Preminger moved aside to allow his star to face the flashbulbs on her own. She struck the pose of a haughty, radiant diva who looked as if she had conquered the world; and that night, when the film was received with a thunderous ovation, she had. Perhaps because they were in a foreign country, and perhaps feeling protected by the fact that they were honored guests of the world’s most prestigious film festival, the director and his star were seen together in public throughout their brief stay. Not only on official occasions but also at private luncheons and dinners and for drinks on the Carlton terrace, they were an item: Otto and Dorothy. And anyone with eyes could have spotted the fact that they were crazy about each other. More than gratitude was contained in the star’s rapt gaze at her director.
For Preminger, the international acclaim at Cannes was the beginning of an illustrious decade at the top of the Hollywood hierarchy. For Dorothy, however, it was the beginning of the end. Soon after returning from Cannes, Dorothy agreed to appear in a supporting role as an Asian in the film of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical play The King and I. Otto, however, urged her to turn down the offer, assuring Dorothy that if she accepted the role she would be relegated ever after to the category of a supporting player.
Preminger directing Gary Cooper in The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, the only dull court-room drama in the filmmakers career.
Acting on her mentor’s advice, she withdrew. “Preminger, usually adroitly pragmatic and perceptive, was in this instance blind to movieland realities,” as Donald Bogle pointed out.46 And as Dorothy herself was to reflect, “My decline may have dated from that decision. Otto was sincere. He had never believed in playing bit parts as an actor himself, and he passed on his convictions to me. Though he was honest, his advice could have been in some part my undoing. I would have received seventy-five thousand dollars for playing Tuptim, and I would have been in a picture seen by millions. [And] it would not have been the role of a Negro.”47 (Rita Moreno, also non-Asian, got the part.)
At the time that he was immersed in supervising Dorothy’s life and career and had already begun planning his next independent project, The Man with the Golden Arm, Preminger accepted an assignment from producer Milton Sperling to direct The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell. Otto admired the defiant protagonist, Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, assistant chief of the Army Air Service, who provoked his own court-martial in the 1920s in order to expose the indifference of his military commanders to developing a strong air force. And he was enticed by the fact that the film’s lengthy third act is set in his favorite dramatic location, a courtroom. It’s possible to see why Preminger was tempted by the material, as well as by the chance to work with the film’s star, Gary Cooper. But he should have passed.
Otto d
idn’t like the original script, by Emmet Lavery (whose play The First Legion had been his farewell production in Vienna), and at his insistence Milton Sperling hired the speedy Ben Hecht, who in less than a week rewrote to Preminger’s specifications. (When the film received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay, Emmet Lavery and Milton Sperling were credited as the cowriters.) Throughout the shooting, which took place in the summer of 1955 from June 18 to August 13, Otto fulminated against Sperling’s indecisiveness. But he enjoyed working with Gary Cooper, always courteous, reliable, and understated. Sandy Gardner, frequently on the set, recalled that Otto was “very gentle with Cooper, and very solicitous about the star’s lighting and makeup. Cooper was playing a character who was younger than himself, and I saw Otto change the lighting so Gary’s dewlaps would not be visible.”48
Preminger and Cooper, however, made the curious choice of turning Billy Mitchell, a firebrand, into a weary figure who seems to embrace defeat. The night before he is to testify, the character is ill with malaria and the next day in the courtroom he seems physically as well as intellectually depleted. Preminger reinforces the downbeat atmosphere by pinning the haunted-looking Cooper against a brick wall in isolating one-shots. The most energetic character is Mitchell’s nemesis, the chief prosecuting attorney, played by Rod Steiger with a full cut of ham, the kind Preminger usually trimmed to the bone. Although the film’s strangely icy, dispirited portrait of a mutinous character typifies Preminger’s resistance to conventional Hollywood heroism, the script isn’t strong enough to support a revisionist approach.
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