by Naomi Andre
Another strong theme is the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South moving into northern and western urban centers. With the opening scene showing Cindy Lou coming to the military base by bus, she is also deep within a crowd of other black passengers who turn out to be coming to work in the parachute factory next to the military base. This establishing shot that opens the film is strategic not only for setting up the location of the action but also for establishing central themes in the film. Transportation, opportunities in the newly desegregated military, postwar prosperity with both men and women going to work, and crowds of black people dressed well (for work, or especially nicely as in the featured figure of Cindy Lou) are moving peacefully and with purpose—no rioting or protests. All of these activities show us a working-and middle-class black community that is ordered and productive, actively engaged in the postwar American dream.
Watching the opening of the Carmen Jones film might have presented a simple morning commuter scene to the majority audience; however, to a black audience, the beginning sequence signaled a chance of new beginnings, and Cindy Lou’s journey is imbued with even more purpose and excitement as the audience eagerly waits to see where she is going and whom she is meeting. Obviously, she is ready for something important to happen, and we are drawn into her quest. Later in the film Husky Miller and his entourage are presented as passing through Billy Pastor’s in rural Florida as they are on their way to Chicago.28 Not only is Husky Miller heading to the city, his manager and assistant offer to take Carmen and her friends there with them. The quintet “Whizzin’ Away Along de Track” with Carmen, Frankie, Myrt, Dink, and Rum about the clickety-clack of the high-speed train to Chicago is a reference to much more than a casual weekend trip. The movement from Florida to Chicago by train cites a specific journey that is a central part of black history. The hope and energy contained in that number well revitalizes the earlier context it had in Bizet’s opera as one of the few “bright” moments of the work when the exotic bohemian world was on display. In Billy Pastor’s Café the excitement is brought in for the possibility of new horizons with the promise in the refrain that “it only takes a half a day to be a thousand miles away, Come on away, Chicago! Chicago!” Furman and others are right to note the importance Preminger places on transportation as a signifier of social mobility.29 Yet the greater meaning of seeing black bodies travel on public transportation must have resonated deeply with the lived experience of those in the audience who had made such a journey themselves or had family members who had traveled these similar routes.
Though there are references throughout the film that speak directly to black experience during the 1950s, the material from act 2 in Bizet’s opera—the section in Billy Pastor’s Café in the film—presents a particularly dense group of signifiers, some of which other scholars have read in isolation, but not all together. The scene opens focusing on a house-turned-business in the country in the evening. A neon sign marks “Billy Pastor’s Café,” and as the scene moves into the building we see a well-dressed crowd gathering around a bar, sitting, standing, and talking. In this speakeasy-type place the principal characters gather after hours, relaxing and dancing, outside of work and apart from the more commercial, most likely segregated, all-white establishments downtown. As the opening of act 2 in Bizet’s opera, the scene in Lillas Pastia’s tavern is an out-of-the-way inn and with Carmen’s “Chanson bohèmien” and the most exoticized large group scene in the opera where most productions end up with Carmen dancing frenetically on a tabletop. It is out of this scene that Frankie (Pearl Bailey in the role of Carmen’s friend Fresquita) takes up the “Chanson bohèmien,” now called “Beat out Dat Rhythm on a Drum.” As has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere, this number, originally sung by Carmen in the opera but now given to Pearl Bailey, bears a good deal of the dramatic weight that spells out a jungle-infused vision of primitive blackness.30 The choreography, added music, and new text all reference a side of black culture that feels far away from the operatic associations evoked in the rest of the film.
Outside of the public gaze in the 1950s white culture of the film, the allblack speakeasy of Billy Pastor’s provides a different place—a space more private where the main characters can let loose with less uptight behavior and where there is less chance of a white foreman or passerby showing up unpredictably. Even within the all-black filmic world, this scene presents a different racial dynamic with its contained semipublic-private arena. Billy Pastor’s is known within the local black community, but it is public enough to be available to Husky Miller and his crew when they pass through town. Such places were necessary in the Jim Crow segregated South, and such a space is needed in this postwar climate for an all-black film so invested in showing the plight of sympathetic African Americans. These are not gangsters or ruffians; rather, they are respectable people who can entertain themselves (and us in the audience) with let-loose dancing in a properly specified location (the clean, well-lighted Billy Pastor’s Café) on the edge of town.
The moment for the jungle-inspired primitive dancing is strategically choreographed. In a noncredited cameo role, famous jazz drummer Max Roach plays the drums as Bizet’s familiar “Chanson bohèmien” sounds in the background when Carmen enters. After Carmen asks the coat-check woman whether or not Corporal Joe has been around, the music gives way to a drum solo that moves us off Bizet’s score and into an improvised, uncharted black territory. Though Frankie (Pearl Bailey) remains central to the action, we also have a new troupe of dancers who show up—like Max Roach—also uncredited. Several of these dancers were at the beginning of their careers, but were becoming familiar faces (and bodies) in black films, news, and events of the time. To an aware audience, an up-and-coming group of “who’s who,” along with more seasoned artists, appear on the screen. Alvin Ailey (1931–1989) and Carmen de Lavallade (born 1931) are the first dancing couple we see—framed in the mirror in the foyer at the coat-check area. Lavallade (with the long ponytail and white dress with the red roses) and Ailey had worked together at the Lester Horton Dance Theater in Los Angeles (a leading modern-dance studio on the West Coast and one of the first to have an interracial company). Four years after Carmen Jones, Ailey would go on to found his path-breaking Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater company that is still one of the leading dance ensembles around. Lavallade also became an important dancer and choreographer with the Metropolitan Opera ballet, Alvin Ailey’s company, and other theaters on and off Broadway. Two other recognizable dancers at Billy Pastor’s are Carmencita Romero (1914–2001) and Archie Savage (1914–2003), both of whom were Katherine Dunham dancers and had also appeared in Cabin in the Sky (1943).
In act 2 of Johann Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus, Count Orlofsky throws a New Year’s party where, when available, it is customary for visiting famous opera singers who happen to be in town to drop in, make a surprise visit, and sing a verse or short aria at the party. Such an event provides a fun moment for the cast onstage as well as a treat for the audience to see who is in town and has shown up. In a similar vein, the thrill of seeing Max Roach and these uncredited dancers allowed audiences in 1954 to see some familiar as well as emerging new artists in the party atmosphere of Billy Pastor’s. Additionally, for future audiences, even up through the present, it is also exciting to see who was there in Carmen Jones, a film that showcased such a dazzling array of black talent at that time.
The song featured at Billy Pastor’s tavern, “Chanson bohèmien,” is transformed into “Beat out Dat Rhythm on a Drum” and centers this scene on one of the most resonant tropes of the Harlem Renaissance that signaled a black connection to Africa. The presence of the drum—notably the tomtom—was a frequently used sound image to evoke life before the Middle Passage and slavery. When Pearl Bailey specifically mentions the tom-tom, the image is one that she talks about as absorbing a deep feeling inside. “I feel it beatin’ in my bones, it feels like twenty million tom-toms, I know it’s twenty million tom-toms, even when I’m deep inside my bo
nes.” Not an uncomplicated sign, the focus of this number on the drum and the moment when the drum becomes “twenty million tom-toms” sets up several internal references to how deeply embedded this symbol was inside the imagination of people during this time.
An early and important reference to the tom-tom occurred in Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 drama, The Emperor Jones, which was made into a movie with Paul Robeson in 1933. In this drama the title character is haunted by the beating of the tom-tom from the first scene through the final moments; the drum is a vehicle for an imagined past as well as an internalized heartbeat. W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Helene Johnson Hubbell all mention the tom-tom in reference to African music in their writings and poetry.31 William Grant Still opened his orchestral suite Africa with three solo tom-toms (1928), and Shirley Graham (who would later become W. E. B. Du Bois’s second wife) wrote an opera in 1932 called Tom Tom (based on John Womack Vandercook’s 1926 published travel diaries, titled Tom Tom, set in the Caribbean). Perhaps the most striking reference in this scene to tom-toms is in the movie Stormy Weather (1943, 20th Century Fox), which was one of the first all-black-cast movies released by a major studio and contains an extended “African” scene that included “Diga Diga Do, Diga Do Do,” an “African Dance,” and a song that opened with “Hear the Beating of the Tom-Tom.” In Carmen Jones, just moments after the reference to the “twenty million tom-toms,” Pearl Bailey moves on to the final verse of the song and brings the music and dancing to a momentary pause when she sings in the second half of the last stanza, “Tomorrow morning let it rain, tomorrow morning let it pour, tonight we’re in the groove together, ain’t gonna to worry about … Stormy Weather … gonna kick old trouble out the door!” The tempo slows, there is a momentary pause in the otherwise hyper-energetic dancing, and Pearl Bailey looks right into Max Roach’s eyes (whose back is to us, and it almost feels as though she is looking at us in the audience) when she sings those lines. We get the reference and understand the message: eleven years after Stormy Weather here is a new musical to show off and feel good about.
Immediately following “Beat out Dat Rhythm on the Drum,” we hear the arrival of the last main character to be introduced in the drama: Husky Miller plays the role of Escamillo from the opera, and his entrance showcases another well-known popular number. In Bizet’s opera, this is the “Toreador Song,” and it tells us who Escamillo is from the description of a bull fight: we watch the struggle with the bull and see the eventual victory for fame and love (presumably a girlfriend is in the crowd). The text for Husky Miller’s entrance “Stan’ Up an’ Fight” works in a similar way to introduce Joe Adams (a noted radio announcer in Los Angeles at the time) as the film’s boxing champion, Husky Miller.32 The choice to change the role of the Escamillo character to a boxer makes sense for the time, given that era of African American boxing history. In the recent past of the film, the legendary Joe Louis (1914–1981) had held the world heavyweight boxing title from 1937 to 1949 and was considered by some to be the best boxer who ever lived. Also during this time in 1954 the famed John Arthur “Jack” Johnson (1878–1946, nicknamed the Galveston Giant), the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion (from 1908 to 1915), was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame.
As boxing became more than a sport exclusively for entertainment, the prominence of black boxers became an important achievement in the larger scheme of the civil rights movement. Like Escamillo’s “Toreador Song” for bullfighting, “Stan’ Up an’ Fight” can be read as a description of a boxing match; the opening stanza focuses on Husky Miller’s record (“Seventeen decisions in a row an’ only five on points; de res’ was all K.O.” [knockouts]), and the second stanza outlines an outdoor fight in a baseball park. Yet the feeling of the number changes during the second stanza and refrain when certain words are highlighted and the cast joins in for the chorus. The second verse portrays a fight out in the open air where:
De ring looks small an’ white.
Out in de blackness,
Out in de blackness,
you can feel a hun’red thousan’ eyes
fillin’ de night.
. …
People are quiet—
Den der’s a riot!
Someone t’rows a punch
An’ plants is right smack on de mark …
Somebody’s hurt,
You kinda think it’s you.
You hang across de ropes—
Da’s all you want to do.
Den you look around’ an’ see your trainer’s eyes,
Beggin’ you to see it through,
De say, “Remember,
Big boy, Remember—
Chorus
Stan-up an’ fight until you hear de bell,
Stan’ toe to toe,
Trade blow fer blow,
Keep punchin’ till you make yer puches tell
Show dat crowd watcher know!
Until you hear dat bell,
Dat final bell,
Stan, up an’ fight like hell!
Setting up the arena with “white” and “blackness” (in the opening lines of this verse), with the people quiet and then there’s a riot, feels less like the boxing fight we see near the end of the film and more like a rally for standing up to “fight like hell” for what you believe in. The all-black peaceful gathering outside of Billy Pastor’s Café has transformed this familiar popular tune into an impromptu civil rights anthem wherein the semipublic-private segregated space of the film reaches out across the screen into multiracial audiences.
James Baldwin’s critique of the film, “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough,” appeared as “Life Straight in De Eye” in the January 1955 issue of Commentary magazine and was reprinted in his essay collection, Notes of a Native Son (first published in 1955 and then reissued in 1983 by Beacon Press in Boston). His comments are stinging in a pointed way, for he boldly wrote critically of a film that was undeniably important in terms of the money given to an all-black film at that time, the impressive spectacle it allowed blacks onscreen to achieve regarding showcasing talent, and the large number of black artists it brought together. Baldwin gets to the heart of what the film does not accomplish—it does not show black people as real people with three-dimensional portrayals. Baldwin writes that the “amoral Gypsy” is mapped onto the “amoral Negro woman,” the characters “sound ludicrously false and affected, like ante-bellum Negroes imitating their masters,” and the sexual chemistry between the two leads “is a sterile and distressing eroticism, however, because it is occurring in a vacuum between two mannequins who clearly are not involved in anything more serious than giving the customers a run for their money.”33 In an era when Carmen Jones was successful at the box office, Life magazine put Dorothy Dandridge on its cover (the first time a black person had appeared on the cover), and the film was nominated for and won multiple awards, Baldwin’s essay could seem to be disgruntled, out of step with the time, and off the mark.34 Yet his review gives us a penetrating view of how Carmen Jones had meaning when it first came out from someone who had his finger on the pulse of the black-white racial climate of the time.
Baldwin comments on the politics of skin color, a theme deep in the black community yet not always perceptible to nonblacks. Baldwin signals this discussion by saying that the film “is one of the first and most explicit—and far way the most self-conscious—weddings of sex and color which Hollywood has yet turned out.”35 He then outlines each of the main characters on the spectrum of a so-called “color wheel,”
. … the color wheel in Carmen Jones is very important. Dorothy Dandridge—Carmen—is a sort of taffy-colored girl. … One feels—perhaps one is meant to feel—that here is a very nice girl making her way in movies by means of a bad-girl part. … Harry Belafonte is just a little darker and just as blankly handsome and fares very badly opposite her in a really offensive version of an already unendurable role. Olga James is Micaela, here called Cindy Lou, a much paler girl than Miss Dandridge but also
much plainer. … Joe Adams is Husky Miller (Escamillo) and he is also rather taffy-colored. … Pearly Bailey is quite dark and she plays, in effect, a floozie. The wicked sergeant who causes Joe to desert the army—in one of many wild improbably scenes—and who has evil designs on Carmen is very dark indeed; and so is Husky Miller’s trainer, who is, one is given to suppose, Miss Bailey’s sugar-daddy.36
I have included, at length, these several excerpts to more deeply engage this topic, for they illuminate one of the most penetrating and incisive themes in the film.
References to the “brown paper bag test” and its more modern incarnation in discourses around colorism have been painful and destructive tropes in the black community going back to slavery. Leading black scholars, including Henry Louis Gates Jr, Cornel West, Michael Dyson, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison (among others), have documented and historicized these terms in thoughtful commentaries.37 An especially difficult element of this conversation is that the “brown paper bag test” and behaviors around colorism are internalized practices and attitudes that exist within the black community as well as through ideologies that are projected onto the black community by nonblacks. To have Baldwin note the roles by the darkness of the actors’ skin color brings to the surface a topic everyone sees and registers but no one in polite society would want to talk about; it encompasses shame and embarrassment. Though the action of Carmen Jones is set in an all-black environment, the politics around race are still present. In a different configuration than the one Mérimée and Bizet nineteenth-century French sources provide with the exotic Romany world being told through a white narrator, the internalized opinions concerning the racial dynamics of white supremacy are still operative.
Baldwin spells out the players on each side of the racial divide. The leading characters all have rather light brown skin (“taffy-colored,” the right light side of the color line in the world of the brown paper bag test); this includes Carmen, Joe, Cindy Lou, and Husky Miller. The darker characters all have negative associations connected to them. The “wicked sergeant who causes Joe to desert the army,” Sergeant Brown (Brock Peters) is the antagonist rival to Joe for Carmen’s affections. Rum Daniels, Husky Miller’s manager (played by Roy Glenn) is only concerned about keeping his own job and does whatever he can to get Carmen Jones in the entourage, including acting as the sugar daddy to Frankie and Myrt. Pearl Bailey’s darker color is filtered through a few complementing lenses. Though Baldwin writes her off as “a floozie” kept by sugar daddy Rum Daniels, she was one of the already-known stars of the time who brought attention to the film. Moreover, as Jeff Smith has noted, Bailey’s darkness provides an acceptable arena for the jazzy performance of blackness in the otherwise opera-infused world of the film.