Finest hours: Dorothy Dandridge’s sultry temptress in Carmen Jones

“Something new! Something great! Something musically terrific!” boasted the trailer for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones at the time of the film’s release in 1954. It’s telling that the notion of novelty comes first – doubtless a reference to the film’s transposition of a canonical 19th-century opera into a contemporary African American context.

Carmen Jones is, after all, an adaptation several times over: Harry Kleiner’s script brings to the screen the 1943 Oscar Hammerstein II stage musical which moved the score of Bizet’s 1875 opera – itself an adaptation of Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella – from southern Spain to a US World War II setting. What’s ‘new’ here, then, is the film’s mix of cultural elements – and, at its centre, an electrifying performance by Dorothy Dandridge, which brings fresh textures to a role viewed equally as iconic and problematic.

Carmen Jones wasn’t Dandridge’s screen debut. A stage performer with her sister Vivian since childhood, she’d appeared in small parts in films throughout the 1940s; however, a reluctance to take on stereotypical ‘Black’ roles had limited her exposure in cinema.

Dandridge’s first lead part was in Bright Road (1953), a sweet, modest drama in which she plays a sympathetic schoolteacher dealing with a troublesome pupil. As such, the bombshell role of Carmen was a significant departure for Dandridge, to the extent that Preminger was reluctant to consider her for it, preferring instead to see her for the supporting role of the musical’s ‘nice girl’ Cindy Lou.

As (probably too neatly) dramatised in Martha Coolidge’s Halle Berry-starring HBO biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), Preminger was convinced to change his mind about the casting after Dandridge appeared at his office sporting makeup, clothes and attitude appropriate to the project’s sultry protagonist.

Carmen Jones was, in addition, a reunion for Dandridge and her Bright Road co-star Harry Belafonte. Here, they’re collaborating on much more sensational material, though, with Belafonte as Joe, the initially indifferent but soon besotted GI, seduced and then discarded by Dandridge’s temptress.

Despite the established vocal prowess of both stars, the pair were dubbed by singers better equipped to handle the operatic demands of Hammerstein’s score. In Dandridge’s case, particularly, the match proved an effective one, with she and mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne working closely together to create a convincing synthesis.

The results of their efforts are evident as soon as Dandridge’s first appearance as Carmen – a sequence which ranks among the all-time great introductions of a character in Hollywood history. Attired in swinging silver earrings, black top and orange skirt, her Carmen sashays through the factory canteen with brazen confidence, performing ‘Dat Love’ (Hammerstein’s rendering of Bizet’s famed Habanera).

The sequence not only clues the viewer in to Carmen’s modus operandi when it comes to romance (“You go for me and I’m taboo / But if you’re hard to get, I go for you”); it also establishes an essential element of Dandridge’s conception of the character: namely, a bold physicality that sears the screen, whether she’s enthusiastically brawling in the factory or, later, stretching out her legs for Joe to dry her freshly painted toenails by blowing on them – a masterful moment of unstressed sensuality that puts most of today’s more explicit depictions to shame.

But Dandridge’s triumph in the role rests in her ability to make Carmen more than merely a symbolic figure of erotic temptation. Instead, with Horne’s voice coming out of her, Dandridge uses the songs to take us further into the character, and to render relatable and sympathetic Carmen’s drive for freedom and her appetite for life. Especially extraordinary is the vitality Dandridge brings to the ‘Card Song’ aria: her reaction to Carmen’s foreseen tragic fate becomes a defiant resolution to “keep on livin’ up to the day I die”.

In contemporary productions (for instance, Sally Potter’s divisive 2007 ENO staging), Bizet’s opera continues to be re-explored, often from a feminist perspective that, in the words of Sophia Smith Galer, “attempts to rewrite opera’s most notorious femme fatale out of the shallow, misogynistic characterisations of Mérimée and Bizet’s fantasies.”

When it comes to gender politics, Carmen Jones isn’t, ultimately, that kind of explicitly revisionist take – the violent conclusion goes unsubverted here. Still, the strength of Dandridge’s performance brings an extra dimension to the film: namely, the sight of a Black female protagonist asserting her right to autonomy and self-determination. As bitingly delivered by Dandridge, Camen’s pivotal retort to Joe – “I don’t answer to nobody. You don’t have no right to own me. There’s only one that does. That’s me. Myself!” – can’t help but resonate far beyond the film frame.

Despite some dissenters (James Baldwin among them), Carmen Jones would become a huge hit and make Dandridge an international star: the first Black woman to be featured on the cover of Life magazine and the first to be Oscar nominated for a leading role.

If there’s a poignancy to watching Dandridge at her blazing best here, then that’s due to the squandered potential in how her career, stymied by ongoing industry racism, would pan out over the decade before her premature death in 1965. A sad sense of waste lingers, but cinema’s power of preservation at least ensures Dandridge’s cultural afterlife. Whenever she’s on screen, Carmen Jones still feels, over 70 years after its premiere, like something new and something great.

Re-Introducing Dorothy Dandridge: The Cool Flame runs at BFI Southbank in July.