Carmen Jones

Experience the greatest films from Hollywood’s Golden Age back on the big screen, every week at The Loft Cinema!

See the late, great singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte on the big screen in the classic 1954 musical, Carmen Jones!

Carmen Jones is Otto Preminger’s daring, audacious, one-of-a-kind film musical, a Black opera based on Oscar Hammerstein’s Broadway version of the Bizet classic set in the American South during wartime. In this sultry tale of burning passion and doomed romance, the electrifying Dorothy Dandridge (who became the first person of color to receive a Best Actress Oscar nomination) stars as Carmen Jones, the restless and ultimately destructive siren who toils as an employee at a parachute factory, though she yearns to live “the good life.” Harry Belafonte plays Joe, a young, straight-arrow military officer on a Southern military base during WWII. Joe is set to attend flight school and marry his hometown sweetheart, the virginal Cindy Lou (Olga James), when fate has him cross paths with the tempestuous Carmen, sending him down the road to ruin as he is swept up in Carmen’s carnal anarchy and her all-consuming desire to escape her unhappy life.  Considered a cinematic landmark as one of the first all-Black, big-budget Hollywood studio films, Carmen Jones is a flamboyant musical unlike any other, featuring Oscar Hammerstein II’s classic songs reworked from George Bizet’s opera Carmen, dazzling choreography and a superb supporting cast including Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters, Diahann Carroll and Olga James. But it’s Dandridge’s sizzling performance as the wild femme fatale Carmen Jones that makes this a truly groundbreaking film for the ages. (Dir. by Otto Preminger, USA, 1954, 105 mins., Not Rated)