Carmen Jones: Freedom Road.

Carmen Jones. Dorothy Dandridge. The two names even and into themselves cause a commotion in the fused atoms that mark my being. I consider the two women inseperable, inextricable from one another. Co-creators of one another, neither as we have come to know them would exist without the other. Based on a play by Georges Bizet and directed by the renowned Otto Preminger (Laura, The Man with the Golden Arm, Exodus) 1954’s “Carmen Jones” (Jones being added to the original play name adds a heap of politics I don't have the time to get into now) is an ambitious, captivating, sublimely charismatic musical. It was one of the few musicals to have escaped the prison I had created for them in my mind -a rarity for me indeed since I used to absolutely “all caps” abhor musicals. This one I fell for immediately, Bizet's music compositions, the lavish beauty of technicolor, black people proved all too rich an invitation for me to ignore. The set up was simple enough, the doomed love affair between a strong willed, dangerously alluring, dreamer of a woman, and a prudish, naive, possesive, but charming young man. The politics too are fascinating with its sexual conflict and contradictions, racial anomalies, and gendered politics. All played a distant second the size of north America to my first infatuation with this film, because the first, second, and third words about Carmen Jones for me began and ended with the incomparable Dorothy Dandridge, Dorothy Dandridge, and Dorothy Dandridge. I was irrevocably seduced from the moment I first saw her. It was one of my first introductions to the power of a woman beyond her visage. Dandridge was gorgeous of course, one of the most beautiful women to grace the screen, but there was something else, something stitched in the eternal, but tied to nothing. Something vibrant and vivid about her energy, something mean but loving, love that frees rather than restrains. Her love was to be earned and you would walk barefoot on glass to prove it. I don't know whether I've always liked freer women or whether Dorothy’s Carmen taught me to love them, but that walk, that skirt, that attitude, they spoke to me of someone to be reckoned with, of tempestuous seas with shores of sunken men drunken with the sweet death of her sirens call. She walks into a mess hall like it was erected in her name. A random man puts his hand on her to try and gain a bit of her time and she shakes him off with the playfulness of a nymph, and the fierce skill of a running back. She merely put her foot in a man's chest and it became one of cinemas greatest accomplishments, a sensual masterpiece of body and frame. The first, second, and third words about this film begin and end with the incomparable Dorothy Dandridge, Dorothy Dandridge, Dorothy Dandridge.

From her opening salvo she was like watching lightning strike from a just safe enough distance as to feel it's corruption of the earth, but not be hurt by it, but Carmen’s entrance into the movie is quite unceremonious. There is none of the pomp, style, or celluloid stop lights of a Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard) or the sexual eloquence of Ellen Berent-Harland (Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven) certainly not the cinematic manipulation of time and space that is Rita Hayworth’s intro in “Gilda”. The camera makes no unique movement, the music barely fluctuates, there is no preemptive exposition to announce her arrival. Almost suddenly she appears in a doorway sashaying in rather nonchalantly, equal parts; allure, confidence, power, ferocity, and sass crash into the screen. I loved her instantly. The spectres of the Jada Pinkett’s, Victoria Dillards, Nicole Carson's had faded into a darkened room in my silver screen driven fantasies. I was much like those men in the mess hall, who had forgotten their prospective or respective wives and,or, girlfriends to revel in her cosmic impressions. That iconic pencil skirt, burst aflame in red and orange while singing of her divine curvature dancing and floating across the sea of damp greys and browns. That iconic pencil dress which complimented and engulfed the black void of her blouse (a recreation of Saul Bass’s opening credits) was her only extravagance. No, in this picture the allure of Carmen was almost solely the allure of Dandridge. She stood in geometric shapes, very thrifty, arms out at acute angles, but she moved far more expensively -hips thrusting air as arms gracefully brandished an unseen apron. Dandridge (Who was dubbed for the film as well as co-star Harry Belafonte) was an actress in the highest order. Every one of her emotions were tangibly gusty and veracious. She glided through them, one to the next with a God-given charm and mastery. “You're too little and too late” she playfully barks to one suitor, meaning every iota of it in her drifting eyes. “I hate to be cooped up!” She replies to Belafonte, a visceral darkness gradually flooding the cinema of her face like a curtain. These moods are driven by something far deeper than the simplified Madonna/Whore argument the story beckons which Dandridge and Preminger dismiss altogether. She is both, she is whatever the season calls for. She is hurt and she hurts back, maybe doubly so. She takes the lead and is lead to whatever her wits analyze as needed for the situation. Her wantonness is celebrated in Preminger's visuals and the film becomes sadder the more tied down she becomes. All three understand Carmen demands one thing above all else; freedom. She said she could not stand to be cooped up and Dandridge's eyes betrayed the depth of that need and the trauma behind it. It could be argued that Carmen instantly recognizes the precarious nature of her situation and devises to use her obvious allure to convince Belafonte not to take her to the prison she cannot abide. Could be said once that was fulfilled one way or another she moved on. But, she also came back, back for more of that edge. A living embodiment of one of Newton's Laws of Motion; Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first. Who is the first and the second between Carmen and Joe volley's back and forth. The rocky nature of the relationship, the supremely possessive nature of Joe would seem to an outsider to be destabilizing - a version of looking for trouble, and that isn't necessarily untrue, but Joe may also represent to her a stabling force. Someone willing to exert an equal and opposite force on her, a first for her. Whether he's simply an opportunity, or kismet, is unimportant because what is important is that Carmen nonetheless is hungry for him, nearly as much as her freedom, and Dandridge feeds that hunger with pluck and command. One expression, smile, thrust of her legs, silk laden word, tornado of body parts fight at a time. A once-in-a lifetime unbridled star- making turn that burns so brightly it sits even now in the firmament of Hollywood long after both their deaths.

And underrated aspect of Dandridge that flares out in colors as textured as the film itself was that she was also very, very cool. Not “Gone Girl”cool, I mean Steve McQueen in a 66’ Mustang cool. Keanu Reeves deliberate cadence cool. Denzel Washington’s walk cool. Any room she walked in demanded her attention; be it boxing gym or shabby apartment. She talked cool, “I didn't come here to take up with that punching bag”. She looked cool, a thousand different versions of the eye-roll, and a thousand different thousand yard stares- my favorite of which is her glaring out from over the top of her glass as everyone else pours into heavyweight champ “Husky” Miller. It's presence, it's charm, it's skill of astronomical weight. The role interestingly enough did not come express mail to her door. Director Preminger and company had seen her work in “Bright Road” ; a middling first look at both a great actor and what would become a well worn trope in film about persistent teachers and wayward students (especially black or Latino students) in the education system. That film said nothing of the skills and attributes Dandridge would so provocatively display in “Carmen Jones” and so in another flash of the cohabitative nature of these two spirits, she took matters into her own hands. She had to show Preminger on her own, and came back with a vision, at which began in earnest the spiritual journey of one of cinemas greatest bits of iconography ever. If you had never seen or heard of Dorothy Dandridge before, you would know she was a star seconds into this film. Whether her satin-sultry stare, or fog cutting glare, Dandridge embodies a full-figured depiction of womanhood, the desire for self love and determinism in a world where she was limited by both her blackness, and her gender. She embodies lust, and yearning, the feast and the famine, the wreckage after the storm, the rainbow above that. In a film full of stars she is undoubtedly the central force in ways that rival, and arguably pale Marilyn Monroe in “Some like it Hot”, Elizabeth Taylor in the extravagant production of “Cleopatra”, or later toJulia Roberts in “Pretty Woman”. It is a testament both to what was, and what could've been, in Dandridge’s career, Carmen's life, before boorish men and their own righteous and unimpeded desires fractured the mirror and broke the frame. In this way Carmen and Dorothy seemed fated to the same meteoric rise and tragic fall, illuminating and advocating for each other to an end, and to their end. Dandridge of course did not die there, she went on to work in a number of other films and various productions off camera, but her star was never as bright, never as loved on, as crystallized as it was in Carmen Jones. For all intensive purposes she too was left there in the void that the role and her handlers (including Preminger) left. Only fitting that Dandridge's celluloid ghost should haunt men, and women alike together, acting as an asomatous ladder for her spiritual successors like Diahann Carroll, Halle Berry, and Kerry Washington. Looming over, lording over the heavens still burst aflame in orange and red, a constellation unto themselves free from the confines of a cell literal or figurative.