Tampa Riverwalk Hosts 'Carmen Jones' Screening
As part of its "Black Love Classics" film series, the Friends of the Riverwalk is hosting a screening of the movie "Carmen Jones" today, February 22. The event is one of several cultural programs organized to engage the community along the Tampa Riverwalk.
- The 1954 film was a major Hollywood production featuring an all-Black cast, a rarity for its time, and was directed by Otto Preminger. - For her leading role, Dorothy Dandridge became the first African American woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. - The movie is based on a 1943 Broadway musical of the same name by Oscar Hammerstein II, which adapted Georges Bizet's 1875 opera "Carmen" to a World War II-era African-American setting. - The film stars Harry Belafonte and Pearl Bailey alongside Dandridge, though the lead actors' singing voices were dubbed by professional opera singers Marilyn Horne and LeVern Hutcherson. - The story shifts the original opera's setting from a cigarette factory in Spain to a parachute factory in North Carolina during World War II. - In 1992, "Carmen Jones" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." - The film was a box office success, grossing over $10 million and becoming one of the highest-earning films of the year. - The title sequence for "Carmen Jones" was the first created by iconic graphic designer Saul Bass, launching his influential career in film title design.
