For World Opera Day: A Look at “Carmen” in Pop Culture

October 25 is World Opera Day, and not coincidentally the birthday of both Georges Bizet and Johann Strauss II. The bicentennial of the birth of the latter composer is in just a couple of years, so we’ll save a post on him for then. But we have had many occasions to mention Bizet’s most famous opera Carmen here on Travalanche, for it is one of the most popular operatic works in the world, so beloved, it has been adapted into many media, and its story and its tunes are well known to the public (even if they don’t know it). So we treat of it today

Late 20th century man that I am, I first learned to love its melodies from their clever employment in the soundtrack to the movie The Bad News Bears (1976). I loved this music so music that set my own lyrics to the “Habanera” and “The Toreador Song” in my own play Columbia: The Germ of the Ocean (1992), a burlesque on the story of Christopher Columbus.

The story of Bizet’s opera concerns the beguiling Gypsy woman of the work’s title, whose charms drive the formerly upright Don Jose into dropping his childhood sweetheart and throwing away his military career. In spite of his sacrifices, Carmen dumps Don Jose for a bullfighter anyway, and in his rage and grief Don Jose murders her. Something like 85% of film noir pictures have this plot, right? It’s EXTREMELY powerful. Carmen is the original femme fatale (well, not really, that was Eve or Lilith, or somebody, I guess).

Bizet’s Carmen was based on a novella by the fascinating author, translator, archaeologist, historian and preservationist Prosper Mérimée (1803-70). The librettists were Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, who both also collaborated with Offenbach. The original 1875 production was not a success, with audiences finding the story both scandalous (sordid) and unremarkable at the same time somehow. It began to find favor about a decade later, but by then Bizet was long dead

The Metropolitan Opera first brought Carmen to the U.S. in 1884. Divas associated with the tirle role included Emma Calve, Marguerite Sylva, Anna Case, Emma Trentini, and Vivienne Segal. Enrico Caruso was touring with it nationally in 1906 in the role of Don Jose; this was how he came to be in San Francisco on the day of the Great Earthquake.

Here are some notable American adaptations of Carmen:

Raoul Walsh adapted it for the silent screen for William Fox in 1915 with Theda Bara as the title character. This one purports to be based on the novel as opposed to the opera. It is now considered lost.

Walsh’s version had the better star, but he still lost the 1915 horse race for Carmen supremacy. Cecil B. DeMille did his own version for Famous Players-Lasky with Geraldine Farrar and Wallace Reid in the leads. Like the Fox version, this one claimed to be from the novella, as the operetta libretto was under copyright. Yet somehow, DeMille was able to use the music, which was arranged by Hugo Riesenfeld (back then, major films were distributed with their own printed scores, which would be played live by local orchestras). A re-edited version of the film was re-released in 1918. This appears to be the version that exists today.

Charlie Chaplin, part Roma himself, released his Burlesque on Carmen in 1915. I hold it to be an important film in his early development, allowing him to explore serious notes he would later confidently incorporate in things like The Kid (1921), A Woman of Paris (1923), and City Lights (1931). More on the film here.

A German version arrived in 1918, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Pola Negri, both fated to move to Hollywood soon and become major figures there.

A 1926 Russian production starred Raquel Meller.

Loves of Carmen (1927): Walsh returned to Carmen again a dozen years later, when film technology was considerably more sophisticated. This version included Dolores Del Rio, Victor McLaglen, and Don Alvarado. MOMA has a restored copy of it.

The 1928 collegiate comedy The Campus Carmen starred Daphne Pollard and a young Carole Lombard.

In 1943 Oscar Hammerstein II wrote his own lyrics to Bizet’s music, updated the story to the present and brought it to Broadway with an all-black cast as Carmen Jones. This has always seemed pretty silly to me. Isn’t there already Porgy and Bess? Which tells a very similar story, with genuine American music. But this was the era of Hot Mikado and similar takes on classics. And it proved a hit, so there you go.

Orson Welles had originally pitched his own adaptation of Carmen to star Paulette Goddard, and how great that would have been! Two years after her divorce from Welles, Rita Hayworth starred in her own version, the first production made by her new company. Ha-cha-cha! Ordinarily I’d chide her for her vanity, but what red-blooded straight man wouldn’t throw his life away for Rita Hayworth??? Further she re-united with the team from her hit Gilda, director Charles Vidor, co-star Glenn Ford, screenwriter Helen Deutsch. And got her dad Eduardo Cansino to do authentic Spanish choreography and put her uncle and brother, also dancers, in the cast. But unfortunately the 1948 version of The Loves of Carmen didn’t score as she hoped. It was almost four years before she returned to the screen.

Surely there was an element of autobiography in Otto Preminger casting his real-life muse and paramour Dorothy Dandridge in the lead role in the 1954 screen adaptation of Carmen Jones? The cast also included Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters, Nick Stewart, and a young Diahann Carroll, among others.

Thank you, Eve Golden, for reminding me of the 1966 Gilligan’s Island episode “The Producer”, in which a movie producer played by Phil Silvers arrives on the island, prompting the castaways to put on a version of Hamlet, setting it to Bizet’s Carmen melodies.

In the 1974 Odd Couple episode “Vocal Girl Makes Good”, real-life opera star Marilyn Horne plays a shy young lady who stars in Felix’s amateur production of Carmen, a fact complicated by her attraction to Felix’s room-mate Oscar (and that Oscar doesn’t feel the same way). As an added bonus, we get to hear Horne sing, of course!

First Name: Carmen (1983) was a modernized version, loosely based on the opera, directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

i almost certainly wouldn’t have included this one had it not also been the 100th birthday of Belita the Ice Maiden today. and this is also surely the most vaudeville iteration, right? Olympic champion Katarina Witt starred in the German-made Carmen on Ice, a sort of figure skating ballet film, with no spoken dialogue.

In 2001 the great Robert Townsend directed Carmen: A Hip Hopera for MTV, with  Beyoncé as the title character and a cast that includes Mekhi Phifer of ER and 8 Mile, Fred Williamson, Mos Def, Wyclef Jean, and a host of hip hop stars.

Now where’s my Baz Luhrman version? You know he’d kill it!

For over 40 other opera related posts on Travalanche, go here.

For more on show business history please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.