Carmen Jones (1954)

I figured, if I say I like Carmen so much, I should probably see this movie, which is the opera re-set in the US during World War II with an all-black cast.  So, I did.  Neat! 

One thing I'll say for it: Dorothy Dandridge in the title role is electric.  She kills it.  You can't stop watching her.  The REST of the movie though...well, I'm just gonna say it: it kind of sucks.  And I realize that me saying that opens a big ol' can o' worms, because am I just saying that because I'm overly attached to the original?  Am I being closed-minded?  Well, I don't think so.  What else can I say?

I truly do not object to the change in setting, or alterations to the plot, but the problem is, it sort of feels like it's performing contortions to try to make things work so that the appropriate songs can be sung in spite of lacking the context.  So, for a fairly contorted example: obviously, it would make no sense to have a bullfighter in this milieu, so instead we have Husky Miller, a boxer (and I will concede that his name is a reasonably clever analogue for Escamillo).  And look, bullfighting is inhumane and should be banned everywhere it hasn't been, but the problem is, it's flashy and dramatic in a way that boxing simply...isn't.  And therefore, his song about boxing heroics doesn't make much impact (also, it's weird that they don't include the opening part where he compares his work to soldiers', given how easily it could've worked in the setting).  But what's really noticeable about it is that it includes this whole thing about how his manager helps him to succeed, and it's sure great to have that guy around, and you think, wait, WHAT?  Escamillo crediting someone else for his success?  What kind of catastrophic misreading of the character is THAT?  But the reason it includes this guy and also this guy's superior is that there's no element of smuggling in this story, and therefore you need someone to take the place of the male smugglers, Le Dancaïre and Le Remendado, if you want to include a version of “Nous avons en tête une affaire,” which they do.  And yet, for all that trouble, their rendition of the song turns out to be pretty lame: instead of joking around about how you need women for criminal affairs, it's just them and her friends Frasquita/Frankie and Mercédes/Myrt trying to convince her to go to Chicago to see Husky.  It just...doesn't fit the music.  It seems like it's supposed to be funny, but it's not remotely so either in the way the original is or on its own.  It's just bad, people.

So what else?  Well, to give the film its due, I'm willing to grant that its version of the Habanera, “Dat Love,” is largely tolerable.  But even there, I dunno: it's really hard to tell how one's reaction is colored by virtue of the lyrics being in one's first language, but some of it just seems...not great.  I don't know: “You go for me and I'm taboo/but if you're hard to get I'll go for you.”  I mean, okay, on the one hand that's sort of clever...but on the other hand, it's also sort of lame, isn't it?  I don't know.  It was hard for me to really warm to it.  Still, in the interest of maximum fairness, let's stick this one in the win column, and while we're at it, let's also put “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum” (the “Gypsy Song”) there as well.  But seriously, that is ALL.

Let me ask you: do you know Carmen's friend Lillas Pastia?  If you do, it's certainly because he's mentioned and identified as such several times in the sublime “Près des remparts de Séville,” and seriously, how nuts is it that a song that good is only like the tenth-best-known piece in the opera?  He's the innkeeper at the tavern where the smugglers conduct business; it's a tiny role.  Well, here he's called Billy Pastor, which is fine, but what's not fine is how the film murders the song.  What's really memorable about it is its sense of melancholy; of calling on a utopian future that, Carmen must know, is going to be fleeting at best.  But there's NONE of that in the rendition here.  It's badly cut down, and it strips out all the pathos.  It is to the original as “Two Princes” is to “I Who Have Nothing.”  NOT GOOD, in other words.

As for the film's version of the Card Trio—well, at first I was all prepared to declare it a success; it seemed to be working pretty well in the new setting.  But NOT FOR LONG, I'll tell you that much.  What's the dumbest fucking thing you can imagine anyone doing to this song, huh?  Tell me.  I'll bet it's not as dumb as what this movie does.  So there's the “dites-nous qui nous trahira/dite-nous qui nous aimera” part, and then...the movie completely cuts out F and M's dueling romantic fantasies.  Seriously.  It skips straight to Carmen bemoaning her fate.  WHAT.  THE.  HELL.  You people DO realize that that's there for a reason, right?  I mean, aside from that it's fun?  Because, like, it's contrasting F and M's lightheartedness to C's obsession with death?  JESUS.  So, blah.

I don't know what to tell you.  There are a fair few other songs, but nothing that really stands out.  For unclear reasons, there are zero songs for Escamillo beyond the hit, and “Quant au douanier, c'est notre affaire” is absent, but I can't say I really regret any of this, given how uninspired this whole thing is.  Even the climactic duet fails to make an impression.  I really do want to like a project like this, but it's just not good enough.

Giuseppe Verdi, Ernani (1844)

An early Verdi opera, and, per wikipedia, his most popular until Il trovatore.  Also, fun fact, apparently it was the first opera to be recorded in its entirety, in 1904.  You could make a good argument that it was a significant lacuna in my opera-watching experience.  Actually, you could do that with any Verdi opera I haven't seen.  If I'm counting correctly (I might not be, considering all the revisions he made), there are eight of them.  I should buckle down and do it, probably.  They're all available in some form or another.

Well, this is Verdi.  You know what Verdi sounds like!  He wrote some pretty solid tchunes!  But one is forced to concede that he was not always as discriminating in his choice of libretti as he could have been, and here is an example of that.  Right, so Ernani is a bandit.  He and Elvira are in love, but unfortunately, she's engaged to marry Silva, an old duke.  Oh no!  So there's some conflict, the more so because Charles V (yes, the father of the king in Don Carlos) is also trying to seduce her.  It gets very confusing—and the wikipedia entry is not very well-written or helpful—but there's a bunch of scheming, and the upshot is that Silva and Ernani (who turns out to be a dispossessed noble) team up to try to take out Charles, who is felt to be treasonous in some way I didn't really understand.  And—here's the real “uh?” moment—Ernani swears that if Silva blows this hunting horn at any time, he, Ernani, will kill himself.  A little later, everyone's reconciled, and Charles agrees that Ernani and Elvira can marry.  But oh no, soon after they marry, Silva cashes in, and Ernani has no choice but to stab himself to death.  Cool.

A number of questions come to mind, most notably: why did he swear this oath, apropos of nothing?  Why does he seem genuinely surprised when the extremely obvious result of him doing so manifests itself?  And why does he go through with it in the end?  Obviously, this sort of self-destructive “honor”-based culture has existed all over the world; you think of samurai who were supposed to commit seppuku when their lords were killed, or Hindu widows who were meant to immolate themselves.  But in those and other situations, they're dealing with social pressure.  The people in those circumstances didn't specifically stipulate that this is what they're going to do.  This opera is just bizarre, and not in the least dramatically satisfying, great music notwithstanding.

It's based on a Victor Hugo play, which you've gotta think—I'm admittedly just guessing here—has to have been criticizing the sort of behavior that the opera wants to be in some sense heroic.  Otherwise, I have no idea what he was going for.  Not a fantastic piece of work, but this Operavision video, from Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, is a solid, traditional production that features the extremely rad Angela Meade as Elvira (a role she'd previously sang at the Met).  She is awesome.  The only issue with this production is that there are, like, two or three random extras/chorus members wearing covid masks.  I would understand and make allowances if this was the height of the pandemic and everyone had to be masked, but it's not, the result is just needless weirdness.