Carmen (1945)
Directed by Christian-Jaque

Film Review

Prosper Mérimée's famous tale of a Spanish gypsy girl and the man she drove wild with desire has inspired one great opera and numerous film adaptations, so it is easy to be dismissive of screen interpretations, such as Christian-Jaque's mid-1940s crowdpleaser, that merely turns it into a tawdry entertainment for the masses.  On a roll after the success of the two prestigious films he made for Continental - L'Assassinat du père Noël (1941) and La Symphonie fantastique (1942) - Christian-Jaque allowed himself to be carried away by a populist wave that prevented him from being a serious film director - of the calibre of say Julien Duvivier or Marcel Carné - but ensured future box office success for well over a decade.  Carmen pretty well sealed C-J's fate, which is ironic given that predestination is one of the key themes of the story.

With his native France under Nazi occupation, Christian-Jaque welcomed the opportunity to make the film abroad.  The exteriors were shot in Spain, the interiors at Scalera Studios in Rome, and the result is an expensive looking production that was bound to attract large audiences.  It is a sign of how far the director's career had come (only five years previously he had been making fairly cheap comedies with Fernandel) that he now had a blockbuster budget and was working with two of the biggest French movie stars of the time, Viviane Romance and Jean Marais.  Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac's libretto was developed into the film's screenplay by Charles Spaak, one of France's most sought after screenwriters, and all the music was naturally purloined from Georges Bizet's famous opera.  Christian-Jaque's Carmen is a vivid dramatic take on the opera that we are all familiar with, perhaps a tad overblown in places but with a few idiosyncratic tweaks to the narrative to make it appear fresher than it might have done.

The casting of Viviane Romance in the lead role is hardly a surprise - she made a career playing sultry man-eaters like Carmen, and she could hardly play anything else with her alluring good looks and magnetic personality.  To coin a phrase, she was the devil made flesh.  Romance's seductive, smouldering presence alone makes the film worth watching, although her talents (along with those of the rest of the cast) are mostly wasted on a script that is barely more sophisticated than that of your average Christmas pantomime.  Jean Marais looks as if he was cast more because he could service the film's action scenes than for his suitability for the role of Don José - he is excellent in the former, a tad disappointing in the latter, his transition from a meek model solider to a murdering, love-obsessed maniac looking too forced and theatrical to be convincing on screen.

Clearly a student of the Robert Newton school of acting, Lucien Coëdel has great fun playing the cut-throat bandit Garcia, although the eye-patch and his slightly overdone histrionics (which include an irritating laugh) betray what looks like a desperate yearning to play Long John Silver in pantomime.  Marguerite Moreno is no less batty as a film noir-flavoured fortune teller, and Bernard Blier supplies further unintentional hilarity, 'monking about' in a habit for all it is worth.  Considering how much comic potential the film has, it's surprising Christian-Jaque didn't go the whole hog and turn it into the bawdiest of farces - that would at least have made it more interesting.  It's so tempting to think of the film as Carry on Carmen...

Success now having clearly gone to his head, Christian-Jaque has a go at playing the great auteur, imitating his directing heroes with limited success.  A dramatic horseback raid on a stagecoach which might easily have been directed by John Ford is one of the film's more successful bravura sequences, far more convincing than the badly edited together bullfight scene near the end of the film.  There are a few sporadic moments of brilliance which provide a glimpse of what a truly great cineaste Christian-Jaque might have been had he not succumbed to the hollow rewards of mainstream success.  In one scene a camera peeks up through a glass table on which an utterly creepy Marguerite Moreno places the cards foretelling poor Viviane's future.  This is later topped by a weird subjective camera shot showing the point-of-view of a mortally wounded man as he staggers and drops to the ground.

Inspired touches such as these are welcome but they are too few and far between to make Carmen appear anything more than a crowdpleaser punching half-heartedly above its weight.  To his credit Christian-Jaque does a fine job of keeping up the tempo throughout, so there isn't so much as a hint of a longueur. Helped by his cinematographer Ubaldo Arata, C-J succeeds in wrapping the familiar story in a cloak of dark romanticism that tends towards poetic realism in its gloomy closing passages.  Anticipating the director's subsequent great swashbuckler - Fanfan la Tulipe (1952) - Carmen makes an entertaining, well-paced romp, but it clearly lacks the sustained artistry of the far superior films that Christian-Jaque put his signature to around this time - Boule de suif (1945) and Un revenant (1946).

Film Synopsis

Seville, Spain.  As soon as Don José, a naive young lieutenant, sets eyes on the dark haired beauty Carmen he makes himself her slave, like so many men before him.  After the gypsy girl has been arrested for brawling with another woman in the cigarette factory where she works, Don José is tasked with taking her to prison, but she tricks him and escapes.  The lieutenant's reward is demotion and a short spell in prison.  Realising that Don José may be useful to her, Carmen contrives his escape and offers herself to him, in exchange for his turning a blind eye when her friends, a gang of outlaws, enter the city to raid the cigarette factory.  Carmen's present lover, another solider, is shocked to find her in the company of his disgraced subordinate and a duel ensues, with Don José the victor.

Now that desertion is his only option, Don José flees to join Carmen's band of outlaws in the mountains, and finds he has a rival in the bloodthirsty Garcia-le-Borgne.  After the latter's arrest, Don José takes his place but shows his victims more leniency than Garcia.  Narrowly escaping execution, Le-Borgne returns to the gang but is killed by Don José in a fight when the latter discovers his rival has a greater claim to Carmen than he does.  Having grown sick of his life as an outlaw, Don José tells Carmen he intends making a fresh start with her in Mexico, but she has fallen out of love with him and flees to the town of Ronda.  Here, Carmen loses her heart to the handsome toreador Lucas and watches on in horror as he is mortally wounded in a bullfight.  Unable to let Carmen go, Don José takes her to a remote spot and offers her once last chance - to begin a new life with him or die...