"CARMEN JONES"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 819, 7 April 1955, Page 5

"CARMEN JONES"

Sir,-May I beg space in your paper to embark upon the fruitless task of disputing an issue which is not disputable, namely, a matter of taste. The object of my complaint is the film Carmen Jones, which appears to have captivated so many theatre-goers, discriminating and otherwise. I would like ‘to say, at the outset, that my grievance does. not arise from any deep-felt antipathy to American ’ influence in the sphere of music. In certain directions, .Which wotild take up too much space to disguss;, America has done a tremendous amount for the art of music. Indeed, she has revealed, in some fields, a degree of initiative and generosity which could be well imitated by older countries and our own. At the same time. she has exported for public consumption abroad, the off-scourings which have gone so far, per medium of commercial radio to bring about a growing degeneracy of public taste, which the most strenuous efforts in the education field are hard pressed to combat. One lamentable aspect of this state of affairs is the petty pilfering of established works for "ear tickling’ purposes. But petty pilfering pales before grand larceny, and the film Carmen Jones is nothing if not just that. Let us concede that, by and large, opera is a matter of adultery, prostitution, and murder, and that, for all its questionably romantic associations, the bull ring is probably no more respectable than the prize-fighter’s stadium, and that a stiletto in the ribs is probably as unpleasant a death as is strangulation. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Bizet’s Carmen, in common with all other Romantic opera, sees these things through the rose-coloured glasses of the accepted "conventionalised" and colourful stage production. If it is objected that this is where opera, as such, falls down, and that it is time that a note of realism should be struck in portraying human passions and foibles. I could find myself in agreement, But the solution, as I, see it, does not lie in transplanting ‘music. which..was nurtured in a Southern French nursery to the foreign soil of Harlem. If the Negro is to tell us a story of the Carmen tvpe, he should tell it in his own idiom. The whole thing is ~ -incongruous-at times, laughably so, What is worse, it so

palpably arises from exploitation of the public. craze for sensationalism, no matter how nasty or how cheap, One smells pounds, shillings and pence at the back of the whole thing, Further} it fails technically, as the "dubbing" of voices (itself a spurious procedure) is not always felicitous, Let us have Negro operas about sordid things (if this is really what modern living demands), but let them be original and not a travesty of other people’s ideas, Meanwhile, I dread the possibility of a reciprocal effort, when Europe produces a version of Porgy and Bess in which the characters come from the pages of Parstfal

HARRY

LUSCOMBE

(Auckland),