Up to very recently this was considered a lost film. Now it has been found, and for viewers of a certain historical bent where Opera is concerned, it may be a godsend. For the rest, let the buyer beware, for this is a film that is almost prehistoric in execution as 1931 British movies go (it was made in 1931, but released in 1932). It seems to have been very cheaply made in an English studio, but with later exteriors filmed in Spain. A good bit of it, especially at the beginning and then for the later outdoor scenes, appears to have been filmed silently. Actors are seen speaking in these scenes, but no voices issue forth. Still, it is very much a talkie overall, and while only short portions of the actual opera are sung by the principals (and often out of the order in which they appear in the opera), there is a really quite tremendous orchestral background heard almost unceasingly throughout, all based on melodies from the opera as arranged by then-Dr. Malcolm Sargent, and very well and excitingly arranged at that, and performed by The New Symphony Orchestra (that was a real name), which we actually see Sargent conducting over the last part of the opening credits. The stars of the film, Marguerite Namara and Tom Burke, were quite famous singers in their day, with Namara, a famous beauty in her time, having a far-flung but not overly memorable opera career while hobnobbing with some of the most famous artists of the age (she actually studied painting with Monet!), and Tom Burke (also known as Thomas Burke, but not the American actor Thomas F. Burke IMDb lists in the cast), who was an English opera and concert star, well-trained in Italy, and who had a major singing career with many dozens of recordings from 1920 into the mid-1930s to his credit, and who was Nellie Melba's Rodolfo in "La boheme" upon her return to Covent Garden in 1921. Lance Fairfax, an Australian baritone who sings the Toreador, has a legitimate voice, even if he does look more like your neighborhood apothecary than a bull-stabber. (He was only 32 here, but looks older, and is both heard and seen to better advantage in years to come.) As with the earlier De Mille film, the story relies more on the original Merimee novella than on Bizet's opera for its story line; there's no Micaela, and Zuniga, a minor role in the opera, is a quite major one here, as acted by Lester Matthews, who would shortly run off to Hollywood and consequently appear in about 200 movies and TV shows, never to return to Old Blighty. Namara was 44 by this time and had been singing opera for a quarter-century. 44 in 1931/32 was a lot older then than it is now, and most actresses of that age back then had passed their femme fatale stage and were playing matronly parts. Namara, however, while not passing for 25 or so, still looks good and the beauty seeps through. Tom Burke is almost painfully straight-laced throughout, at 42 coming over as your standard British solicitor (as played by Harvey Korman) rather than as a young military man open to the wiles of a duplicitous Gypsy girl (and she is very duplicitous in this version of the story). Namara strives for a throw-away line delivery followed by a mischievous laugh, but does so almost constantly so that it wears thin. Burke is so stalwart in appearance that he makes Jose look like a young C. Aubrey Smith. The soprano is more mezzo-soprano by this time, and her best singing days are obviously behind her, while Burke sounds terrific, no more so than in his really stunning pianissimo at the end of the Flower Song (you get the beginning and the end of it, but no middle; it's that kind of film). The camera work and general filming are not bad, but the only really lively scenes in it are two fights - one a duel between Jose and Zuniga, and the other a knife fight between Jose and the Toreador. The duel is particularly unimpressive in that each actor looks like if he got pricked by a sword, he'd go running home to Mommy - the swordsmanship is very definitely the kind of thing you would see on an opera stage, so put away any expectations you might have of Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone having a go at it. The knife fight is somewhat more realistic. Both are well filmed, though, and almost the only times in the film where the camera really becomes part of the action. Two of the supporting actors were British national treasures, but you'd never know it from their appearances here. The first, Mary Clare, a major British stage star, plays the factory girl (she's actually four years younger than Namara but looks ten years older!), who is stabbed by Carmen, and she would go on to shortly play Claude Rains' loving mother in "The Clairvoyant" (she was three years younger than Rains!), the mysterious Baroness in Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes", and a really nasty piece of work in James Mason's "The Night Has Eyes". The second, the elfin Hay Petrie, is seen as the smuggler Remendado. He has only a handful of lines and looks like a taller Billy Barty, but only two years later he would give one of the British screen's greatest 1930s performances as the hunchbacked and dwarfish villain Quilp in Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop", and provide Robert Donat's ghost with a tiny nemesis in "The Ghost Goes West". Anyway, this film has many points of interest to the specialist to offset its pure awfulness to the general viewer. Even antediluvian film making has a place in our hearts if our hearts are in the right place. For this one, mine was, thus the seven rating.
2 Reviews
Early Talkie Version Of Carmen
malcolmgsw4 May 2015
British International Pictures,the producers of this film were at the forefront of sound films in the UK.They made "Blackmail".They turned their silent films into part talkies by adding sound to the second half.So it is a bit of a puzzle as to what happened here.Whenever there is an exterior,parts or all of the dialogue are not recorded,there is just music.There are no subtitles ,so you don't know what is happening.It would appear that the principal actors came from the opera stage and therefore they act in the most theatrical way throughout the film.However the sword fights seem to be acted out in slow motion.In any event even if you are an enthusiast for early talkies,you will find it difficult to sit through this film unless that is you are a lover of the opera itself.I found the film virtually unwatchable.
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