Carmen Jones (1954)

Carmen Jones: 'Scuse my dust, gentlemen. The air's gettin' mighty unconditioned 'round here.

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Frankie: We'll be livin' off the fatheads of the land.

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Frankie: Somethin' tells me Chicago's gonna be real good for you.
Myrt: Somethin' tells me you gonna be real bad for Chicago.

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Although the original Broadway production had used a standard pit orchestra with Georges Bizet's orchestrations for the opera "Carmen" slightly altered by orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett, the film score was created by Herschel Burke Gilbert, the Music Director (a term he always insisted was the correct one, not "Musical Director), using a full symphony orchestra (ranging from about 90 to over 105 pieces), which enabled him to present the music with the sensibility of most of Bizet's original 1875 orchestrations as they were meant to be heard, although modified to fit the story line and transitions of the film. Because of Marilyn Horne's coming into the singing cast quite late in the production, and because of a number of unrelated delays, Gilbert had to leave the production shortly before it was completed, as he had a commitment for an original score of another film. Dimitri Tiomkin, a Fox Studio senior, as it were, stepped in to put together the last bits of recording and supervising the last music editing. Technically, especially given his seniority at Fox and his stature in the industry, he could have insisted hi Eartha Kitt was offered the role of Carmen but they wanted her to be dubbed so she would have an operatic voice in the role, same offer they made to 'Harry Belefonte' and Diahann Carroll. Kitt refused, wanted to use her natural chest voice. It didn't matter for Pearl Bailey, whose own voice suited her comedy songs.
Otto Preminger wanted to film on location in Chicago and South Carolina, but studio records show the movie was shot entirely on the Fox lot. One notable exception was the children's chorus scenes that were shot on location at a working dynamite factory. The parents, of course, were present, many of them sitting on boxes of explosives - idly smoking.
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