THE LOVES OF CARMEN takes a plush 1948 Technicolor run at the Romani temptress first brought to life a century earlier in a novella by Prosper Mérimée. His “Carmen” begat the famous Bizet opera, and eventually ten films, silent and sound, before this eleventh, a $2,500,000 Hollywood version—adventure/romance drama, sans opera—with a script from Helen Deutsch, directed & produced by Charles Vidor. Since it stars Rita Hayworth, dancing seductively, in Technicolor, it doesn’t really have to offer more. Luckily, it does, and it’s easy to see why audiences laid down $6,600,000, making it the 36th most-attended movie in a year when they could pick and choose between a gob-smacking 857 offerings.

“You’re a nice boy but I don’t love you. I don’t love anybody. I never in my life loved anybody. And you’re just the sort of big stupid who falls in love in return for a kiss. And then makes a nuisance of himself.”   But do we listen?

Spain, the 1820s. Newly arrived in Seville, dragoon corporal ‘Don Jose Lizarabengoa’ (Glenn Ford) hopes to prove himself officer material in the cavalry, but attention to duty is quickly wrested away when he encounters ‘Carmen’ (Rita Hayworth), a blithely wanton ‘gypsy’ temptress who uses men like, well, like the tissue-paper we generally are. Even after wise card reader (Margaret Wycherly, billed as ‘Old Crone’) warns Carmen that this latest boy-toy may spell fortune fate, Carmen goes full-lust-ahead, ultimately pitting Jose against his commander (Arnold Moss in sly mode), which results in Jose fleeing into the mountains with the vamp. They join a band of outlaws, run by ‘Garcia’ (Victor Jory, in merrily evil form) another of her paramours, actually her ‘husband’ who bought her when she was 13. This hiccup (solved the old-fashioned way, with sharp things and blood) merely sets the stage for Jose’s further fall into the abyss of Carmen’s mate pit, a veritable Wile Queendom.

“I spit in your milk! And the milk of your old turtle of a mother!”

As director Vidor had it, “if I made the picture for opera lovers, nobody but opera lovers would come…But if we do the story realistically, using the sort of gypsy music Carmen herself must have danced to, and discard the familiar opera trappings, even opera lovers can enjoy the picture.” Arias absent, there is atmospheric music (scored by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco) and lyrical movement galore, with a couple of stirring, sex-charged dance numbers performed to the hilt by Rita, 29 and as come-hither p-teasy as she could get away with under the Production Code and during the Truman Administration. In her third of five teamings with Ford (they linked offscreen as well), she looks to be having a grand time: she co-produced the film, cast her uncle and brother in bit parts and had her father Eduardo Cansino help choreograph the traditional Spanish dances.

Ford, 31, wasn’t happy with his haircut, and his performance often gets nicked, but we think he’s fine, though Jose is pretty much the definition of a love-struck sap—as if we’d not commit highway robbery for Rita Hayworth?  Jory is in his malevolent glory, and Luther Adler has a good turn as the bemused, more philosophical (not to say upright) of the outlaw band. *

“Dog and wolf weren’t created to live together.”

William E. Snyder’s cinematography pulled an Oscar nomination, the color is a treat, both in the obvious studio sets and in the outdoor shooting done around the all-purpose Alabama Hills outside Lone Pine, that venerable Californian Sierra locale that subbed for ranges all over the globe.

“Like a worm – cut him in half and he still crawls!”

97 entertaining minutes, with Joseph Buloff, Bernard Nedell, John Baragrey (as a bullfighter Carmen passes her cape over), Ron Randell (swooned and discarded), Trevor Bardette, Philip Van Zandt and Natividad Vacio (later familiar from The Magnificent Seven).

* Rita & Glenn: The Lady In Question (1940), Gilda (1946), The Loves Of Carmen (1948), Affair In Trinidad (1952), The Money Trap (1966).  “I don’t know why I bother with that girl. She’s bad all the way through. She lies as easily as other people drink water. She’s a liar, a thief and a cheat. Has no more manners than my great aunt’s cat. She’s really awful. And I’d sell my soul to hear her say just once that she loves me.”