Word: habanera
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...pitting his serrated profile against John Boles's open-mouthed full face in a battle of closeups, throughout most of the film, Miss Swarthout's singing interludes come through in furtive fragments. Her repertory includes the Berceuse from Jocelyn while Boles and Barrymore play a ticktacktoe; the Habanera aria from Carmen, shot through with closeups of Actor Boles asleep; and Rimsky-Korsakov's Song of India, during which she finally manages to get the camera's undivided attention. Best-staged sequence in the film, however, is her singing with Boles of the duet from Don Giovanni...
...Lescaut dished up a digestible version of Massenet's very Gallic score. Bruna Castagna, whose buxom, pleasant Carmen is the best Manhattanites have heard since the days of Geraldine Farrar, had a nearspat with Conductor Gennaro Papi when he tried to slow down her singing of the Habanera. But the incident passed off in mutual glares...
First impression was to wonder why anyone so flagrantly sexy as her Carmen should trouble to work for a living in a cigaret factory. She sang the Habanera belligerently, as if defying the world. She turned on bewildered Don Jose like a tigress, sidled up to the captain of the guards like an oldtime cinema vamp. The stage scarcely seemed to hold her. Ponselle's voice is naturally sumptuous, but she was too busy ranting to do justice by Bizet's music...