Word: habaneras
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Hammerstein's lyrics are as right and renovating as his book. The seductive Seguidilla becomes Dere's a Café on de Corner; the Quintet turns into Whizzin' Away Along de Track. Carmen gets a load of Joe, and her famed flirtatious Habanera becomes Dat's Love...
Ever since 1875 when Emperor Franz Josef shook his royal britches to the tune of the Afro-Cuban habanera, the world has imported a remarkably large part of its popular music from Cuba. But only in recent years has this import business mushroomed into a sizable industry. Captain of that industry today is a black-haired, rather chinless band leader, Xavier Cugat (rhymes with glue pot), who gets an annual gross of $500,000 purveying the Cuban rumba and other Latin-American rhythms to the U.S. public. Last week Importer Cugat was at the peak of his career...
...move props as well as sing, dance, feed lines to Captain Billy on & off stage. Carmen opens with all hands singing Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here. Carmen is Billy's 18-year-old daughter Betty, who does a song and trucks to the jazzed-up Habanera while her mother pounds a little red piano. Captain Billy revised a scene in which Carmen consorts with smugglers in a cafe, made the chief smuggler a Greek restaurant proprietor, played by himself. Bullfighter Escamillo announces that he is "the greatest bull-thrower in all Spain," while Carmen begs...
...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...