In Manhattan last week, the movies were making opera seductively easy to take. In Sol Hurok's Aida (see CINEMA), the young, beautiful Ethiopian slave girl really was young and beautiful (played by Italy's Sophia Loren, with the singing voice dubbed in); and while the Nile flowed realistically, the extras were dazzlingly costumed and the plot was explained in plain English. Hollywood's Carmen Jones, for its part, transformed the Seville siren into a beautiful American Negro factory girl, took the toreador from the bull into the prize ring and turned the words from Spanish-flavored...
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