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Carmen's singing, fully equal to the other sides of her performance, cannot be credited to Singer Dandridge. Her voice was found to be too light, and Marilynn Home's was skillfully dubbed in. LeVern Hutcherson does the singing for Actor Belafonte, and does it handsomely. Belafonte seems a rather Sunday-go-to-meetin' type to attract a Carmen, but he makes the big scenes convincing. Pearl Bailey, through the second half of the film, lolls around superbly under feather boas, dragging her weight in rhinestones and "livin' off de fatheads of de land." And in one scene, using her own inimitable vocal cords, she belts out the Chanson Boheme as they never heard it in old Bohemia.
The Adventures of Hajji Baba (Allied Artists; 20th Century-Fox). In the old days, when a Hollywood studio wanted a famous composer to write background music for a film, it had to play an expensive game of Haydn seek; nowadays, the film colony has a sort of Bach yard full of kept musical geniuses. The current favorite is a man called Dimitri Tiomkin, who has filled in the awkward pauses of High Noon, Cyrano de Bergerac and many other recent pictures with stuff that one critic called "Kaffee-Klatchaturian."
With Hajji Baba, Composer Tiomkin rises above all that. He has not written his score to fit the film; the film has apparently been written to fit his score. The compliment is a dubious one. Allegedly based on some 19th century picaresques about Persia by Author James Morier, Hajji Baba is all too obviously based on nothing but some old Bagdad sets that Producer Walter Wanger found around Hollywood. From there out it's silks of Ind. accents of Chi. on with the swarth and out with the nautch. A heavy navel bombardment in rich color is followed by dialogue ("Allah be praised!") and swarms of half-naked warrior women who kill their male captives with too much kindness. Enter Hajji the Barber himself (John Derek), who goes in for close shaves and comes out with a distant princess (Elaine Stewart).
All this is trussed together by hundreds of yards of Composer Tiomkin's sound track—a sort of Faroukish turn ("Come to my tent, O my beloved") on the old snake-dance tune. It may not be much as music, but it's perfect as a truss.
The Bob Mathias Story (Allied Artists), in purely cinematic terms, is nothing more than a wagonload of newsreel clips hitched to a star. But that hardly matters, since track-and-field Wizard Bob Mathias (TIME, July 21, 1952) is a dazzling star to watch. He plays himself in this modest picture, which straightforwardly takes him from his high-school days in Tulare, Calif, to the 1948 Olympic Games in London, where, at 17, he surprised the world by winning the decathlon; then on to Stanford, where he played some first-class football; and finally to the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, where he won the decathlon a second time.
Beyond the action shots, the film has little to say, although there is a passing attempt at showing how a white-blooded American Boy (Mathias once had anemia) can become a great athlete. The girl friend in the picture, as well as in real life, is now Mathias' wife Melba, who may have the makings of a genuine actress. Her husband will probably be remembered as a great athlete.